Abstract
In the world, the old population is growing fast and many countries went into an advanced age society. Therefore the development of everyday products, electric appliances, and welfare services considering old people is more important than ever. In particular, the complexity of products can cause many problems for old people. Universal design is an approach to create environments and products that recognizes the diversity of users, regardless of their ability or age. Universality evaluation for a product is very important to verify old people's accessibility and usability for the product. Universality means how good a product was designed in view of universal design principles. In this study, UNIX, a method to evaluate the universality of a product was developed. UNIX was based on seven universal design principles; equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive, perceptible information, tolerance for error, low physical effort, size and space for approach and use. UNIX is a kind of expert evaluation and very simple method. The method is consisted of two steps. In the first step, relative weights for seven principles and subjective ratings on design suitability for each principle are obtained. In the second step, universality index (UNIX) of each product is obtained by weighted average multiplying relative weights and rating scores. As a case study, this method was applied for mouse designs. In conclusion, this method could be effectively applied to evaluate the universality of a product.