Involving older adults in the design process: a human-centric 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 audio-visual artefacts for the online platform ICTskills4All are more effective when co-designed and validated with end-users.