Towards Real-Life Inclusion: User-Centric Analysis of Access to Urban Areas

Inclusive design outcomes in architecture rely on valid and reliable information about user experiences. The way users perceive and experience the built environment contains the clues for the optimal facilitation of their needs and expectations. However, their perceptions of aspects of the built environment and their needs and expectations are not easily accessed for incorporation into the design work of professional architects and architecture students. This paper identifies how this need may be addressed and outlines methods of making such knowledge more accessible and in a form that facilitates ease of incorporation of user perceptions and expectations into design. Specifically, this paper details approaches whereby user perceptions are transformed into design tools that can be used by architects for applying inclusive design. Several approaches that are described in this paper can be applied and combined by architects and students to obtain information regarding user perception of the built environment and subsequently converting the information into the tools or criteria for designing inclusive buildings and facilities. The approaches and the tools are expected to support the incorporation of inclusive design into the architecture profession and education.

This article discusses methods of inclusive (universal) interface design of digital products as a way to improve the quality and accessibility of interaction of this type of products with users who have different capabilities and individual needs. The relevance of the study is due to the rapid development and increase in the number of digital products and the need to improve the user experience for all users, regardless of their individual characteristics. Thus, the aim of the study is to analyze the existing methods of universal design of digital interfaces and to identify the perspectives of inclusivity in general. In order to achieve this goal, the author performed the following tasks: highlighted the existing methods of inclusive design; analyzed the methods for effectiveness and accessibility for different inclusive groups; identified existing problems and based on the analysis identified vectors of prospective development to the principles of inclusive design of ergonomic design and proposed its own user experience solution for a certain group of individuals. Accordingly, at the moment it can be seen that a large number of applications or websites are not adapted to inclusive user groups, which naturally reduces their involvement and interest in the use of digital products, so the implementation of adaptive inclusive design of digital interfaces will allow users with different characteristics to integrate and easily adapt in the digital world, to ensure comfortable and safe use of the above products. Also, if we talk about business benefits, companies will be able to get a new segment of target audience, improve competitiveness and fulfill the social mission of the company.

Commercial pregnancy apps are becoming popular in mobile health and integral to individuals' health management ecosystems. For that, they can complement medical advice and be conveniently used for ubiquitous tracking of pregnancy. Besides their functional and medical purpose, they may elicit subjective, personal, and intimate experiences that are equally relevant to users. Yet, these qualitative aspects of experiencing pregnancy apps remain under-researched. An inquiry into those qualitative aspects may help advance the design of pregnancy apps for improved user embodiment, engagement, and experience. Here, we qualitatively inquire about experiences with six popular pregnancy apps through 4,000+ online reviews. Our findings reveal that pregnancy apps are more than mere trackers and can impact pregnancy experiences, either positively or negatively, based on their design features. Further, reviews pointed to a neglect of family, friends, and relatives in the apps' design, which users found often problematic. To counter these shortcomings, we outline avenues for improving the design of pregnancy apps beyond usability and medical outcomes and call for enhancing their user experience through more sensitive, user-centered, and inclusive design.

3 - Designing Inclusive Packaging

In this paper, we aim to provide readers with three critical concepts that can maximize inclusivity of learner experience (LX) and user experience (UX) design: accessibility, usability, and universal design for learning (UDL). Although recent K-12 and postsecondary education have experienced rapid change in its student population with the growing awareness of the equal opportunities for all, general design methods of addressing such diversity across formal and informal learning contexts are still prone to retrofitted changes to predefined instructions in favor of standardization. This is due in part to the limited interpretation of accessibility as the concept for the medical model of disabilities where learners with disabilities are not regarded as users or consumers, but as clients or patients. Moreover, LX and UX have been widely designed with the usability of dominant group in mind while trading off exclusion of those who cannot fit themselves into it. However, accessibility and usability are not mutually exclusive; rather, a truly inclusive learning design (i.e. UDL) comes from the interplay between them. Through the paper, we provide definition and description of each concept and provide practical examples of how UDL principles can be applied to inclusive learning design.

BACKGROUND Mobile health (mHealth), and specifically smartphone applications (apps), have grown exponentially in both functionality and accessibility, and are becoming an important component of healthcare. Research exploring the use of mHealth for managing or treating chronic diseases such as cancer, has shown promising effects. However, there is a lack of studies exploring the use of apps within lifestyle interventions, such as exercise interventions. In particular, in order to strengthen mHealth effectiveness within healthcare, evidence focusing on user experiences is key. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore user experiences of school pupils and university students using an augmented reality (AR) smartphone app designed to prescribe exercise for children and young people with cancer. METHODS School and university students, aged 8-21 years were eligible to participate in the study. Practical workshops allowed participants to engage with the AR smartphone app before taking part in focus groups to explore user experiences. Data was analysed using qualitative content analysis, which also involved a critical friend approach using two researchers. Suggested improvements were then mapped against motivational affordances’ (MAs) taxonomy. RESULTS A total of 50 participants aged 8 - 21 years took part in this study. Participants expressed some concerns regarding data safety and functionality of the novel AR avatar, but found the demonstrations and varied exercises useful. It was proposed that additional educational components, challenges and rewards as well as a customisable avatar, social support features and audio instructions for more inclusive design would be desirable and could enhance user experience. CONCLUSIONS This study provides understanding on how apps that prescribe exercise can be optimised to enhance motivation and user experience. Further evidence specifically in children and young people with a childhood cancer diagnosis is needed. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT RR2-10.1177/14604582241288784

