Designing for Dyscalculia — Making Cash Transactions Easier

I began the project with an open-ended brief to ‘design a solution for those diagnosed with dyscalculia’. In the initial secondary research, I came across various articles describing it as the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia. Dyslexia, thanks to accurate(and inaccurate) depictions in movies and books, was not a new term. Similarly, I formed a brief understanding of dyscalculia in my mind — it is a disorder that makes it difficult for those suffering from it to perform well in math.
Next, I read articles about how dyscalculia is not known in the mainstream and how there are is one dyscalculic person in every classroom on average. This led me to quickly zero down to a problem statement:
Early signs of dyscalculia are often overlooked by parents & teachers due to a lack of awareness about it.
On conducting a pilot study by just describing the condition to a few people in my network, I received a very common response, “Oh! I was really bad at math in school. I think I have dyscalculia. Good to know.” On further reviewing literature, I realized that dyscalculia is often being confused with many similar conditions involving math and numbers, like math anxiety. Some of the symptoms can be similar, however, the causes are completely different.

Having a basic understanding of the dyscalculia from secondary research, I began to search for people who I can interview for my primary research. I decided to interview and observe the following people:
- Children with developmental dyscalculia
- Parents of children with developmental dyscalculia
- Occupational therapists involved in therapy for dyscalculic children
Kids very often have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. In fact, data suggests that 43-65 percent of kids with reading disabilities also have math disabilities.
This piece of information was the first link to begin my search. I reached out to local centers for kids with dyslexia and that helped me find a few kids who had dyscalculia as well. I reached out to their parents, who narrated their stories of diagnosis and therapy, and helped me connect with occupational therapists.
I soon realized that the problem I was trying to solve was not a major one. Tests like these(image below) can help detect dyscalculia, something similar to the Ishihara test for color deficiency. The minor problem here was the lack of a standard test and its eventual widespread distribution to relevant channels like schools and pediatricians for early diagnosis.

The design thinking process gives you the freedom to keep refining the problem statement while moving ahead with the research and ideation. I could not come up with my own version of ‘standard test for dyscalculia’, but I could definitely come up with a design solution that makes their lives easier. Now, I was addressing a different problem.
Revised Problem Statement
Dyscalculic people tend to face problems in many everyday life instances where numbers & money are involved.
Results & Insights from Primary Research
- Apart from the problems faced in academics, dyscalculic people face problems in many small everyday life instances where numbers are involved. This collectively adds to their inconvenience & frustration. Elevators, mobile phones, and remote controls are some of the common gadgets that pose daily problems to dyscalculics. Remembering frequently used patterns and locations helps in coping with it.

- While math anxiety and dyscalculia are unrelated, it is common to see that students suffering from dyscalculia develop anxiety. Apart from schools where they perform poorly in math-related subjects, other walks of life also get affected — measuring quantities for cooking, shopping with cash, keeping scores in games, etc.
- Estimating quantities is a difficult task for dyscalculics. Actions involving decision making based on time, distance and space distribution is highly challenging. Many dyscalculic people rely on strategies similar to life hacks for such estimation. For example, keeping a fixed playlist on the way from work to home to understand if the commute took a longer time than usual. Analog-digital watches help in creating associations between hour-minute hands and the time — for example, a vertical line and 6 o’clock

- Therapists & trainers often use dice patterns & roman numerals as an alternative to teach counting concepts. Also, color coding works for basic arithmetic concepts like green for addition & red for subtraction.

- Deciding budgets, calculating expenditures, reading bills, understanding profit-loss margins & discounts become highly difficult for young adults & adults with dyscalculia. Despite attempts to minimize the use of numbers in their daily life, these are some of the aspects that are difficult to neglect. Percentages are used extensively in our world to convey a message. Shops, restaurants, eCommerce sites, banks & advertisements for sales and discounts are some of the examples where we see its use daily.

