One Common User Interface for All Users?
By Alexander Kuban, SAP User Experience – 02/18/2002 • Original article
Could you ever imagine doing your daily work without a PC again?
PCs and other IT products became a great help in various working fields and their continuous enhancement makes them more and more attractive to be used in new jobs today. Since computers and software became a central tool in offices, production areas and many other areas, it becomes more and more important to make them easy to use without specific qualification. Therefore, graphical user interfaces such as Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows were designed to enable an intuitive use of modern technology.
For that purpose the mouse was designed as a new input device to make a step away from the need of specific knowledge on how to use a software based on key commands as it was unusual, when MS DOS and UNIX were the dominating operating systems. Depending on an employee's profession, the movement of one hand to take the mouse for navigation or selecting a function takes additional time in comparison to the case when the same action could even be executed with the keyboard. I.e., sales agents who type in data permanently need a limited set of software features. So they would be efficiently supported by the availability of key commands for the selection of actions they need to trigger countless times an hour.
Having those key commands missing results in a loss of time which accumulates over the day, week or even month.
From a long term perspective, it is economically and also ergonomically important for power users to have full keyboard access provided.
Looking at people who use IT products permanently, you can divide this population into different groups regarding their requirements and expectations. One possible division could be made based on physical limitations. The average user is able to access software and hardware without any limitation. The other group of users, which has impairments in terms of a physical or sensory disability, depends on capabilities of hardware and software, which can be covered by following industrial standards regarding software design.
Many disabled PC users cannot use the mouse so that they need to have a standard software that provides unlimited keyboard access to each single functionality the software contains. This requirement completely meets the basic requirement power users have – regardless of a disability – to work efficiently.
Looking at individuals with visual impairments special needs in terms of the application's appearance should be taken care of. The more information the screen contains the less they are able to be in control of what's displayed on the screen. Design like this more often has a negative impact also on normally sighted users as well. The more a screen contains, the more information the brain has to filter what was visually absorbed. Providing information on an extremely visually oriented level also has a negative impact on visually impaired users. A status or meaning of an information being only conveyed by a difference in color or shape is only obvious to users who have no visual handicap. Blind users, users with low vision and color blind users usually cannot benefit from this way of design due to their specific disability.
Above all this, the appearance of an application should be customizable regarding special needs of the end user (fonts, contrast etc.) to comfort the user who should be considered as a user working at least 8 hours a day with the same kind of application.
Focusing on users with physical disabilities, the usage of the mouse sometimes must also be taken out of consideration. For this group of users the navigation via keyboard is also as important as for the users with visual impairments or the non-disabled power user. For those users who might be only able to work with one hand, hotkeys should be easy to handle. The single keys shouldn't be located too far apart from each other so that they might be reachable easily with the fingers of one hand. This is especially important for hotkeys of standard functionality, which might be used permanently in doing a specific task.
For this reason developers and designers of IT products should take the challenge to make their product as usable as can be to enable as many users as possible to use their products efficiently from a long term perspective. This basic idea should be included in every single part of the processes of specification, design and implementation.
The best way to find out about the usability and the accessibility of an IT product would be to sit down and use it for several hours – especially from an end user's perspective instead of the one of a developer.
Additional Information
- Web Accessibility Initiative: www.w3.org/WAI
