Academic literature on the topic 'Readability usability UX design accessibility'

Successful interaction with complex systems is based on the system ability to satisfy the user needs during interaction tasks, mainly related to performances, physical comfort, usability, accessibility, visibility, and mental workload. However, the “real” user experience (UX) is hidden and usually difficult to detect. The paper proposes a Transdisciplinary Assessment Matrix (TAS) based on collection of physiological, postural and visibility data during interaction analysis, and calculation of a consolidated User eXperience Index (UXI). Physiological data are based on heart rate parameters and eye pupil dilation parameters; postural data consists of analysis of main anthropometrical parameters; and interaction data from the system CAN-bus. Such a method can be adopted to assess interaction on field, during real task execution, or within simulated environments. It has been applied to a simulated case study focusing on agricultural machinery control systems, involving users with a different level of expertise. Results showed that TAS is able to validly objectify UX and can be used for industrial cases.

The convergence of blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) presents significant opportunities for innovation, yet its success depends on prioritizing user experience (UX) through effective user-centric design. This chapter examines the critical role of user-centric design in ensuring the usability, accessibility, and adoption of blockchain-enabled IoT systems. It highlights essential elements such as understanding user needs, optimizing onboarding processes, and creating adaptive, responsive user interfaces for diverse devices. The chapter emphasizes reducing friction points, enhancing interactions across platforms, and leveraging iterative design to address real-world challenges. By focusing on the seamless integration of blockchain and IoT, the chapter offers practical insights into designing systems that engage users and promote long-term retention. This approach aims to foster widespread adoption by addressing usability concerns and ensuring that users can effectively interact with and benefit from these advanced technologies.

Reflection through drawing is a strategy capable of developing perception, project values. Several studies explain how drawing serves as a reasoning tool when engaging a student to learn a subject of study; the learner tries to represent their comprehension on a specific subject. The act of drawing works as an incentive, students interact with the subject of study through the graphic representation of an idea. There is the need to empower drawing as a reasoning tool in higher education settings, in finding new approaches in classroom in developing user experience (UX) projects focused in accessibility, usability factors. This learning strategy is crucial in the contemporaneous context of user Interface design because it allows new outcomes, allows learners to understand in a systematic approach how to develop, empower accessibility solutions in a UX project.

The rapid growth in the prevalence of smart devices has created a significant demand for workforces with knowledge and experience in user-centered design. The new emerging designers are expected to be familiar with practical design research methods while delivering competitive visual results. An interdisciplinary pedagogical approach to design teaching can help students connect the practice of psychology, human factors, and graphic design. In this presentation, we will discuss our practical methods of forming an interdisciplinary design research team to work on a hands-on design challenge involving academia and industry for the usability of specialized medical devices.Our research focuses on enhancing the usability of Environmental Control Units (ECU) in the VA Hospital healthcare system. An ECU is a digital tablet with specific functionality to help patients with spinal cord injury disabilities to overcome their common day-to-day challenges such as: making a phone call or calling the nurse/help, switching on/off the lights, adjusting the bed, etc. This device has four modes of interaction: touch-based, sip-and-puff (pneumatic tube), eye-tracking, and voice-control. Veterans with SCI/D typically find ECUs useful, yet previous research has identified dozens of usability issues ranging from relatively minor or cosmetic to catastrophic (Hancock et al., 2020; Etingen et al., 2017). This multidisciplinary research project is ongoing between California State University Long Beach, the Spinal Cord Injuries and Disorders (SCI/D) Center at the Long Beach VA Hospital, and the device manufacturer, Accessibility Services, Inc.This research started in 2019 with heuristic analyses of the touch-based and eye-tracking modalities of the ECU device (Hancock et al., 2020a; Hancock et al., 2020b). Based on the heuristic evaluation findings, the team made a Beta version with improvements. The team were prepared to conduct A/B usability testing, but due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, accessing the hospital grounds got limited. In the summer of 2020, the design team developed a fully online digital prototype of the ECU interface to conduct remote A/B usability testing with a neurotypical population (i.e., CSULB students). This research has brought together students from graphic design and psychology to engage in a hands-on user-centered design project. Students from both practices received training to conduct remote user-testing sessions and post-processing the resulting data. Currently, the team is collecting data from its ongoing A/B testing between the Alpha and Beta versions of the interface. In the meantime, the team has begun to draft a new design (Omega version) based on the current and emerging findings to make design improvement suggestions to the device manufacturer.This paper will discuss how interdisciplinary design research creates unique opportunities for students in graphic design to learn human-factors psychology and how various design choices for interface features such as color, font, size, etc. will affect its usability and user experience outcomes. In contrast, students in psychology human factors learn about aesthetics and practical design solutions. As the resulting systems are for actual use by veterans with spinal cord injuries and disorders in collaboration with a government partner (the VA), the students also gain valuable service learning experience.

