Universal Usability - Challenges of Universal Usability

Challenges of Universal Usability

There are three major challenges to universal usability:

1. Supporting a broad range of hardware, software, and network access. With the advance of ICT, users’ hardware, software, and network configurations are changing. The variety of ICT products creates complex systems with a broad range of hybridity. For example, would a software product be usable to users running Windows XP on a Centrino laptop with broadband Internet access and to those who have Windows 98 on a Pentium II desktop with 56K dial-up?
2. Accommodating individual differences among users, such as age, gender, disabilities, literacy, culture, income, and so forth. Individual differences can be roughly categorized into three types: physical, cognitive, and socio-cultural. In the field of HCI, research attempts have been centering on accommodating physical and cognitive differences by isolating various specific factors such as spatial ability, speed of movement, eye-hand coordination, and so forth. However, previous literature has demonstrated that individual differences are difficult to pin down and difficult to generalize from one context to another.
3. Bridging the knowledge gap between what users know and what they need to know about a specific system. Two issues need to be resolved: (i) Building a user model to access individual user’s background knowledge on a specific system; (ii) Integrating the mechanism of evolutionary learning.