Purpose Rapid digital transformation following COVID-19 has increased the need for immersive tourism technologies. However, most prior studies focus on consumer adoption and overlook post-adoption and experiential factors among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Addressing this gap, the purpose of this study is to integrate the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), Flow Theory and Expectation-Confirmation Theory (ECT) into a unified Metaverse Adoption Continuance Framework to examine both adoption and continuance of metaverse tourism platforms among SMEs in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 388 SME owners and managers through structured surveys. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling, this study tested the mediating role of user experience and the moderating effects of technology-savviness and familiarity. Findings This study found that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, flow state, perceived enjoyment and presence positively influenced user experience, whereas privacy concerns had a negative effect. User experience significantly affects both behavioral intention and continued usage, which are strong predictors of adoption. Technology-savviness and familiarity moderate these relationships. Additionally, ethical and equity considerations, particularly privacy and digital inclusion, emerged as important contextual factors shaping SMEs’ adoption decisions. Research limitations/implications This study used a cross-sectional design, which limits the ability to see how perceptions and metaverse use change over time. Future research should adopt longitudinal methods to observe such changes. Because the data were self-reported, there is a possibility of bias, so future studies could include actual usage indicators. The focus on Kuala Lumpur tourism SMEs also limits generalization; comparing regions or cultures could improve validity. The Metaverse Adoption and Continuance Framework can be expanded by adding elements such as AI-based personalization and blockchain security. Qualitative studies can further explore emotional, social and ethical aspects of metaverse use. Practical implications This study provides useful insights for tourism SMEs, policymakers and technology developers. Tourism SMEs can enhance user experience by creating simple, engaging and affordable metaverse content such as guided virtual tours and browser-based virtual reality. Collaboration with universities and start-ups can reduce costs and promote innovation. Policymakers can support digital transformation through grants, training and improved broadband access. Ethical practices, including transparent data protection and inclusive design, are vital to build user trust and social equity. Balancing immersive engagement with privacy safeguards ensures sustainable adoption and wider community benefits. Social implications This study highlights the potential of metaverse technologies to enhance digital inclusion and innovation among tourism SMEs, particularly in developing economies. By promoting immersive virtual tourism, SMEs can reach broader and more diverse audiences, including individuals with mobility limitations. The findings of this study emphasize the need for digital literacy and privacy awareness to encourage socially responsible technology adoption. Moreover, supporting SMEs in this digital transition can generate employment opportunities in VR content development, digital training and related services, contributing to inclusive economic growth and stronger community resilience in the post-pandemic tourism landscape. Originality/value This study refines existing hybrid adoption continuance models by benchmarking against prior frameworks and contextualizing them for Malaysian tourism SMEs. This study contributes theoretically by integrating experiential and post-adoption constructs and practically by offering actionable insights into SME digital readiness, ethical data governance and sustainable metaverse implementation.

Office spaces need to use inclusive design in order to provide equitable and accessible work conditions. In India, it is becoming more and more crucial to satisfy the needs of a varied workforce, which includes individuals with impairments, women and people from various cultural backgrounds and of different age groups. This study looks at physical accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and workplace inclusion in relation to inclusive design in Indian offices. We examine important elements like breastfeeding areas, accessible restrooms, and flexible work schedules that accommodate a range of employee requirements. Case studies from Indian businesses illustrate effective inclusive design strategies as well as typical implementation issues. The article ends with suggestions for companies looking to design more inclusive work environments. These include adhering to accessibility guidelines, promoting inclusion, and modifying workspaces to allow a wide range of users. Keywords: Inclusive design (Barrier free design) accessibility, office spaces, India, workspace culture.

Inclusion pays off, but how to make that happen? Inclusive design describes a widely acknowledged approach combining user centered design principles and accessibility demands. Recent studies show a strong positive impact of accessibility on the overall user experience. This article provides a brief overview on accessibility regulations and requirements. We will go beyond these regulations to achieve design recommendations that enable efficient product design. Also, we will introduce prerequisites for a large-scale adoption of these principles.

The existence of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Designer has been highly increasing and needed in recent times. One of the reasons is that many companies are starting to use Website and Mobile Application all of these actions occurred in a convincing way that attracted users, however, each of them support the objective of business development. In answering this problem, knowledge of UI/UX is needed in terms of conduction for using it. Therefore, needed designer must use several processes in the research method that the author uses, namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The purpose for designers, there are many resources to fulfil the lack of education and to prevent working hard, it assists designers in working and creating for all frameworks and inclusive design. Also, the contributes to designers with a practical framework, aligning with industry standards, and fostering a user-centric approach. It ensures digital products are inclusive, promoting diversity, and advancing design in the technology industry. In addition, how a designer can incorporate their unique ideate for building Websites and Mobile Applications. The result of the Design Thinking method in this research is to expertly improve the user’s experience better than before. And the result application was efficient based on the participants rate are successful effective. Satisfying based on overall rate 98.4% after see this and when using the application.

