The main focus of this project was to design a product that supports people with disabilities in navigating the barriers that exist for them to enjoy public spaces. The aim was to design this product in a way that will easily integrate into someone's life without forcing them to constantly be reminded of their disability in order to use it.

This was a two week project (80 hours) during which I created an independent project brief and carried out a design process spanning: user research, problem ideation, interaction design, usability testing, branding, and finally, UI designs. This case study will serve as a detailed look into that process, highlighting the insights I gained along the way.

Project Duration: 2 weeks (80 hours)

My Role: Sole Designer, with mentor feedback

 Background

Around 26% of adults in the United States have some sort of disability. Having a disability often creates barriers to participating in society, which can ultimately lead to a lower quality of life for those people. The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 to establish a baseline set of accessibility standards to protect people with disabilities (PWD’s) against discrimination in public spaces. One of the many issues with the ADA is that it mostly addresses the built environment without considering the usability of spaces for PWD’s. A space could technically be “ADA accessible”; however, ADA accessibility does not imply enjoyability and there are many other factors to consider. For example, adding a wheelchair ramp to a back, separate entrance meets ADA requirements, but functions to exclude the PWD forced to use it by reminding them of their difference. Because of the the gaps in the ADA, the burden of figuring out what places someone with a disability can visit and actually enjoy falls on the individual. Typically, PWD’s spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy researching the public spaces they want to enjoy before going. For this project, I knew I wanted to dive into this problem space to see how design could potentially improve the lives of people living with disabilities.

User Interviews

Since the aim of this project was to design a resource for a specific group of people, I knew I needed to start with user interviews. Specifically, I needed to interview people with disabilities so that this project would be informed by the needs of actual users. In addition to people with disabilities, I wanted to interview a subject matter expert in order to learn more about different types of disabilities and what features PWD’s need businesses to have in order to enjoyably use those spaces. When talking to the subject matter expert, I also asked questions to learn more about best practices regarding what language to use when referring to PWD’s as to not place the burden on someone with a disability to explain that to me. In my second round of interviews, I sought out the perspective of a caregiver to a PWD with the the goal of uncovering daily routines and pain points that the PWD might be not able to identify with words. In this interview, I was seeking information from an observation-based perspective. Finally, this interview gave me the opportunity to entertain the idea of catering the product to caregivers in addition to PWD.

In the two rounds of interviews I conducted, I created three different sets of questions depending on the participant. This presented a new challenge for me to tackle when it came to synthesizing and comparing results. I had different goals for each participant so it felt a little disjointed, but ultimately allowed me to learn a lot about this problem space very quickly.

Here are some of my key findings:

Round 1: Participants with Mobility Impairments and an Occupational Therapy Doctoral Candidate (Subject Matter Expert)

-Participants with mobility impairments need to research businesses before they know they are able to go there. They usually need to collect information from multiple sources including google maps, the business website, facebook groups, calling the business, and sometimes even driving by to see what the entry looks like/how crowded it is.

-Small independent businesses are less likely to create inclusive spaces for different types of impairments since they usually have smaller spaces and less money for “unnecessary” changes to their space. Participants usually go to larger chain businesses for convenience despite their preferences.

-There’s plenty of resources out there for businesses to make changes to their spaces, but the incentive just isn’t strong enough to make the changes. The federal government does not have a central enforcing agency to hold business accountable to the ADA. The burden of ADA enforcement falls on individuals with disabilities to file law suits which are commonly expensive and time consuming.

-The main types of disabilities fall under mobility, vision or hearing. Cognitive impairments can combine with any of these main categories and is much more broad.

Round 2: Participants who are caregivers to someone with a disability

-The caregivers echoed the difficulty of finding the information needed about a business to make the decision to go there.

-When a business do have accessible options they are often awkward solutions that draw a lot of attention from the other patrons of the business which creates a negative experience.

-They often times feel like a burden asking for a business to accommodate for the person they care for.

User Persona

After synthesizing both rounds of user interviews, I pulled together a persona based off of the trends identified among participant responses. When developing this persona, I decided to aim this product at young adults who want to be social and find new places to go in their cities or when traveling.

Identifying the Problem

Completing the user interviews and synthesizing the results led to a pretty clear problem to solve: How might we help people with disabilities find the information they need to know about businesses before they visit?

Moving forward with that problem statement I did a few rapid sketching ideation activities to see what potential solutions would pop up. These exercises are always super interesting since you can’t overthink anything.

Something that came out of these exercises I wish I could have pursued further was the idea of using the general public to generate data about different businesses. What if (when a user opts in) when google maps notices you’re inside a cafe it pops a question to you asking something like “how crowded is this cafe right now?” or “is the menu clearly visible right now?” or “how loud is the music in this cafe?”. If even a small portion of people enable those questions and answer one every now and again google would have an enormous amount of data about millions of businesses in cities around the world that could benefit PWD’s if it were added to the info under business pages inside google maps. Unfortunately this idea doesn’t fit within the scope of this particular project, but it’d definitely be interesting to explore further.

What direction I ended up pursuing was creating an entirely new app that looks and feels like any app you’d use to see what businesses are around you (yelp, foursquare, ect.) but the difference would be the ability to create a profile with a permanent set of filters applied according to what your needs are.

