Safety vests for jockeys: a case study of primary and dependent-secondary users affecting the evolution of vest design in the Australian horse-racing industry

This research presented new insights into design issues of Australian jockeys’ safety vests, which have scarcely updated standards. There is a consistent rate of serious jockeys’ injuries and an increasing number of female jockeys, yet safety vests still need improvement. A user-experience (UX) framework guided the author, but the perspectives of the tracks’ medical staff could not be clearly classified within a common UX framework. Jockeys’ and medical professionals’ thoughts provided significant findings that inform areas of change. Benefits may arrive by a revision of a UX framework to accommodate design dependencies as suggested by Dependency-Based User-Experience (D-UX) design.