Case Study: An Inclusive City (1/2)

My UX process for solving accessibility problems in the city

Most of all have moved or travelled to an unknown city. Perhaps we have taken the wrong bus, or gotten on the subway in the opposite direction of where we needed to go. But if you can move your extremities these are only minor issues.

For people like my Aunt Bertha traveling with her wheelchair it can be an odyssey. And we are not talking precisely about traveling in developing countries.

Image from stock (Yes, this not my actual aunt, but she shows the same spirit)

This last month my Aunt Bertha went to Paris with her nieces.

It was difficult for her and her companions traveling through this busy city and finding the accessible metro stations, without knowing the local language.

Picture from https://blog.bulldozair.com

While I was thinking about my aunt’s experience, I thought: there is not much I can do in terms of infrastructure, but certainly there is something I can do as an UX/UI designer in order to approach this concern.

In this post I will describe my design thinking journey to find a solution to this problem.

Research

I designed a survey to discover what are the major problems when people with reduced mobility are traveling around the cities.

About a 69% (out of 45 participants) think that there is not enough accessibility information in the city.

Most of the survey participants where from Madrid which is a city with a good infrastructure level.

Translated extract from the survey available at : https://goo.gl/forms/D7fkENuFaUNdn61t2

Also, in order to connect more with the end user situation and find all the possible pain points. I interviewed a couple of friends with physical impairments.

Both of them are very active and social people and they don’t let that their reduced mobility condition be an impediment to enjoying their lives.

In the interview they mentioned the following problems they face.

• Finding movie theaters with suitable seats .
• It is common to find non adapted W.C. facilities in bars, pubs. restaurants.
• No ramps at entrances or ramps higher than 10 degrees
• Unadvised broken elevators
• Crowded buses and subways
• Not knowing which routes are more accessible when traveling within a new city

Empathize

With all information gathered I was able to build this empathy map:

Empathy map created for this project.

Define

With this infornation, I started tracing a possible user case scenario where the pain points are persistent throughout the process in this user journey.

Is still too early to think about concrete solutions. But I found out that it is useful at this stage to start thinking about whether it is possible to fix these problems or not so I know where to put my focus.

User Journey created for this project.

Ideate

Now is the time to analyze the scenario to start thinking about solutions.

I started placing on a white page all the concepts and ideas I gathered throughout my user research process.

The mindmap is one of my favorite ideation techniques :)

Since a great part of the problem is while traveling or going through a city, the most suitable output product would be a mobile app.

Prototype

Before working with the actual prototype, we have to define our IA (Information Architecture). This is a very important stage of UX. Here we have think about the most intuitive and easiest way to find our the sections of the application we are going to build.

In order to define this, I used a tentative site map.

Is important to defining a site map before start working on the prototype.

I tested these concepts and wording with a card sorting to see if people organized the categories as I had anticipated.

The card sorting exercise is very useful to detect any usability issues in your IA

I realized that some people were not sure where to place the “Booking” section since it seems like a first degree category, but on the site map I place it under “Accessibility Guide” (also people were not sure what that meant). So I changed the whole section name to “My plans”. That way people can relate to what they can actually do in that category, which is looking for accessible places and making reservations in those places.

With that structure I start making a quick proof of concept with this very low-fi paper prototype and again, test it with people.

Low-fi prototypes helps you to structure your ideas and test them quickly.

After a few structure corrections, I started with the wireframe. This is the part of the process when the process starts being materialized into a product.

Wireframe: all in grayscale, but it's getting real!

This would be the conclusion for the UX process. Remember that following a deep and well-conscious process is essential in order to get desirable results.

You can find the UI process and final prototype in the second part of this case study.