Now, this idea requires a large amount of accessibility information about specific businesses to be available to the app in order to create accurate business profiles so I pretended that exists already and set out to design how this app would function and what it would look like from here.

 User Flow

With the premise to my solution set I needed to create the main user flow to figure out which screens I’d need to build out in order to illustrate the function of this app properly. The new account setup flow is what someone would go through their first time using the app, which would walk them through disclosing what needs they have based on their impairments as well as what interests they have so that their home page shows what categories of businesses are most relevant to them.

The main flow shows what journey the user would take every other time they open the app. This was an important part to illustrate since once those needs are disclosed in the account setup the user never needs to think about them again since the app will only show businesses that meet their needs, thus alleviating the arduous research required every time the user wants to go somewhere new.

 Wireframes

I wanted to build out the flow for creating a new account since that’s really the crux of the app experience. The trickiest part of building out these wireframes for me was figuring out how to display all of the features a user could add to their profile as a filter. Some early peer feedback led me to adding an additional screen which allows the user to disclose what specific impairment they have. This then prompts the app to suggest a list of filters in the next screen that likely apply to them, rather than asking the user to list off every feature they need a business to have since it gets pretty detailed and wordy very quickly. The user would then have the option to delete features that aren’t important to them or to add ones that are missing with a search feature.

A few main design choices I wanted to focus on here were large CTA’s, “speak to type” functionality, a scroll bar on the map to zoom vs the typical pinch to zoom feature most maps use which can be difficult for someone who struggles with fine motor skills, and pulling out a “call the business” CTA to make that a super quick option.

 Branding

When it came to branding the app it was really important to create something youthful and cool since most resources for people with disabilities tend to be pretty sterile and not very interesting to look at. I wanted to really push the visual design aspect while maintaining a design that doesn’t sacrifice usability for people with different types of impairments. I went with some bright pastel colors and some almost abstract nature photography with similar shades present with a neutral gray/blue brand color.

 UI Designs

Putting everything together, I wanted the overall feel to be cohesive and easy to navigate. Oversized CTA’s, large rectangles with a lot of surface area to tap, and not relying on different colors to signal any function within the app were all intentional design choices made to increase usability.

Setting up your profile

The screens below highlight how a user would create their profile to use the app. It starts off with some basic information and then moves to a list of different impairments/areas of concern that are relevant to the user. Based on what the user selects, the app will suggest a set of accessibility features that are most likely to be relevant to the user in the next screen. Here the user has the option to either uncheck the boxes of features they don’t need or add ones that are missing with the manual search option. In both screens there is a link to report if any options they need is missing. The final screen is where users identify what types of businesses they are most interested in. These selections determine what categories show up on the home page of the app. I chose to use 2x2 squares on the interests page since I wanted to fit all of the categories in one page. I didn’t want there to be too many options to choose from so that it became overwhelming to the user. I chose to put the category name directly on the photo so it would be clear that the user should tap the photo to choose that category.

Searching for a Business from the Homepage

The screens below highlight the main function of the app. The home page shows recommended businesses that all have the accessibility features selected during profile creation so that the user doesn’t need to set the same filter each time they want to find a new business. This feature also adds another layer of personalization aiming to help users find businesses they want to go to even quicker. I chose to place the images 2x2 again, but changed the shape from square on the interests page to a rectangle to create space for the photos to showcase more of the business it represents. I placed the business names below the images on this page so that the words don’t take away from the image, which serves a more important purpose than on the interests page. The photos bleed off of the screen signaling to users that they can horizontally scroll through without taking up too much screen real estate. The manual search result features the scroll to zoom bar on the map (vs pinch to zoom), and has a call the business CTA pulled out for easy access to that feature. The business detail page has a photo of what the entrance looks like and a few more CTA’s making commonly used functions super accessible and easy.

 Usability Testing with a Prototype

I conducted two rounds of usability testing for this project. The first round was done after building out my initial wireframes in order to get some specific feedback regarding how the user identifies what filters they need in their profile.

The second round of testing was done after I completed the UI designs. This round was a little more open ended functionality-wise, focusing instead on the visual design aspects of the app. I wanted to push the visual design of this project to see how far I could go before compromising usability. My first iteration definitely found that line, with participants reporting that the legibility of some aspects of the design suffered as a result. With observations from this round of usability I was able to identify which parts of the design were difficult to read and was then able to go back and increase the contrast, make sections more bold, and apply filters to certain sections to help make the words pop a bit more.

 I learned so much during this project. The topic itself is incredibly important, and is often so easily overlooked by people without disabilities. It was really exciting to put some thought into how design could potentially improve the lives of so many people. It was also interesting to come to a realization in the design phase that just because I was building an informational resource didn’t mean it needed to be sterile or boring to look at.

Another piece of the process I found interesting was interviewing different types of participants with different sets of questions. This experience provided some really great user research practice and further reinforced a skillset I’m developing there. If I had more time/resources, I would have loved to interview even more people (especially people with different types of impairments) or maybe business owners in order to dive into what barriers exist for them in making their spaces more inclusive to people with disabilities. There’s a lot of opportunity in this problem space for some really cool solutions that could impact a lot of people in a monumental way, and I’ll hope to be able to dig into them further myself.

Thanks so much for taking the time to give this a look!