Understanding Real People

Abstract

Some approaches to representing the diverse range of capabilities within the population focus on representing those with severe losses in a sin-gle capability, such as vision or mobility. This approach follows the simplistic view that people are either able-bodied, or have a single severe capability limita-tion. This paper challenges this view using data from a population representative survey of the 2019 adult population in Germany. This survey asked participants whether they had any limitations in daily activities because of their vision, hearing, memory, concentration, hands, reach or mobility. Out of 1002 valid responses, 158 participants reported that something was ‘very limited’. However, 145 of these par-ticipants (92%) had a limitation in more than one capability category. Therefore, representing the diverse range of capabilities within the population necessarily requires describing people with co-occurring limitations. The full set of capabil-ity limitations for an individual is defined herein as their ‘capability fingerprint’. Within the German survey, the top 16 capability fingerprints represented 80% of the survey participants. Presenting the most prevalent capability fingerprints is advocated as a better approach for understanding the diversity of the population. These capability fingerprints could be used to develop population-representative personas, or to better understand the sample that took part in small-scale user research.