What does a score on a digital assessment mean? At its core, a score is a measurement of how a student matches up to a predefined construct. For example, a reading assessment may measure the construct of a student’s reading fluency, comprehension, or both. This research seeks to challenge the legitimacy of digital assessment from the lens of Accessibility, User Experience (UX), Inclusive Design, and Marginalized Populations by focusing on the needs of the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) middle school-aged student in the United States.DHH learners are among the least understood groups. Neither the US Census nor public schools recognize American Sign Language (ASL) as a non-English language used at home. For the sake of discussion, this research references a study by Goman from 2016 which estimates that 14.3% of all Americans aged 12 and older have some form of hearing loss, and a study from the U.S. National Center of Educational Statistics which estimated students with hearing impairment between ages 3-21 at 1% of all students. These statistics are especially concerning when juxtaposed with how assessments are created. Two of the top educational companies in U.S. use a process called “pretesting” to determine the statistical relevance of the questions used in their assessments. This process involves trialing assessment items with a sample group similar to the population to be assessed. As assessments are increasingly delivered digitally, they overlap with other disciplines like UX Design. In UX, it is well documented that testing with five people finds most problems. If we assume that pretesting uses a similar sample size, it is a reasonable assumption that many items would not be trialed with DHH students, i.e. this marginalized group isn’t populous enough to be accounted for in a statistically relevant pretesting sample.To provide legitimacy to this claim, this research used structured interviews with subject-matter experts (SMEs) in usability, accessibility, child-computer interaction, and DHH education. The responses provided by these SMEs lent credence to the idea that DHH learners were often not included in digital assessment design either due to being sampled out, a lack of accessibility awareness, and/or the absence of inclusive design guidelines for DHH students. For example, one interviewed Director at a prominent deaf institution said, “In terms of my field, there isn’t some tangible set of design principles that apply in [my] specific area. These things are developing as we go.”This is especially concerning when scores for deaf learners have wide implications in terms of public funding for school districts at the macro level, and self-worth issues at the individual level; especially when it is oft-cited that 80% of age-14 DHH students on average place below a grade-4 reading level. For these reasons, the goal of this research is to empower designers, developers, managers, and researchers with a repeatable framework for inspiring cross-disciplinary collaboration to create fair and equitable digital assessment designs. It is about meeting the full spectrum of need for every individual student—starting with the DHH student’s needs.

