Goal-Directed User Study And Design Of IT Product For Elders

China has gone into an aging society since 1999,and it also has the largest population of elder people in the world.With the rapid development of Information Technology,IT product is becoming more and more important in human's life, especially for elders who live alone.In this thesis,the author investigates elders' user experience of using IT product,then designs and develops a product which satisfies elders' requirement.Goal-Directed Design is a prevalent UCD method,which includes three phases. The author firstly uses the Interview Methods to investigate elders' basic demographic information,including ages,living style,educational degree and so on.According to interview results,the author found that different older adults owned different requirements and used different IT products.Therefore,in order to understand elders better,the author uses interview methods and questionnaire methods to obtain different older adults' characters.After analysising data the author classifies the elders into three categories.The first category is Vogue Elder,the second category is Health Care Elder and the last one is Family Elder.Then the author creates different kinds of personas, which can provide good user model for new-product development.Next,the author analyzes Health Care Elder' persona and creates 5 scenarios. Through the 5 scenarios the author obtains 5 requirements and designs the new-product's function frame and interaction flow.At the same time,the author has also summarized several usability rules especially for older adults design in order to guide our product development.Product development consists of two phases.One is low-fidelity prototype development and the other one is high-fidelity prototype development.During each phase,the author invites several elders to give some advices.Most of them who feel satisfied consider that the product can meet elder's requirements and its operations are so easy that they can use it themselves at the first time.But they also give some advices against the products,such as the phone's keyboard is too small,the memory capacity is not very enough and so on. To sum up,the thesis adopts Goal-Directed Design to study and design IT (?)products m the angle of users and makes a useful exploration for UCD methods using in a (?)ecial user groups.It develops a new product that satisfies with elder's requirements (?)d lays the groundwork for in-depth IT products studies.