Ai Nakane’s research while affiliated with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and other places

Although many Internet services exist that can raise our quality of life, there are still many non-active users who cannot fully enjoy the convenience of the Internet and its potential even when they have computers in the home. To deeply understand this failure to use the Internet, we conducted a field study, and arrived at an integrated model depicting the psychology of active/non-active computer users. Our model enables us to understand the psychology of the users and the external factors affecting them and sheds light on how non-active users are stuck in a negative loop. Users that received a support service designed on our model dramatically changed their attitude and started to use the service actively.

This article describes some case studies of designing the paper manual for replacing an Internet router for a home network. Constructing a method for designing easy-to-understand paper manuals for novices is one of the most important tasks at the ICT Design Center. We show how we improved the manual, which is now being distributed to actual users.

We propose two design concepts for the user-friendly manual and compare them in an experiment. The first concept, which focuses on user comprehension, is to use one picture of the completed wiring. The second concept is to uses a series of steps from left to right with the goal of making the user follow the order. Trials show that participants presented with material based on the first concept tend to follow their own mental-model rather than the manual. Material based on the second concept also failed to make users follow the order. Some implications for the refinement of manual design are derived based on the results.

Although many Internet-based social services exist that can raise our quality of life, there are still many non-active users who cannot fully enjoy the convenience of the computer and its functionality even though they have computers in the home. In order to analyze how to enhance computer usage, we conducted a field study and arrived at an integrated model that enables us to deeply understand the psychology of active/non-active computer users. Initial design guidelines for activating the non-active users are derived from our model.