Supporting Inclusive Design of Mobile Devices with a Context Model

Abstract

The aim of inclusive product design is to successfully integrate a broad range of diverse human factors in the product development process with the intention of making products accessible to and usable by the largest possible group of users (Kirisci, Thoben et al. 2011). However, the main barriers for adopting inclusive product design include technical complexity, lack of time, lack of knowledge and techniques, and lack of guidelines (Goodman, Dong et al. 2006), (Kirisci, Klein et al. 2011). Although manufacturers of consumer products are nowadays more likely to invest efforts in user studies, consumer products in general only nominally fulfill, if at all, the accessibility requirements of as many users as they potentially could. The main reason is that any user-centered design prototyping or testing aiming to incorporate real user input, is often done at a rather late stage of the product development process. Thus, the more progressed a product design has evolved the more time-consuming and costly it will be to alter the design (Zitkus, Langdon et al. 2011). This is increasingly the case for contemporary mobile devices such as mobile phones or remote controls.