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The impact of user research on product design case study:: accessibility ecosystem for windows vista

Published: 23 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes the impact of user research on the accessibility features of the Windows Vista operating system. Conducting user research for a complex and widely-used product requires assessing a wide-range of users, experiences, and an ecosystem of PC hardware and software. Our user research for Windows XP gave us a greater understanding of the user's selfperception of their abilities. We also uncovered three pivotal usability issues: awareness, discoverability, and learnability. To address these issues for Windows Vista, we iteratively researched the product while focusing on universal design. The impact of this research resulted in design changes to the following major accessibility areas: an enhanced entry-point, a recommendation process that maps user needs to relevant accessibility components, and enhanced features of Windows Speech Recognition.

References

[1]
Burgstahler, S., Jirikowic, T., Kolko, B., & Eliot, M. (2004). Software accessibility, usability testing and individuals with disabilities. Information Technology and Disabilities, 10(2). http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv10n2/burghsta.htm
[2]
Forrester Research, commissioned by Microsoft (2004). The Market for Accessible Technology - The Wide Range of Abilities and Its Impact on Computer Use. http://www.microsoft.com/enable/research/phase1.aspx
[3]
Newell, A. F. & Gregor, P., User Sensitive Inclusive Design: In Search of a New Paradigm. Conference on Universal Usability, (Arlington, Virginia, USA), CUU 2000. ACM, 39--44.
[4]
Stephanidis, C., (2001) User Interfaces for All. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. London.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '06: Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2006
316 pages
ISBN:1595932909
DOI:10.1145/1168987
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. aging
  3. assistive technology
  4. speech recognition

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