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Universal usability refers to the design of information and communications products and services that are usable for every citizen. The concept has been advocated by Professor Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also provided a more practical definition of universal usability – “having more than 90% of all households as successful users of information and communications services at least once a week.” The concept of universal usability (“usable by all”) is closely related to the concepts of universal design and design for all. These three concepts altogether cover, from the user’s end to the developer’s end, the three important research areas of information and communications technology (ICT): use, access, and design. == Challenges of universal usability == There are three major challenges to universal usability: #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? #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. #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) Integrating the mechanism of evolutionary learning. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Universal usability」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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