During my UX Design Apprenticeship at BRIDGEGOOD, a design nonprofit for social good, my team had the opportunity to redesign one feature on the existing bridgegood.com website. For our first design sprint, we ultimately chose to redesign the Inclusion page and ended up creating an Accessible Design feature, which serves as an interactive experience for what it might be like to have a vision, hearing, or mobility disability. This feature was made to be an empathetic journey for able-bodied Creatives so they can better empathize with the disabled community and realize the importance of creating accessible designs.
My Responsibilities: For this project, I was the Product Lead and delegated tasks. I was in charge of conducting user research, wireframing, usability testing, and prototyping.
Able-bodied Creatives need a resource that enables them to empathize with the disabled community and gives them a glimpse of the assistive technologies disabled people use and the experiences disabled people go through.
On Day 1 of our design sprint, only one word could describe how our team felt: lost. As the Product Lead, I reached out to Shaun, the founder of BRIDGEGOOD, for help. After our conversation, our group started reaching out to as many users to conduct user interviews as we could and brainstormed a list of interview questions. I served both as the interviewer and note-taker.
The main goal of our user interviews was to understand our users' knowledge of inclusive design. We ended up brainstorming 12 questions and interviewing 9 users. Our main findings include:
"How Might We" Statements: After conducting user interviews, our group jumped straight into generating "How Might We" statements for 10 minutes to explore opportunities within the problem space.
Affinity Mapping: After writing down our statements, we began affinity mapping by clustering and categorizing all of our "How Might We" sticky notes. We found that the 4 major categories were Engagement, Education, Resources, and Disabilities.
However, the “How Might We” statements that we chose to focus on were under the 3 categories of Education, Engagement, and Disabilities.
After completing the ideation phase, our group hit yet another roadblock. We realized our chosen “How Might We” statements covered too many topics and there was not a central focus. We were worried that 2 weeks would not be enough time to thoughtfully cover all of these different subjects.
We realized talking with stakeholders was an important opportunity to ask questions about the existing product. Since we were creating a product for BRIDGEGOOD, it was important to satisfy both the needs of our users and stakeholders. Ultimately, our key takeaways were:
After a 2-hour long discussion with Shaun, we finally overcame our slump and decided what our main topic would be: Accessible Design.
After a 2-hour long discussion with Shaun, we finally overcame our slump and decided what our main topic would be: Accessible Design.
After making our decision to focus on accessible design for people in the disabled community, we began brainstorming user journeys. We created an existing user journey and a “happy” journey (i.e., an ideal journey where the user reaches their goal). In our happy journey, we wanted the home page to be our user's entry point. Our team's vision was to create 3 different experiences where able-bodied users would be able to better empathize with people with different disabilities; therefore, in our ideal user journey, users would fully interact with each of these 3 experiences.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes: Before digitally prototyping, each team member hand-sketched their vision for what our product should look like. In the low fidelity stage, we mainly focused on the content writing, placement of interactive elements (e.g., videos and images), as well as navigation.
Usability Testing: After digitizing our prototype, we conducted usability tests on 5 users. From this, we discovered our prototype had one major problem: navigation. For each of the 3 disability experiences, our intention was for users to go through the feature at their own pace.
Consequently, we did not add a “Next” button because we thought it might encourage users to skip the experience altogether. However, the absence of a button made users confused and many could not proceed past the first page of the experience.
Additionally, two users mistook the top right blue line of text (which was intended to be just the title for each page) as a link and repeatedly tried to click it even though they were just non-interactive lines of text.
After our usability testing sessions, we knew we needed to completely redesign our feature's navigation to be more intuitive, straightforward, and align with user expectations.
In this stage, I was responsible for creating the majority of the user interface and interactions on Adobe XD.
Home: We wanted the first thing the user to see on the Home page to be the 3 different disability experience options. Additionally, we made the experience buttons larger than the resources buttons to establish hierarchy.
Vision Disability: For this experience, users are educated about screen readers and how to use them. Users are also informed about the importance of captioning digital images with alt text.
Hearing Disability: The hearing disability experience showcases the importance of closed captions and explains why automated captions cannot be substituted for closed captions.
Mobility Disability: For the 3rd experience, users learn what an eye gaze device is, how it works, and who uses them. They also get to try out the device for themselves!
Resources: We created 6 different resources for users to explore: Disability Definitions, Statistics, Accessible Technology, Videos, Organizations, and Disabled Creatives. This will allow users to further educate themselves after the 3 experiences.
Although the Accessible Design feature is not currently live on the bridgegood.com website, BRIDGEGOOD plans to implement our feature on their website and use it as a paid educational tool for designers at tech companies. BRIDGEGOOD plans to generate revenue by utilizing our feature as a curriculum for these companies and have BRIDGEGOOD Creatives teach designers about accessible design for a fee.
Being able to participate in this sprint was an incredible opportunity that I am extremely grateful for. As an able-bodied Creative, this experience reminded me of my everyday privileges. It also made me aware of the subconscious ableism I have and that I must continue improving on. I was fortunate to be on the same team as a designer who has dyslexia. I was able to hear his experiences as a dyslexic person and the hardships he has faced throughout his life. Having disabled people on design teams for all companies is extremely important to make sure your company is working with disabled people rather than speaking over them.
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