LiveTalk: Real-time Information Sharing between Hearing-impaired People and People with Normal Hearing

摘要

In recent years, more and more people have been recognizing that communication is very important in pursuing collaborations and innovations.Recent efforts to involve people from a variety of backgrounds in the development process, such as brainstorming, evaluation, and modification, have shown that such efforts can create new user experience (UX).Notably, there are projects where participants include people with certain difficulties.In April 2015, Fujitsu launched a new communication tool, FUJITSU Software LiveTalk, aiming to include hearing-impaired people in the circle of community.Throughout the developmental phases, we collaborated with contributors who were hearing-impaired.In the development of LiveTalk, we observed the participants to identify characteristic behaviors of hearing-impaired people in their workplaces as well as challenges they encounter when communicating with people who can hear normally.Their opinions were also shared with us to help create a prototype equipped with features that addressed them.Through the user evaluation and feedback on this prototype, we repeatedly improved the model to make it easier to use.It is an application that realizes smooth bilateral communications between hearing-impaired people and people with normal hearing, based on a new UX design.This paper explains the development of LiveTalk.