Overview
My Role(s)
User Research
Ideation
Prototyping
Evaluation
Accessibility Auditor
Communications
Timeline
October 2022 - May 2023
Team Size
6
Background
This project was created through my undergraduate capstone experience where students plan, design, construct, and deliver a digital media object of significant scope with the intention of working with a community partner.
At the start, developing project ideas was more of a brainstorming process. Based on those ideas, we then advertised them to our peers to help persuade them to join you in its creation. I went with this group because i believed in the idea and the people who created it.
Problem
Students with physical disabilities at the University of Rochester face significant challenges navigating the campus.
Accessible routes to classes, dining halls, and essential locations are often not straightforward, and issues like inaccessible buildings, broken elevators, and obstructed paths require inconvenient and painful detours. These difficulties lead to frustration and feelings of exclusion among disabled students. Analysis using the '5 Whys' method revealed that the root cause of these problems is that the campus was not originally designed with disabled students in mind.
Solution
A website that maps accessible routes between buildings that factors in detours and individual accessibility needs
Our project will offer step-by-step directions for the most accessible routes based on individual needs. Users, including students, faculty, staff, and visitors with mobility issues, can report and check for accessibility problems such as broken elevators, blocked paths, or defective push-door buttons. Our site will comply with WCAG standards for screen reader compatibility, ensuring visually impaired users can navigate independently. The platform will integrate crowd-sourced updates similar to the Waze app and streamline reporting issues to facilities, enhancing overall campus accessibility.
Research
Although I joined this group early on, a bit of the early research was already completed which was the competitor analysis. So, I helped to create a survey and determine ways top distribute it.
Survey
A MAJORITY of participants don't know how to report broken push-door buttons
I was responsible for reaching out to the Office of Disability Resources and the Disability Awareness Group on campus to establish a relationship with, and hopefully gain access to their communities to have potential research participants to get feedback from. Once that was established, we sent out a survey to be shared via email, social media, and word of mouth.
For the purpose of our survey, we wanted to understand the experience participants had when it came to campus accessibility regarding disabilities and assistive technologies. We made it clear to define disabilities as any temporary or permanent physical issue that impacts one's ability to get around campus. But this survey was for all students who frequented campus, regardless if they are physically disabled. Some of our main questions include:
Which navigational app do you use the most on campus?
Why do you use navigational apps as it relates to campus?
How often do you notice that a door push button is broken?
Do you know how to report a broken door push button on our campus?
On a scale of 1-6, how well do you think the school supports disabled students on campus?
Would you be interested in taking part in a user interview for our project in the near future?
Survey Results and Insights
Quantitative:
Google Maps and is used was the most common navigational app used by participants at 55.2%
16 out of 29 participants use a push-door button 1-2 times a day
Out of 6 participants with a disability, 3 of them had a temporary diability and the other 3 had a permanent disability
83% (24) people aren't sure how to report a broken push door button
Qualitative:
People most often use push door buttons when their hands are full, convenience, and to hold door open for others
Participants believe the school can support disabled people by:
Improving elevator reliability
making the underground tunnels more accessible
properly marking accessible paths and handicap directions
allow students other options that don't require traveling physically to class
Facilities Stakeholder Interviews
Our goal for the capstone is to make a functional service that can be integrated with the University of Rochester's Facilities Department's present systems. As such, we had an interview with the Facilities Department to better understand the current infrastructure on campus. These two major questions we had going in are:
What are the current processes and procedures of Facilities regarding handling accessibility on campus?
How can we integrate our service into their system and procedures?
Process Map | Facilities Interview Analysis
We created a process map that combines user journey and service blueprint elements to outline how Facilities receive and manage work orders. Furthermore, we grouped our interview findings into 4 categories—routine maintenance, prioritizing fixes, programs/resources, and important future state considerations.
User Interviews
Going through the survey responses we had, a few of the participants checked off the option to be contacted for a future user interview. We also used the information we gathered from Facilities to help construct the questions we asked. We decided to do a total of 4 interviews. I would do two of them, while my team member took notes. And they would do the other two interviews while I did the note-taking. We decided to categorize the interviews between 'abled' and 'disabled' participants. Conducting these interviews made realize how emotional of a problem lack accessibility can be.
User Interview Analysis
From our interviews with disabled students, they said that elevators, push buttons, ramps, handrails, and nearby parking make the campus accessible. Alternatively, issues like long outdoor walks, distant parking, and the absence of elevators, ramps, or push buttons make inaccessible. And disabled students naturally have trouble with those things. We learned that they are unable to take the same routes as peers, and even have to plan well in advanced before it gets too crowded to move around. So much so, that one interviewee changed from a full-time to part-time student. Even then, asking other's for help became an uncomfortable, but necessary ordeal
Ideation
Our user interview analysis indicated that at the very least we needed to mark the locations of assistive technologies around the main campus. Below you can see how we segmented different aspects of this problem to create a solution.
