No abstract

: Usability testing that makes a subject do some tasks with prototypes has been mainly used for evaluating user friendliness of home appliances in the past. However, consumers often choose the products according to their visual impressions of user friendliness when they purchase the products in the market. In addition to this, little attention has been given to these issues. This paper is intended to analyze the visual impressions of user friendliness based on rough set theory in the case of home appliances.First, we attempted to analyze the products in the current market, and extracted some factors which made users feel user friendly. Then, we made some visual prototypes that were based on the results of the previous analysis. Finally, we conducted the survey to compare these prototypes with some current products by thirty subjects. As a result, it was found that distinction of the buttons on the operational panel by means of size and colors was the most important factor of the visual impression of user friendliness. Additionally, we found rough set theory was useful in order to analyze the visual impressions.

: This study is aimed at improving the user-friendliness of home appliances that support the elderly and other users in their daily lives, by focusing on the functional descriptions appearing on the operation panels of products, as these are considered to have a significant impact on this objective. We also conducted a survey and analysis to assess the intelligibility of these descriptions. First, we attempted to construct a structural classification to understand the historical changes in descriptive interfaces, giving consideration to a mental model of elderly users. For this, we created an improved method of classifying user interfaces according to whether they are procedure-oriented or aim-oriented, focusing on functional descriptions. When we classified the functional descriptions of current home appliances using this method, we found that an increasing proportion of appliances feature aim-oriented interfaces characterized by qualitative expressions that tend to be vague, making use difficult for elderly people. We thus conducted a survey of interface intelligibility among elderly test subjects, focusing on aim-oriented functional descriptions of washing machines. At the same time, we attempted to classify descriptions according to the expressive forms of figures of speech and semantic modification relations, focusing on the rhetorical aspects of functional descriptions. In addition, we attempted comprehensive classifications according to criteria such as commonality of terms, presence/absence of foreign words. We then explored the relevance to the results of our intelligibility survey of elderly and young subjects. Our results suggested that some figures of speech and commonality of descriptions may have an impact on the ease-of-understanding of appliance interfaces.

We propose a system to create designs that reflect multiple user preferences. When creating such designs, it is important to collect a significant number of user opinions and adopt them in the designs. However, as the number of users increases, the collection of opinions becomes more difficult. Therefore we propose a system using the paired comparison voting (PCV) method and digital signage. The PCV method obtains preferences from multiple users by voting. The proposed system presents designs for users using digital signage. Thus, the proposed system creates designs that please multiple users. Here, we experiment using the proposed system and demonstrate its effectiveness with real users. The experimental results show that the created designs became similar visually and genetically. As a result, we verified that the proposed system creates designs reflecting the preferences of multiple people.