A Study On Digital Products' Usability For Off-Farm Workers

Digital divide is one of the great challenges the human society faces, along with the world's informationization process. The study on bridging digital divide is significant to the human being. In this thesis it mainly describes the usability study on off-farm workers' using digital products. Off-farm workers are the typical vulnerable group in the digital divide. In the study a series of usability methods are used to obtain the usability issues on the off-farm workers' using typical digital products. The purpose of this study is to confirm whether and how the usability issues impact the digital divide and to explore the solution to bridge the digital divide from the perspective of product's designing.The research is divided into four stages. The first stage is to grasp and understand the ethnographic characters of off-farm workers through literature review; The second is to understand the specific requirements of off-farm workers and how they acknowledge and use digital products by field observations and interviews; Then through usability testing of a popular mobile phone we attempt to understand the special usability issues that affect their using digital products. And finally we adopt a cooperative design method together with the off-farm workers to design a prototype that is usable to them exploring effective approaches for designing for this group.As the result of the study shown, the workflow of the system is not consistent with the mental model and the habits of off-farm workers. The cognitive capability and mental model of off-farm workers are far from fully taken into consideration in the development. The mistakes they made could be divided into two categories: (1) The user could not identify correctly the features by their name for the task; (2) The user could not recognize and use the built-in short-cuts to complete the task. The results of the research demonstrate that using user-centered design approach in digital product development can effectively eliminate some serious usability problems that off-farm workers suffer from.In summary, the study we conducted shows that usability issue does play an unneglectable role in exacerbating the digital divide for vulnerable groups to use digital...