Adapting design and interaction techniques to the structural, demographic, and social changes of the 21st century

Abstract

After the last few decades, we are observing social changes in the Western population that are leading to an ageing workforce, especially in European countries such as Spain and Italy. This translates into a higher percentage of active workers over the age of 50. It is therefore clear that there is a need to pay greater attention to accessibility and usability in all digital products, as this is essential to integrate anyone into their use. Currently there are organizations, standards, and agreements about the correct application of accessibility in interfaces. However, such content may be too scattered in different sources, or written too abstractly, which makes companies unmotivated and not paying enough attention to accessibility aspects in their products, except when it is required by law. That is why this work tries to compile accessibility guides that affect user experience designs in relation to digital interfaces. The priority objective is to create a reference guide, analysing the different types of disabilities and illnesses that affect users when they interact with interfaces, explaining how they affect and what barriers they cause to these users, as well as procedures to solve them. In addition, to promote the motivation of the inclusion of accessibility levels, a set of experiments related to the design decisions of micro-interactions, web forms and techniques of content structure previewing are proposed to give quantitative data to validate the good practices developed previously. To carry out these experiments, the A/B testing methodology [45] has been followed, comparing different models that are distinguished in the points to be studied. For the measurement of results, the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) [42] will be used and the observation of errors, interactions, time, mistakes, and personal comments. The experiments manage to meet the objective of demonstrating the validity of the proposed techniques in terms of efficiency and user satisfaction. All this, together with a set of observations and analyses in relation to the attributes of accessibility and usability, provide arguments in favour of the application of these best practices in user interfaces.