Human-centered design for students with disabilities is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor. It requires input from practitioners in the fields of user experience (UX), instructional design, accessibility, software engineering, and more. To that end, this paper seeks to reveal the perspectives of practitioners who have experience across these various disciplines, especially as they pertain to Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students.In a previous study, the author asked practitioners to describe the design guidelines they use in their professions. To contextualize the concept of guidelines, the research participants were introduced to North Carolina State University’s Principles of Universal Design and Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. The outcome of that study revealed a wide spectrum of guidelines, with little commonality except for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Universal Design.This paper builds off that prior research by interviewing the same practitioners with a renewed focus on the definition of guidelines. In particular: 1) How do these practitioners define “guidelines”, and do these definitions vary between the different disciplines of user experience, accessibility, etc.?2) Do the practitioners’ definitions of “guidelines” change as the end-user becomes more specifically designed? For example, do practitioners expect more, less, or something different when designing for hearing students vs DHH students?3) If these practitioners were empowered to create a theoretical set of design guidelines for DHH middle school-aged students, what process would they follow? The results of this new study demonstrate an awareness in the research participants that experts from different disciplines may need to be engaged in the process of creating design guidelines. More specifically, when asked to create DHH guidelines, the SMEs were often quick to say that they needed to collaborate with individuals who were embedded in the DHH community, i.e., individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing, or individuals who have acquired second-hand knowledge through being immersed in Deaf culture.Surprisingly, when interviewing these practitioners for a second time, designers were not always explicitly stated as integral to the creation of design guidelines for DHH middle school students. A few reasons emerged for why this is the case: A) On multiple occasions, the research participants lamented that design education today often fails to prepare new designers in the space of accessibility. B) In another instance, a senior software architect felt that engaging designers would be detrimental to the guideline creation process. He would later amend his response to say that he would include a designer only if they had a sufficient background in accessibility. C) In a different instance, a designer took designer participation for granted and assumed that designers would obviously be part of the design guideline process. When asked to clarify why he did not include designers in his process when first asked, he said that his ego led him to assume that he would naturally be part of the process.While both this paper and the previous paper focus on the DHH student experience, the overall goal of this research is to create a reusable framework that will allow subject matter experts (SMEs) to examine the guidelines they use today, and to learn how to create the next generation of design guidelines that will rise to the challenge of human-centered design becoming increasingly multidisciplinary.

As the aging population grows, the healthcare system faces challenges in meeting the unique needs of older adults. Medication non-adherence among older adults is a critical issue that leads to severe health complications and reduced independence. Traditional medication management tools often fail to address this problem due to their technological limitations, complexity, lack of personalization, and poor accessibility. These shortcomings make it challenging for older adults to manage complex medication routines, increasing health risks and dependence on caregivers. Research indicates that approximately 40% of older adults struggle with medication adherence due to memory issues, complex routines, and accessibility barriers. This study aims to design an AI Agent-driven medication management solution to empower older adults by simplifying their medication routines and reducing cognitive and physical strain. The proposed system aims to improve medication adherence, promote greater independence, and minimize caregiver reliance through personalized and accessible support. A human-centered design methodology guided this research with initial qualitative user studies through interviews and surveys to identify gaps in existing solutions. Quantitative scenarios-based testing evaluated the system’s impact on user confidence and accessibility. The system integrates advanced AI capabilities, including real-time contextual processing and multimodal integration, which ensures adaptability to user needs and seamless interactions. The proposed solution delivers a personalized, user-centered experience that simplifies medication routines for older adults by employing AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs), large multimodal models (LMLs), and other existing tools, such as various apps on the phone and computer to function effectively with contextual information. Key features include medication reminders, meal planning, activity suggestions, and family monitoring tailored to an individual’s health condition, prescribed medication, avoiding dietary lists, recent grocery shopping data, current weather, and other necessary contextual factors for a patient’s health management. This holistic system promotes medication adherence and supports broader health management needs for an active lifestyle. The project focuses on iterative refinement guided by user feedback to create a design that provides usability and accessibility to users. Results from user testing show a significant rise in confidence among the target users, who reported feeling more comfortable and independent in managing their health with the AI-powered medication management solution. This study emphasizes the potential of AI to reduce health risks among older adults by promoting their medication adherence. By incorporating AI potential with human-centered design, this solution proves how to bridge the gap between user needs and technological possibilities. This system approach improves health management needs and independence and reduces caregiver burden, encouraging a balanced support system. These findings highlight the broader implications of AI in healthcare, offering a scalable and impactful model for addressing the challenges of an aging population and providing a pathway for context-based AI assistive solutions in UX design that improve the quality of life for older adults.