Abstract
Are the naive usability judgments of blind consumers more accurate than those of consumers without such impairments? Forty-one legally blind participants evaluated three user-product interfaces for three different products. The interface designs varied in terms of stimulus-response (s-r) compatibility and were associated with empirically-determined differences in accuracy, learnability, or response speed. Compared to the naive judgments collected by Payne (1995) from sighted participants, blind judges were reliably more accurate in their predictions of the relative performance efficiency of the various designs. We speculate that the superior judgments of blind participants may be due to their use of haptic and auditory evaluation strategies. In a follow-up study, normally-sighted participants were asked to evaluate the same products using either visual or nonvisual strategies. Judgments were most accurate, and similar to that of blind judges, when sighted judges performed the task nonvisually.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.