Creating Personas with Identified Accessibility Issues for People with Disabilities: Refrigerator Usage Case

摘要

1 Background and Objective Inclusive design means a design that is designed to enable everyone to use products, architecture, and environmental services more easily and safely, regardless of the presence or absence of disability and age. To perform an inclusive design for a target user, a user study of the target user should first be conducted to drive their needs. In this process, the description of the target user through creating persona helps the stakeholders to communicate smoothly since persona represents target users' personal characteristics, needs, behavior, objectives, and expectations (Grudin and Pruitt 2002). Thus it is well-recognized for its importance in Inclusive design (Carmichael et al. 2005). In addition, personas based on the user research can be utilized to help recognize the needs in accessibility for people with disabilities (Schulz and Skeide Fuglerud 2012). In South Korea, about 4.8% of the total population is registered as disabled people by 2015. The percentage of people with physical disabilities was more than 50%, and blindness and hearing loss were about 10%. According to the report of Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (2014), people with visual, hearing, upper and lower limb impairment reported that the accessibility for home appliances such as television, washing machine, microwave and refrigerator. Home appliances are often used in everyday life and this kinds of products with accessibility issues cannot guarantee the autonomy of people with disabilities. TVs were only inconvenient for the visually and hearing-impaired, however, all types of people with disabilities had high inconveniences in using the refrigerator. Therefore, this study aims to identify the accessibility issues and create personas to enhance the accessibility of refrigerators with respect to disabled people.