Involving older adults in the design process: a humancentric Design Thinking approach

Abstract

A product’s acceptance depends on the experience that it provides to its users. To consider user’s contextualised specific needs an user-centred design process is recommended. Human-centric design considers human's opinions as a design priority, and puts them in the “centre” of the iterative design process. To understand the end-users influence (adults 55+ experience) in product development, we conducted an empirical study with 25 participants, supported by a human-centric co-design thinking process (participatory design) with collection of qualitative data. In this article we report a Design Based Research (DBR) study, that compares the acceptance of a set of two audio-visual artefacts: designed with adults older than 55 and a design process supported only by the designer’s expertise. Overall we believe this study depicts evidence that audiovisual artefacts for the online platform ICTskills4All are more effective when codesigned and validated with end-users.