Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
Designing for older adults is different from designing for younger adults. Older adults are usually less enamored with technology than they are about getting things done and usually experience a range of perception and cognition issues.
This study project concerned the analysis, design and evaluation of a TV system for the European project eCAALYX:
– Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment
– targeted at older adults suffering from a selection of chronic
conditions.
User-Centered Design methodology was used to concentrate on older adults’ specificities and therefore create an adequate product that is easy to use by them. In the context of this project, user research, personas, lowfidelity prototyping and user based evaluation were used.
User Research was used to understand the target audience of the project. Personas were created to concentrate on the goals of the different types of users of the system. Finally, a low-fidelity prototype of the Health Channel was created and iterated a number of times with feedback from user based evaluation. Based on the knowledge derived from the process described before, guidelines were created to drive the design of user interfaces for the TV and the preparation of usability tests targeted at older adults.
Author: Francisco Nunes
Type: MSc thesis
Work done at: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Year: 2010