Collecting old people’s data for more accessible design: A pilot study

Abstract

Good design should be equipped with the quality of being accessible to broad user groups, including older people. As the population becomes older, the needs and capabilities of people become ever more diverse. However, there exists limited effective data for designers to understand older people’s capability condition. The lack of good data becomes a great barrier to make design accessible to older people. This paper introduces a pilot study of collecting older people’s multiple capability data in China. It aims to explore principles and instructions to design the process, methods and testing tasks of such a study. The results show that in the pilot study, (1) there are discrepancies between users’ self-assessment and performance measurement, (2) the selection of products should take into account the cultural context, and (3) ceiling effects exist and they greatly affect the validity and reliability of the data.