Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Visualising the number of people who cannot perform tasks related to product interactions

  • Long paper
  • Published:
Universal Access in the Information Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Understanding the number of people who cannot perform particular tasks helps to inform design decisions for mainstream products, such as the appropriate size and contrast of visual features. Making such informed decisions requires a dataset that is representative at the level of a national population, with sufficient scope and granularity to cover the types of actions associated with product use. Furthermore, visualisations are needed to bring the dataset to life, in order to better support comparing the number of people who cannot perform different tasks. The 1996/97 Disability Follow-up Survey remains the most recent Great British dataset to cover all types of ability losses that may be relevant to using everyday products. This paper presents new visualisations derived from this dataset, which are related to vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, dexterity and reach. Compared to previous publications on this dataset, the new visualisations contain task descriptions that have been simplified, described pictorially and separated out into different categories. Furthermore, two-dimensional visualisations are used to present exclusion results for products that require vision and/or hearing and for tasks that require each hand to do different things. In order to produce these new visualisations, the publicly available version of this dataset had to be reanalysed and recoded, which is described here-in detail.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.royalmail.com/marketing-services/address-management-unit/address-data-products/postcode-address-file-paf?campaignid=paf_redirect.

  2. i~design research programme website http://www-edc.eng.cam.ac.uk/idesign3/AccessedAugust2011.

References

  1. Access Economics. Future Sight Loss UK 1: Economic Impact of Partial Sight and Blindness in the UK adult population. RNIB. PDF available online www.rnib.org.uk (2009). Accessed Aug 2011

  2. Action on hearing loss. Facts and figures on deafness and tinnitus. PDF available online www.actionhearingloss.org.uk (2011). Accessed Aug 2011

  3. Aldersey-Williams, H., Bound, J., Coleman, R.: The methods lab: User research for design. Design for Ageing Network. Available at www.education.edean.org (1999). Accessed Aug 2011

  4. Arthritis Research Campaign. Arthritis: the big picture. PDF available online www.ipsos-mori.com (2007). Accessed Aug 2011

  5. British Standards Institute. British Standard 7000-6: 2005. Design Management Systems—Managing Inclusive Design—Guide (2005)

  6. Clarkson, P.J., Coleman, R., Hosking, I., Waller, S.D.: Inclusive Design Toolkit. Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge, UK. ISBN 9780954524326 Available at www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com (2007). Accessed Aug 2011

  7. Clarkson, P.J., et al.: Towards Better Design, [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], May 2012. SN: 6997, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6997-1. Survey data and documentation available from www.esds.ac.uk (2010). Accessed Aug 2012

  8. Coleman, R.: Living Longer: The New Context for Design. Design Council Policy Papers Series. Design Council, London (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Department of Social Security Social Research Branch. Disability Follow-up to the 1996/97 Family Resources Survey [computer file]. UK Data Archive [distributor], Colchester, 3 Mar 2000. SN: 4090 (2000)

  10. Elton, E.M., Nicolle, C.A.: Translating Inclusive Capability for Designers, INCLUDE 2011, Royal College of Art, 6th International Conference on Inclusive Design, pp. 1–10. Helen Hamlyn Centre, RCA, London, 18–20 Apr (2011)

  11. Goodman-Deane, J., Waller, S.D., Williams, E.Y., Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J.: Estimating Exclusion: A Tool to Help Designers. INCLUDE 2011, Royal College of Art, 6th International Conference on Inclusive Design, Helen Hamlyn Centre, RCA, London, 18–20 Apr (2011)

  12. Grundy, E., Ahlburg, D., Ali, M., Breeze, E., Sloggett, A.: Research Report 94: Disability in Great Britain. Corporate Document Services, London (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Keates and Clarkson: Countering Design Exclusion. Springer, London (2004). ISBN 1852337699

    Book  Google Scholar 

  14. Johnson, D., Clarkson, P.J., Huppert, F.: Capability measurement for inclusive design. J. Eng. Des. 21(2–3), 275–288 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Marshall, R., Case, K., Porter, J.M., Sims, R., Gyi, D.E.: Using Hadrian for eliciting virtual user feedback in ‘design for all’. IMECHE Proc. B J. Eng. Manuf. 218(B9), 1203–1210 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Martin, J., Elliot, D.: Creating an overall measure of severity of disability for the office of population census and surveys disability survey. J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. A 155(1), 121–140 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Nickpour, F., Dong, H.: Developing user data tools: challenges and opportunities. In: Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J., Robinson, P. (eds.) Designing Inclusive Interactions. Springer, London (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nielsen, J.: Usability Engineering. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1993)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Persad, U., Langdon, P., Clarkson, P.J.: Characterising user capabilities to support inclusive design evaluation. Univ. Access Inf. Soc. 6(2), 119–135 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Porter, J.M., Marshall, R., Sims, R., Gyi, D.E., Case, K.: Hadrian Gets Streetwise. In: Pikaar, R.N., Koningsveld, E.A.P., Settels, P.J.M., (eds.) Meeting Diversity in Ergonomics. Proceedings IEA 2006 Congress, Elsevier (2006)

