^{My Role           The Team           Project Timeline           My Key Contributions}

    Research          2 Designers         Mar - Apr 2018                User Research
    UX Design                                                                                  Competitive Research
    UI Design                                                                                    Define Problem & User Needs
                                                                                                         Concept Ideation
                                                                                                         User Flow & Wireframe
                                                                                                         Prototyping
                                                                                                         Interaction Design
                                                                                                         Visual Design
   

Use Empathy as
An Engine
of Innovation

By connecting with the communities with disabilities community
and discovering insights of their own lived experiences, we can
create a better way of living. 

Through the assistive technology design challenge, I sought to
help the visually impaired community and design an affordable
assistive product to improve their day-to-day routines. 

02-02
User Research

Key Insights from Users Research

After our research, we learned how visually-impaired individuals
deal with everyday problems. Here are our finds and insights.  

Insight # 1
Hard To Find Lost
Items


They memorize the placement of objects and
how to tell two products apart from each other.
This becomes an even greater problem when
visually-impaired people live with others in the
household or as they grow to older. They found it extremely frustrating when people move things
around the house without their knowledge.

Solution: An audio tracker could help users find
the item location at any time, they could use their smartphone and to easily locate the item by the
sound of the tracker.

This information could also then be shared with
their family members. 

Insight # 2
Similar but different products
from packaging series


They also frequently bought products with
different packaging to tell them apart by touch.
However, this was not always possible or easy.

Solution: Use the device as a voice label for
everything. Press the tracker and to read
confusing packaging. This helps the user
distinguish between products that appear
identical through touch.

Insight # 3 
Hard to use the APP



It is hard to use most apps even with VoiceOver.
Most apps are not designed to be accessible for
the blind or visually impaired.

Solution: New UI system that works with Voice Over
that gives the capability for visually impaired people to
use smart devices and know all the content on every page.

Ecosystem of Physical

We designed a personal audio tracker for the
visually impaired. An affordable assistive smart device
that could help visually impaired today.

02 - 05
Design & Prototyping

Bringing It All Together

With our goals, features and processes mapped we moved into
the next phase of actually building the experience with some rough
sketches. I combined all the sketched screens onto one board so
that we were able to see and adjust user flows and navigation quickly.

App UX Challenge

Even though smartphones have voice over features to help visually
impaired users, most apps do not consider visually impaired users
when they develop the app itself. The challenges are many, so we simply
had to design a seamless app for visually impaired users from the outset.
We also found a systematic way to develop an app that can be used for
visually impaired users.

02 - 06
User Testing

Trying It Out In The Real World

Six people were tested from the visually impaired community.
Participants were able to find what they needed easily and found
that the process was simple and straightforward.

In the beginning, our interface was designed to guide users without any visual guides.

But I found that Voiceover read what’s on the screen, but it cannot identify certain information, such as text box or typographic symbols. Also, it will interpret the title as two separate objects.

We redesigned Ping App with a new UX method, which meant the user could touch the screen from “top to bottom ⇩” “bottom to top⇧” to completely explore all information and functions of one particular interface.

The home page has two columns of information, this allow the user to explore the page by touch the both right & left side of screen vertically.

The whole process of the user’s guide and introduction was recorded according to the normal speed. In the test, we found that the speed of voice recognition was too slow for the user, making the user feel as though the device was talking too long.

We then sped the vocal response, based on the user’s point of view.