Access to transport is essential for an individual’s effective participation in social, economic and political activities. However, individuals are excluded from participating in many of these activities due to transport-related social exclusion. Inclusive design is commonly used to address issues of exclusion in the development of products and services for older and disabled people. However, little has been done to explore the specific application of inclusive design in addressing transport-related social exclusion. Through a review of literature comparing the key approaches and concepts of inclusive design and transport-related social exclusion, and evaluating the suitability of inclusive design for addressing issues of transport-related social exclusion, this paper presents an expanded approach to inclusive design for use in the design and development of vehicles and transport services. This expanded approach encourages transport designers and researchers to consider a range of excluded people groups outside of the age-ability construct and to also address issues of availability and user experience beyond the initial focus of usability. By exploring the current transport experiences of a range of excluded people groups, a number of common areas of transport exclusion were identified including physical exclusion, digital & information exclusion, cost & payment exclusion, service exclusion, and psychological exclusion. Through the use of the expanded approach of inclusive design for transport and these common areas of transport exclusion, transport designers and researchers can better ensure that all issues of transport exclusion are being addressed in the development of new and future vehicles and transport services from the outset of their development.KeywordsInclusive designTransportSocial exclusionMobilityAutonomous vehicles

A growing share of the population is using mobile devices for communication, content snacking, and to an extent computing. These extremely portable devices have become almost ubiquitous. They are everywhere. A rapid rise in cross and multi-device ownership is being seen. With this advent of smartphones and other handheld devices, it has become essential for us as designers to make our websites and applications available and usable to as many people as possible. We traditionally however choose to neglect people who are challenged from our primary user groups until it is an explicit requirement. This research aims to build accessibility design thinking into the UX process, guided by a model of ‘Inclusive Design.’ This design research helps understand and establish the nitigrities of the environment, pain points, needs, and requirements of a challenged user. It aims to make designing applications easier by eliminating the need to re-visit challenges by proposing a set of guidelines that can be used to improve user experience altogether. These guidelines have been established by using traditional research methods including ‘expert interviews’ with professionals, a study of literature, data analysis, interviews with challenged users, as well as usability testing along with modern-day design sprint technique to solve problems and test new ideas in a short time. Guidelines proposed at the end of this research by understanding the need for accessibility in UX design tied together with visual design will be of interest to designers, students, and academicians, all alike.

In the background of the rapid development of technology and intelligence, intelligent technology has brought more novel and convenient experiences to most users when using home appliances. It is because young users have become accustomed to the smart products, but it has also increased the difficulty for special groups such as the elderly and disabled. Home appliances are very daily products for the elderly, however the emergence of new forms and technologies of home appliances has lead them being unable to use basic functions properly. Large smart screens with tons of functions has made it difficult for users to find the key to access; voice operations have made it difficult for them to know how to speak, and so on. The era of intelligence has brought unprecedented technological panic to these special groups.However, despite the fact that the home appliance industry began addressing the issue of product usage for special groups as early as 2000, there has always been a significant challenge. The problem is that once the home appliance design meets the needs of a special group, the product will have "awkward shape", such as the washing machine's buttons being too large to accommodate more functions; The small size of the refrigerator is only for the convenience of elderly people to access, but it affects the volume for daily life required. In a word, although it meets the needs of the special population, it sacrifices the user experience of most people and even affects market sales.The main reason for the problems is the lack of practical and feasible inclusive research and design methodologies for smart home appliances. The main popular methodology is “Microsoft's inclusive design”, but it mainly focuses on software without a specific methodology for smart home products that combine software and hardware. This paper built a research and design methodology for innovative smart home products targeting special and healthy populations.And based on the know-how of R&D, we attempt to overcome this challenge and ensure that products that have been designed by this methodology can meet the needs of special populations for accessible use, while also covering healthy users as much as possible. While gaining a good reputation for humanity design in the market, it can also ensure market efficiency. Finally, the article introduces three successful cases of applying this methodology.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has been focusing on properties such as usability, accessibility, inclusive design, user experience. As new security risks are emerging with the continuous increase of Internet interconnections and the development of the Internet of Things, more recently security, trust and resilience have also become important for the development of interactive systems. Since users have been identified as one of the major security weaknesses in today’s technologies, HCI becomes a fundamental pillar for designing more secure (but still usable) systems. However, interactive system properties might overlap and sometimes create conflicts in user-centered development processes. For example, security could reduce system usability by placing a burden on users when they have to deal with passwords. The HCI research has provided several tools and techniques that can support designers in making decisions, but there are no “cookbooks”. This workshop promotes sharing of experiences in managing and resolving conflicts of multiple interactive system properties within the context of a user-centered design process. We are concerned by theories, methods and approaches for dealing with interactive system properties, managing potential conflicts and trade-offs. This workshop is organized by the IFIP WG 13.2 on Methodology for User-Centered System Design and the IFIP WG 13.5 on Human Error, Resilience, Reliability and Safety in System Development.

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.