A Persona-Based Approach for Identifying Accessibility Issues in Elderly and Disabled Users’ Interaction with Home Appliances

Disabled and elderly populations may not fully appreciate the benefits of advanced technologies and every-day products due to accessibility issues. However, the diverse characteristics of disabled and elderly users make conducting user research a challenging task for stakeholders who oversee the needs of developing accessible products. They need a tool providing rich information to empathize with the disabled and elderly users, instead of standards and documents without detailed explanation of real-world applications. Therefore, this study aims to identify accessibility issues based on the interview and observation data from 52 people with different disabilities and ages. We developed eight personas representing four different user groups under the context of home appliance usage: visually impaired, hearing impaired, spinal-cord impaired, and elderly. Each persona takes a role as a tool to understand the target users and has a persona card representing their task barriers, frustrations, needs, and quotations along with a cartoonized character. In this study, we address two common accessibility issues and two persona-specific issues within each user group. The issues are presented in stakeholder’s language personas to help them comprehend and empathize with their users.