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Facets of prior experience and the effectiveness of inclusive design

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Abstract

Research in inclusive design has shown the importance of prior experience for the usability of interactive products. Prior experience, however, is an ill-defined and inconsistently used construct. A number of different definitions and operationalisations of experience exist, but the differing power of these operationalisations to predict the usability of products for older users has rarely been investigated systematically. This study seeks to fill that gap. It is argued that the construct of experience has at least three components. It is proposed that two of these components, exposure and competence, are directly relevant for the current discussion about prior experience in inclusive design and that they can predict to different degrees the usability of a product for older users. In an empirical study, these facets of expertise are each operationalised on three levels of specificity and their impact on usability is assessed. The results show that measures of competence predict usability variables more strongly than measures of exposure and that levels of medium and high specificity are the best predictors. The application of inclusive design principles to a redesigned version of a ticket vending machine—although not resulting in a difference of overall usability—changed the impact of prior experience on usability measures implying an enhanced inclusiveness of the redesign with regard to prior experience. The implications of these findings for the effectiveness of inclusive design for older users are discussed.

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Notes

  1. For comparisons between an older and a younger sample using the same ticket vending machines cf. [30].

  2. These ticket machines were also used by another workgroup before [30, 31], although in part with a different focus than the present study (i.e. investigating the effects of video instruction).

  3. The electro-mechanical generation follows the ‘mechanical generation’ born before 1930 and precedes the ‘software generation’ born after 1960.

  4. Thus, membership in a technology generation is an exposure measure of low product specificity that refers to experiences made in a life period in which people are highly receptive to new technology. The fact that the participants of this study are members of the same technology generation, however, does not mean that they are necessarily homogenous with respect to more recent experience with computers (e.g. due to different exposure to computers for those still working versus those already retired).

  5. Note that although in practice combinations of several tickets could also be bought in several subsequent buying processes, tasks involving the purchase of a combination of tickets were only regarded as correctly solved when all required tickets were bought during a single process. This strict rule could have artificially lowered effectiveness measures.

  6. There could even be negative transfer of the knowledge about the original TVM to the redesigned version, thus reducing the usability of that version. Given the generally increased level of usability, however, we find this possibility not very likely.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (project INCLUDIS) and a research grant from Deutsche Telekom Laboratories Berlin. The authors would like to thank the ALISA project at Humboldt Universität Berlin for providing the prototypes of the ticket vending machines.

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Hurtienne, J., Horn, AM., Langdon, P.M. et al. Facets of prior experience and the effectiveness of inclusive design. Univ Access Inf Soc 12, 297–308 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-013-0296-1

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