Universal Usability in User Interface Engineering

1. UNIVERSAL USABILITY

2. CODE OF UNIVERSAL ETHICS
In a fair society, all individuals would have equal
opportunity to participate in, or benefit from, the
use of computer resources regardless of race,
sex, religion, age, disability, national origin or
other such similar factors.
-By ACM(Association for Computing Machinery)
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3. What is Universal Usability?
 Ben Shneiderman , a pioneer in the field of Human-
Computer Interaction, defines universal usability as “enabling
all citizens to succeed using communication and information
technology in their tasks.”
 Notice he does not say, “enabling all citizens to use”, but
rather, “enabling all citizens to succeed”—quite a call to
arms! Designers who practice universal usability strive for
designs that gracefully accommodate a diversity of user
needs and circumstances.
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4. ACCESSIBILITY Vs USABILITY
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Accessibility is concerned
primarily with making the
content and functionality of web
sites accessible—within reach—
to all users.
Universal usability goes one
step further, striving to make the
content and functionality
accessible and usable by all.
Accessibility’ defines a set of
technical requirements that
could be met and yet the
result may not be universally
usable
‘Universal usability’ specifies not
just the attributes of the
technology but the experience
of the users.” Universal usability
is evaluated and measured very
differently than accessibility, by
way of real users.

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ACCESSIBILITY
Available to everyone
regardless of the way
they use their devices
USABILITY
Easy to use,
Intuitive,
Easily Learnable

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7. Universal Usability is about satisfying experiences:
 “The expectation of satisfying the full range of human diversity
is an enormously high achievement to push toward.”
 But we also believes it is achievable if people give it the care
and attention that they give to other priorities.
 “Health is achievable. We have times when our health is better
than others, but we strive to be healthy all the time.”
 Similarly, we should strive to satisfy people “with different
hardware, different network connections, different abilities, and
different levels of knowledge about using computer technology.”
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8. LEVEL OF USABILITY
A small example,
 We expect automobiles to have levels of Adjustability. We can move
the seat, tilt the steering wheel, angle the mirrors, raise the lighting—
there are so many adjustable features. Of course, it takes more time
to design and may cost more, but the benefits to usability and safety
are enormous.
 Mature technologies have many forms of adjustability that are easy
to use, “enabling people to move gracefully from simple use to more
elaborate use”. They empower people to do remarkable things.
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9. The unseen magic of technology,
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10. SUPPORTIVE AND ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
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11. How assistive technologies are associated with universal
usability?
• ​For people, with disabilities that affect them socially and
emotionally, assistive technology provides opportunities for
them to improve their communication and relationships.
• There are thousands of devices and programs that have been
designed to support communication, teach life skills, support
academic learning, and development of social skills.
• These supports help people develop the skills they need to be
successful, manage their emotions, and build relationships,
these things enhances universal usability.
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12. The inclusion of universal usability, addresses a broad range of issues :
 accessibility for people with disabilities;
 access to and quality of hardware, software, and Internet connectivity;
 computer literacy and skills;
 economic situation;
 education;
 geographic location;
 culture;
 age, including older and younger people;
 and language.
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13. “Universal usability, shouldn’t be a special course
that someone has to take. It should be part of
the preparation for anyone who learns about
computer science and training for every
computing professional. I want to be in a
discipline and part of a profession that is proud
of its role in achieving universal usability”.
By, Ben Shneiderman .
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14. CHALLENGES OF UNIVERSAL USABILITY:
There are three major challenges, to Universal
Usability:
1) Supporting a broad range of hardware, software, and network
access. With the advance of ICT, users' hardware, software,
and network configurations are changing. The variety of ICT
products creates complex systems with a broad range of
hybridity . For example, would a software product be usable to
users running Windows XP on a Centrino laptop with broadband
Internet access and to those who have Windows 98 on
a Pentium II desktop with 56K dial-up?
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15. Technology variety: Support broad range of hardware,
software and network access:
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16. 2) Accommodating individual differences among users, such as
age, gender, disabilities, literacy, culture, income, and so forth.
Individual differences can be roughly categorized into three
types: physical, cognitive, and socio-cultural. In the field of HCI,
research attempts have been centering on accommodating
physical and cognitive differences by isolating various specific
factors such as spatial ability, speed of movement, eye–hand
coordination, and so forth. However, previous literature has
demonstrated that individual differences are difficult to pin down
and difficult to generalize from one context to another.
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17. User Diversity : Accommodate different users
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18. 3) Bridging the knowledge gap between what
users know and what they need to know about
a specific system.
Two issues need to be resolved:
(i) Building a user model to access individual
user's background knowledge on a specific
system
(ii) (ii) Integrating the mechanism of evolutionary
learning.
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19. Gaps in user knowledge
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20. PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL USABILITY
The basic principles are:
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DESIGN
SIMPLY
BUILD
WELL
FAVOR HTML
FORMAT’s

21. Future Directions of Universal Usability:
 Research is moving forward to address new challenges and to
reach the full potential of universal usability.
 Technological advances and global networking provide the
basis for many new developments. A recent trend in universal
usability is the movement toward convergence.
 Devices have become smaller, systems have become more
complex, and more functionality is included in a single device,
enabling users to often use one device for a variety of tasks.
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22. THANK
YOU !
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