Research On The Usability Of The User-interface Of The Rehabilitation Products For Special Children

With the development in economy and ethics, our country has raised more and more attention in caring about the disabled people. The State Council has approved and implemented The Outline of China's Eleventh Five-year Plan for the Cause of the Disabled People , which has proposed the aim of by 2015, every disabled person enjoying the preliminarily recovering service. As the social demand for the curing and caring for the handicapped children are growing rapidly, the number and types of the related rehabilitating products are comparatively too limited for selection. The design of these products shows little consideration for the man-machine relation, which exposes the absence in the study of usability of this special kind of products.Since the user-interface is the direct and immediate experiencing object of the special children, and the usability of the user-interface has direct influence upon the assessment of the rehabilitators as well as the effectiveness in achieving the goal of the rehabilitation training, the need in the study of the usability of the user-interface becomes more and more pressing. This dissertation takes the special children and rehabilitators as two study objects-----the rehabilitators are taken as the major study object, because they are the main users of the rehabilitation products; the handicapped children are taken as the minor.In order to solve the designing problems leading to low efficiency in usability of the user-interface, centered around the users, based on the theories of the usability of multimedia user-interface, this dissertation takes the approaches of interviewing, questionnaires, cognitive walkthrough of experts'evaluation, heuristic assessment and so on, on the one hand, trying to systemically categorizing the problems in the usability of interface, and to summarize the characteristic of the problems; on the other, trying to present the necessity in the study on the usability of rehabilitating products, as well as to anticipate the vast improvement in the interface usability. By illustrating some cases in the products designed for hearing impairment children, the dissertation assesses the interface usability and gives the explanation of the study process to designate the problems in the usability of the user-interface in the rehabilitating products for the hearing impairment children. At last, this dissertation initiates a user centered process in assessing and testing the interface usability in the rehabilitating products for the hearing impairing children, and summarizes the purposely designing principles of the user-interface. To test the feasibility of the principles, this dissertation carries out some practices to get the firsthand proof to support the theories in the interface usability.