1. Virtual User Concept for
Inclusive Design of
Consumer Products and
User Interfaces
The VICON vision is
to support the The needs of people with physical or sensory
development of impairments are generally not well considered
when designing user interfaces to consumer
accessible consumer products. Controls and displays often fail to
VICON focuses on the needs of people with
meet the requirements of users with visual,
products by creating hearing, mobility or dexterity impairments. mild to moderate physical and sensory im-
pairments, including those with multiple im-
Virtual User Models It is difficult for mainstream manufacturers to pairments.
have a detailed understanding of these needs These users require products with high usabil-
for use in design and and how to design for them. Manufacturers ity and accessibility, incorporating multimodal
interaction with context sensitivity.
manufacturing. would benefit from the support of a third party
solution to input the necessary knowledge.
The approach of VICON is to develop an ad-
VICON aims to provide this support through vanced Virtual User Model that can be inte-
the development of an advanced Virtual User grated into the product development pro-
Model which will enable virtual testing and cess and used for virtual testing by simu-
feedback throughout the development life- lating the interactions of real users.
cycle.
Virtual User Profiles (a customizable library of
virtual people) will be integrated with existing
development tools and used to model real-
time interactions with consumer products.
This will provide manufacturers with a practi-
cal source of usability and accessibility feed-
back on concepts, design alternatives, hard-
ware and software user interface specifica-
tions, prototypes and final products.
Project Coordinator: Project Manager:
Prof. Dr. Michael Lawo Dipl.-Ing. Pierre Kirisci
Email: mlawo@tzi.de Email: kir@biba.uni-bremen.de
Tel: +49-421-218-7824 Tel: +49-421-218-5582