Reimagining at-home fitness for the visually impaired
🖼️ Background
This project was completed for IterateUX's UX Design Challenge, a one-month challenge during which participants conduct user research, define a product, and prototype its design. With the help of our mentors, my team and I ultimately won first place out of 27 competing teams!
We were prompted to design a mobile app that makes staying healthy and fit more accessible, fun and useful for people with disabilities. We decided to select visually impaired individuals as our target user group because it would challenge us to understand an often neglected group of people through deep research to create an effective solution.
🌟 The Final Result
🔎 Phase 1: Research
Because we were designing for individuals with a disability that we had never experienced, we recognized that the research stage would be crucial. We decided to pursue multiple avenues of research to ensure that we were as well-informed as possible.
Secondary Research
We first conducted secondary research to gain some initial knowledge and ensure that we started from a place of understanding. This also helped us gauge what information we'd need to obtain from other forms of research down the line. We gained initial insight into the following categories:
Key takeaways included:
Types of visual impairment vary widely and manifest differently from person to person.
Color, contrast, and shape are important visual indicators, particular to individuals with visual impairment.
Screenreaders are already built into many devices, and designers and developers must be mindful of ensuring that their designs are compatible.
User Interviews
We recruited our interviewees by posting in Facebook groups and online forums related to visual impairment. We found that members were eager to contribute to our project and were able to recruit 5 participants, ranging in age and type of visual impairment, which included congenital blindness, nystagmus, diabetic retinopathy, and more. These interviews were conducted remotely and lasted, on average, 40 minutes.
We used 4 main objectives to narrow the scope of our interview questions: find out how participants normally exercise, uncover the tools participants use to engage in fitness, identify the obstacles participants face when setting and achieving fitness goals, and identify obstacles participants run into when using technology. Following the interviews, we were left with an overwhelming amount of information and decided to use affinity mapping to synthesize them into broader, actionable categories.
We boiled down these insights to 3 key takeaways:
Using outdoors facilities is frustrating and sometimes hazardous without the help of a sighted person.
Keeping track of goals and progress is a big priority.
AI and technological advancements have significantly improved their lives by making things more accessible.
Competitor Analysis
To better understand the current fitness options that exist for visually impaired people, we performed a competitor analyses of 4 products, including ReVision Fitness and Aaptiv, and a comparative analysis of Be My Eyes.
We boiled down these insights to 5 key takeaways:
Apps should provide precise control over users’ fitness experience.
Community and social features can increase engagement.
Simple, straightforward UI is easiest to navigate for visually impaired people.
Fitness apps that provide extensive safety precautions do not exist yet.
Videos should be accompanied by audio transcriptions for screenreaders to interpret.
With these discoveries in mind, we crafted a problem statement and an objective to guide the design of our product.
🤔 Problem Statement
People with visual impairments face accessibility barriers when engaging in fitness activities, putting their safety and health at risk.
🎯 Objective
Strategize and design a mobile fitness app to help visually impaired people reach their health goals in a safe and engaging manner.
✅ Phase 2: Defining the Product
At this point, we were equipped with enough information to begin to define the scope of our solution. Based on our defined objective, we brainstormed the features that our product could offer during a collaborative session. We found that there were a wide variety of ways that our problem statement could be addressed and needed a way to narrow down the overwhelming number of ideas we had. We used priority mapping with an impact-effort matrix to decide what should and shouldn't be included in our final product design given the limited time we had.
✏️ Phase 3: Prototyping
The team and I engaged in a Crazy 8s brainstorming session to generate as many ideas as possible. We then discussed what aspects of each design we liked and disliked to inform our high-fidelity prototype.
🏁 Competition Results and Learnings
We were given the invaluable opportunity to present our design process and final design in front of fellow designers and mentors. Because we'd purposefully invested much of our time into the research stage, we were overjoyed to be given positive feedback around the thoroughness of our research process and how it led to our final product. However, we also recognized that the usefulness of our product was entirely conceptual without insight gained from user testing. If this project was to become a consumer-facing app, I would prioritize user testing, especially with a diverse group of individuals with different types of visual impairments, as needs can vary significantly depending on the condition.
This project challenged many of the pre-conceived notions that I'd had surrounding accessibility. Many of the struggles that I'd imagined would be true for visually impaired individuals turned out to be false, and many struggles that I'd never considered turned out to be true. I came to fully appreciate the power of research in design and enjoy the journey of being proven wrong to get one step closer to a good design.
🔁 Bonus Phase: Iterating On Our Design
Given the limited amount of time we had for the prototyping phase, we hadn't had a chance to fully think through the visual design of our product. In the weeks following the end of the design challenge, I redesigned our application with intention to align with the findings we'd uncovered regarding accessible design best practices.
We decided to go with a design style that was heavily inspired by Brutalism. A minimal design style with an emphasis on bold typography guides the user to focus on the content rather than be distracted by extraneous visual design elements.
