AccessEase: Native App
Overview
Enayball LTD is an accessibility design house. I am Senior Designer and a Co-Founder. Enayball LTD has won various Grants for R&D in the accessibility sector, this project was funded by a 6 month IUK grant. We would design a digital product that utilises machine learning to suggest and support procurement of accessible technologies for people with disability. The scope was to end the 6 month sprint with a high-fidelity prototype, to bring to investor presentations.
The Team
We were 7 people: a Market Researcher, a Project Manager, another Product Designer, an Occupational Therapist & two Assistive Technology Advisors.
My Role
I was Lead Designer, in addition I supported Product Management and Product Research activities.
Users & Audience
Our user group was people with disabilities in the UK, Europe and US, their caregivers and family. Our research participants were our user group and professionals within the disability sector.
Process
Initial Research
Our first task was to better define our problem statement, which was initially broad: “to develop a novel and market valuable product offering for the disability sector.”
I partnered with our Market Researcher Rachel and we conducted diary studies with 15 people with disabilities, our questions held focus on uncovering day to day access issues. We used an accessible research platform called Video Ask and exported our data onto an Excel Spreadsheet to draw out themes. We quickly noticed a distinct trend:
Many of the issues facing our research group were already addressed with adept product solutions, however our participants either did not know about and/or felt overwhelmed at thought of procuring these products.
Validating the problem area
Rachel conducted market and regulatory research with guidance from myself and Peter (the other product designer) and as a trio we analysed the document. They confirmed that an assistive technology marketplace was a valid development route. We then co-created a competitor analysis to understand the market better. The two documents validated the design route of developing a smart accessible technology marketplace:
The disability market as a whole is large and growing, however individual conditions offer relatively small TAMs (Total Addressable Markets). Therefore it is tactical to create a product that addresses the needs of multiple groups of people affected by a variety of disabilities.
Designing a product that is not classed as a medical device will create a faster and more affordable route to market. A marketplace for assistive technology would not be classed as a medical device.
The market is not saturated with direct-competitors.
Exploding the problem area
Before I could jump into designing it was important to define user needs more deeply. Pete and myself defined three areas to focus our next stage of user reserach:
How do people with disability currently discover and procure assistive technology?
What are the common pain points for people with disability when obtaining assistive technology?
How do people with disability feel about professionals in the accessibility field?
The entire team collaborated to design 1-2-1 interviews which contained follow up questions specific to early insights from the diary study, as well as a loose script investigating the three questions above. The perspectives and expertise of the Assistive Technology Experts and OTs on our team was invaluable here. Pete, the other product designer, Rachel the market researcher and myself then led these interviews with the 15 participants who had completed our diary study.
To diversify our research participants and create a more reliable set of findings we also ran a survey using Typeform (an accessible research platform) and had over 70 research participants answer questions specific to the three topics defined above.
As a team we analysed the Research and shared key insights. I summarised these insights into a User Requirement Specification and User Persona, to ground the myriad of insights we had generated into concise documents to drive product development.
Early prototyping
Pete and myself kicked off product development by creating a user flow that defined the primary screens of the marketplace. We then translated this into a low-fidelity product prototype.
Focus Group
Myself and the core team planned and hosted a Focus Group with 5 research participants. I led on ideation activities and concept testing. I kicked off by leading a series of ideation games, including drawing based co-design actives between the user group and the our core team of designers and accessibility professionals. This was done prior to revealing the prototype and its function to reduce opportunity for user bias.
I then led a Prototype Walkthrough. Discussion was led via a Product Walkthrough Discussion Guide and focused on gathering both accessibility insights and more general qualitative user insights.
Focus group notes were captured on the Discussion Guide and via visual note taking I completed on my iPad. They were numerous and insightful.
Iterative Designing
Four key-findings were defined from the Focus Group:
Accessibility beyond WCAG 2.2 Many of our research participants were born with their disabilities and as a result, did not grow up using traditional digital technology and never became familiar with its use-cases. We discovered many of them do not utilise mainstream technologies (even when they are designed to be accessible) to support their living. It’s therefore not enough to simply tick WCAG boxes, the primary challenge is to design a tool that is approachable and accessible via deep consideration of its user-base.
Aspirational language - the user group often feels exhausted and depressed when procuring new assistive technologies as they are required to define how their conditions are “declining” or precisely comment on “what they can’t do”. The app must frame their needs aspirationally to create a positive discovery experience that will encourage a returning user base.
Mistrust of professionals - people with disability often mistrust Accessible Technology professionals and Occupational Therapists. They see them as “blockages between them and the help they need” and that they often have to “exaggerate the severity of their condition” to get the help they need. To win over our user base, the Marketplace must weight its recommendations based off data from people with disability as well as trained professionals.
Review first, buy later - our user group feels easily exploited and alienated when procuring assistive technologies. The marketplace’s architecture must prioritise community and trust-building before pushing any buy actions to win over the user base as loyal users.
I went back to the drawing board and created wireframes for a new prototype, this time in the format of a native app (our research suggested this would be the primary platform of user-interaction and designing for a device with the smallest screen size first tends to create less complexities when porting to additional platforms). Design decisions were driven by the insights above.
I employed an iterative and user-centric approach to the design of the prototype, running user-walkthroughs with a few research participants at key stages of the development process.
WCAG
WCAG 2.2 standards were heavily referenced during this development stage and baked into the app. To mention a few, the AccessEase prototype offers multiple options to receive media and also input it, meets AA - AAA contrast ratios and text visibility standards, is meaningfully sequenced, conveys information with colour as well as geometry and utilises consistent identification and navigation features.
Response to key insights
User trust is built via a host who introduces the key features of the app during the onboarding flow and who reappears at key moments during the product procurement flow.
A review first, buy later hierarchy was implemented in the product matching flow, which champions other user’s opinions foremost. This was in response to insights we had generated around mistrust that our user group is prone to, based off of past accessible product procurement experiences (across both public and private routes).
Reduced opportunity for error and cognitive load was achieved by creating a streamlined interface and flow. This was driven by Focus Group insights which defined user overwhelm and error particularly likely with our user group and resultant user-abandonment likely.
Summary
After a few iterations and user walkthroughs we got to a baseline that user’s found accessible, community-centric and exciting. The foundational design of the product was in place and prototype mockups were created to take to investor meetings and use in further grant applications to secure the next stage of development funding.