Supporting Inclusive Design of User Interfaces with a Virtual User Model

In this paper an approach to improve the design of every day consumer products for inclusive design with a focus on elderly people with mild to medium physical and sensory impairments is presented. As mainstream manufactures do not have a detailed understanding of the needs of this target group the idea is to use a Virtual Human Model that covers these impairments. A Virtual Laboratory with three design phases is the approach to allow designers to plan and evaluate the user interfaces of their products. The paper gives a state of the art and presents the Virtual User Model as a mixture of human and environment context. In this paper we present results of an detailed ethnographic study. The research carried out on a group of 58 elderly people from the UK, Ireland and Germany who had a range of three mild-to-medium impairments; hearing, vision and manual dexterity.