User Requirements/Design Features:
Map of River Campus, showing all paths (namely accessible ones), and assistive technolgies.
Navigation of the shortest accessible path.
Legibility on both on mobile and desktop
Estimated time of arrival to destination
Ability to filter in individual disability needs for accessibility
Option to report broken assistive technologies to Facilities.
We analyzed our survey data and conducted interviews with stakeholders from Facilities, as well as with disabled and abled users. This data helped us create a Facilities service blueprint, which will be updated as we gain more insights into their processes. We used this information to develop user requirements, and formulated “how might we” questions to guide us further on the design features of Our Access.
How Might We Questions
Prototype
Sketches
Low-Fidelity
For this prototype, my main focus was on the report page. It was based on the current report system options the Facilities Department had on their website. However, we tried to streamline the process because the report feature on their site wasn't intuitive. Many of the word choices were hard to understand, and for OurAccess, we want to ensure that our users can quickly report something and go about their day.
The resource page, for this prototype version, was another responsibility of mine. And was based off of the main website for University of Rochester at the time. Along with that I helped out on minor details for elements like the buttons and search component.
Style Guide
Reference Images
We thought we had a good grasp on what the site looked like but the more we needed to make new elements, the further we dove into the University's website for inspiration. We had to readjust our site because the school's website had various color buttons and even fonts on some pages, to say the least.
High-Fidelity
Assisted with analyzing the data gathered from prototype testing.
Inspected styles and elements from the University of Rochester's website (both mobile and desktop) to determine necessary components (buttons, cards, links, etc.).
Created a color palette and selected fonts for the style guide based on the website's design.
Developed high-fidelity versions of the resources and report pages for both mobile and desktop.
Modified the wording on the report page to improve user comprehension.
Iterated on the report page as new information was provided by University Facilities and Services.
Designed an interactive slideshow for the resources page.
Assisted in creating cards to display three resource categories: Facilities, Disabilities Office, and Disability Awareness Club.
Desktop
Mobile
Implementation
Created a full-featured working prototype!
Due to time constraints, we were not able to fully match the working prototype to reflect what could be observed in our high-fidelity prototype. However, we made sure to sustain most of the fundamental parts of our design along with including all of our features.
Developmental Environment
Front-end: HTML/CSS
Web Framework: Flask
OCR Model: Google Python Tesseract (OCR Engine Pytesseract)
Back-end: Python
Version Control: Google Drive
API: Google Translate
This project was really enjoyable! I had fun doing it with my team members and learned a lot in terms of teamwork. I had a great deal of experience with UX projects thus far, so it wasn't challenging for me to do the work. Better yet, it was the perfect battleground to use all my UX knowledge for a good cause. My main takeaways are as follows:
Designing for Accessibility Can Be Tricky & Even Emotional:
This is the first UX project that caused a strong emotion for me. When we were doing our user interviews, I felt very sorry for the disabled students across campus. Many times you'll see these accessibility push-door buttons on campus, but they don't always make sense. And certain things that are options for me, are necessary for people physically disabled. This is a given, but I think until you are forced to think about things that they are concerned about, you won't really see how impactful accessibility needs are.
Teamwork Requires Going Above Your Assigned Role:
To be honest, many people in my team didn't pull their weight as much as they could have. We're all seniors and we know this is the most important project for our major. There was this expectation for people to do their work and communicate. But all was revealed in the last moment, which wasn't fair. It's not purely UX for me. I had to do building audits, graphic design, and become a programmer if needed. There are no hard feelings on my part, but I learned that you can only rely on others so much. Ultimately, I think we had one of the best groups and I'm got the opportunity to be apart of it.
Reflection
This project was really enjoyable! I had fun doing it with my team members and learned a lot in terms of teamwork. I had a great deal of experience with UX projects thus far, so it wasn't challenging for me to do the work. Better yet, it was the perfect battleground to use all my UX knowledge for a good cause. My main takeaways are as follows:
Designing for Accessibility Can Be Tricky & Even Emotional:
This is the first UX project that caused a strong emotion for me. When we were doing our user interviews, I felt very sorry for the disabled students across campus. Many times you'll see these accessibility push-door buttons on campus, but they don't always make sense. And certain things that are options for me, are necessary for people physically disabled. This is a given, but I think until you are forced to think about things that they are concerned about, you won't really see how impactful accessibility needs are.
Teamwork Requires Going Above Your Assigned Role:
To be honest, many people in my team didn't pull their weight as much as they could have. We're all seniors and we know this is the most important project for our major. There was this expectation for people to do their work and communicate. But all was revealed in the last moment, which wasn't fair. It's not purely UX for me. I had to do building audits, graphic design, and become a programmer if needed. There are no hard feelings on my part, but I learned that you can only rely on others so much. Ultimately, I think we had one of the best groups and I'm got the opportunity to be apart of it.
