AN EVALUATION OF INTELLIGIBILITY OF FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTIONS AND AN ANALYSIS OF THE RHETORICAL ATTRIBUTES FOR ELDERLY PEOPLE

Abstract

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.