  21. Smith, S., Norris, B., Peebles, L.: Older Adultdata: The Handbook of Measurements and Capabilities of the Older Adult. Department of Trade and Industry, London (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Stanton, N., Hedge, A., Brookhuis, K., Salas, E., Hendrick, H.: Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics Methods. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, USA (2004)

  23. Tufte, E.R.: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edn. Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, USA (2001). ISBN 0-9613921-4-2

  24. Waller, S.D., Clarkson, P.J.: Tools for Inclusive Design. In: Stephanidis, C. (ed.) The Universal Access Handbook. Taylor and Francis, London (2009). ISBN 9780805862805

    Google Scholar 

  25. Waller, S.D., Williams, E.Y., Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J.: Understanding the co-occurrence of ability loss. In: Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J., Robinson, P. (eds.) Designing Inclusive Interactions. Springer, London (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Waller, S.D., Williams, E.Y., Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J.: Quantifying exclusion for tasks related to product interaction. In: Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J., Robinson, P. (eds.) Designing Inclusive Interactions. Springer, London (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Waller, S.D., Langdon, P.M., Clarkson, P.J.: Using disability data to estimate design exclusion. Int. J. Univ. Access Inf. Soc. 9(3):195–207. Available online at www.springerlink.com (2010). doi:10.1007/s10209-009-0168-x

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, UK

    S. D. Waller, M. D. Bradley, P. M. Langdon & P. J. Clarkson

Authors
  1. S. D. Waller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. M. D. Bradley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. P. M. Langdon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. P. J. Clarkson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. D. Waller.

Appendices

Appendix 1

An ideal data source for supporting design decisions would be able to predict and compare the percentage of the population who are excluded from a particular task, and the percentage who would have difficulty. Unfortunately, apart from the questions that asked about reaching out in front and above the head, the DFS did not take a consistent approach to difficulty when phrasing the questions asked. Some of the questions asked ‘can you…’, whilst others asked ‘do you have difficulty doing…’.

The authors experience teaching people to use demand scales for task assessments found that inconsistent mentions of difficulty within some, but not all of the statements describing a demand scale can cause people to completely misinterpret the scale. The authors therefore had no choice but to remove any mention of difficulty from statements describing the demand scales. Specifically, this affects the following statements.

  • Figure 2: ‘Read ordinary newsprint’, ‘recognise a friend across the road ’;

  • Figure 3: ‘Follow a conversation against background noise’, ‘hear loud speech in a quiet room’;

  • Figure 8: ‘Use a pen’.

The equivalent data points in Figs 10, 11 and 12 are similarly affected. When participants answered the questions regarding reaching out in front and above the head, they could report that the task was not difficult, difficult or impossible. In this paper, exclusion results are presented only using the participants who indicated that the task was impossible, in order to provide a consistent approach throughout all the statistics presented here-in.

Appendix 2

The process of reanalysing the original DFS dataset has enabled the data presented in this paper to be clustered in a manner that is more suitable for product assessments, but note the clustering and naming used here is different from previous publications by the same authors, and the originally published survey results. Specific differences are now discussed in turn:

2.1 Cognition

The 13 tasks presented in Figs. 4, 5 and 6 were originally contained within categories named as ‘thinking’ and ‘communication’ in previous publications by the same authors. This distinction between thinking and communication was based on the categorisation from Grundy et al. (1996), yet the distinction was not considered beneficial for product assessments, and the reconstruction process enabled all 13 questions to be combined into one category.

2.2 Dexterity

The tasks presented in Fig. 8 show exclusion results for tasks involving the dominant hand and separately involving the non-dominant hand. Figure 12 shows exclusion for tasks involving both hands, where each hand is doing something different. The dexterity results presented here-in are completely different from any previous publications by the same authors, which used different tasks from the survey to define the scales and predicted exclusion for tasks that could be performed with either hand, and tasks where both hands had to do the same thing. The format of presentation within this paper is considered more useful for predicting exclusion for the kind actions that have to be performed when using typical products.

2.3 Mobility and reach

The tasks presented in Fig. 7 associated with walking, steps and balancing have previously been presented in a category called ‘locomotion’ in previous publications by the same authors, and within the originally published survey results.

In this paper, bending tasks are presented within ‘reach’ (in Fig. 9), whereas bending tasks have previously been presented within ‘locomotion’ in previous publications by the same authors, and within the originally published survey results. In the context of a product assessment, it makes more sense to present reaching down in the same category as reaching up.

Also within ‘reach’, previous publications have presented the number of adults unable to reach one arm above their head, whereas the results here specifically consider the dominant arm, for better compatibility with the corresponding results for dexterity tasks.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Waller, S.D., Bradley, M.D., Langdon, P.M. et al. Visualising the number of people who cannot perform tasks related to product interactions. Univ Access Inf Soc 12, 263–278 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-013-0297-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-013-0297-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation