Taking account of the needs of disabled, young and elderly people, in a future Universal Communications Identifier - requirements analysis issues

摘要

Requirements analysis in the Human-centred design (HCD) framework is the process of eliciting human needs from potential users of a system. Envisaged as an essential first step in systems design, it is also a major recurrent task through rapid prototyping stages, and into user trials. The process of interaction between systems designers and users is difficult, even for relatively simple systems. Today, even with better understanding of both systems design and human cognitive processes, requirements analysis for new, advanced communications services is becoming more difficult. ETSI has been working on the idea of producing a Universal Communications Identifier (UCI) since 2001. The UCI is a new concept for advanced communication networks and services. It will provide a single unique identifier for all interpersonal communications, replacing the e-mail addresses, mobile numbers and all the other identifiers in use today. It is anticipated that the UCI will remain the same for life, and be a unique number for every individual. Currently, as part of the exploratory study of the UCI, there is a need to identify how specific, and novel, features of the UCI can be used to improve communications both for people with various functional impairments (e.g. people with different disabilities and elderly people) and also for young people (up to 12 years of age). This paper reports on the way that ETSI Special Task Force 230 has gone about obtaining specific user requirements for the needs of disabled, young and elderly people. It also reports on what has been found to be the most important communication requirements related to disability, ageing and young people, which will be transcribed where possible into requirements for the additional information field in the UCI. In addition, the UCI requirements gathering process undertaken highlights the growing difficulties with requirements capture for complex interpersonal communications networks and services.