- Dyscalculia does not necessarily become an obstruction in career paths if detected and worked upon early. There are various career options for people with dyscalculia in fields that have minimal arithmetic & numeric intervention. Many dyscalculics have had successful careers as journalists, filmmakers, historians, actors, artists, advertising professionals & defense personnel, to name a few.
“For me, math was like trying to understand Sanskrit without having studied it ever”- Cher, American singer, often called the ‘Goddess of Pop’
- Dyscalculia is not related to low IQ or any other intellectual disability. Also, people with dyscalculia are as comfortable with digital gadgets as people without dyscalculia.
Ideation
After literature review and contextual inquiry, I additionally went through Yahoo! Answers, Quora, other dyscalculia forums and Youtube to gain a further nuanced understanding of the daily lives of people with dyscalculia. Based on these, I created personas, which would help in identifying the pain point and opportunities through task analysis, empathy mapping, and scenarios.


Idea 1
Description: A mobile game where players find out examples of numbers in nature & click photographs of these to complete mathematical equations.
Insight: Dyscalculic people are visual thinkers. Having a problem with the concept of counting & arithmetic operations does not adversely affect their ability to recognize patterns or to visualize objects as words and symbols.

Possible problems with this idea
- Difficult to create interest after a point due to the repetitive nature of the game.
- Highly dependant on the environment in which the game is being played. There might be places where it would be difficult to find a number 7 in nature despite a user spending a lot of time in it. This would lead to frustration and bad user experience.
- High chances of discrepancies between the scanned image and its interpretation by the app/software.

Idea 2
Description: A mobile widget/ browser plugin that converts percentages into visual forms.
Insight: While most dyscalculic people get to understand the concept of basic arithmetic operations to a certain extent over time, the concept of the percentage still remains unfathomable to most of them. However, dyscalculic people are comfortable with pie charts and other forms of visual representation of data.

On further scrutiny, it was evident that these ideas were definitely addressing the problem statement to a certain extent, but still, there is a possibility to inch closer. Although games and shopping are prominent parts of everyday life, there are bigger challenges for dyscalculics, especially on the monetary front. With the massive acceptance of digital wallets recently, the use of cash for shopping has reduced substantially. However, it is still not reduced to zero and is considerably high in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Handling money often leads to situations of anxiety and embarrassment for dyscalculics.
Scenario
- Mira has a picnic planned with her friends tomorrow for which she decides to bring some biscuits and chips.
- She picks up her purse, which has some pocket money from last week, and heads to the local shopping complex nearby.
- At the shop, she finds her favorite chips but has a little difficulty in deciding how many packets to pick up. She tries counting the number of friends on her fingers and finally decides on a number.
- At the billing counter, the cashier hands over her a bill of ₹36. She gives him a ₹50 note after thinking over for some time
- It’s the rush time in the evening, the queue behind her is getting longer and she gets an awkward stare from a lady behind suggesting her to finish her billing faster.
- She quickly takes back ₹14 change to avoid further embarrassment. But, she is unsure if she got the right amount back and recounts several times on her way back home.
Proposed Solution
A color-coded wallet paired with an app that simplifies money related calculations. The app provides the user with denomination options for the amount to be paid and also verifies the amount of change returned back.





User Testing
To test the prototype, I cried a customized wallet with colored stickers and cards in place of cash. Prospective users were selected through a screener and were made to perform one major and two minor tasks. The users were encouraged to think aloud, ask questions and voice their concerns and opinion. The time for each test was recorded. And the same cash transaction was asked to complete without using the proposed solution. The comparison of this data later served as a metric to quantify the success of the solution.


Based on the results, a few improvements were made in the design:
- The copy was made clearer as the first-time users found it a little difficult to understand when to access the physical wallet for the first time.
- An undo button was introduced. Some users made a wrong selection in a hurry and were made to refresh the process and start from the beginning before the undo functionality was added.
- Additional information about the location of the transaction was recorded and displayed. This can in future pave way for the additional functionality of money management tool.
Based on these, high-fidelity mockups were developed using a style guide.


Post- Test Results
- All the participants in the test were able to complete the payment from start to end under 90 seconds. This might still seem like a long duration, but when you compare it with the time is taken to complete the same transaction without the app on average it took 2 minutes 20 seconds (which is more than 150% of the current time taken).
- The participants did not find it difficult to juggle between the app and the physical wallet and were able to complete the transaction seamlessly. All the participants strongly agreed that they felt confident after using the app which is the underlying objective of making the app for dyscalculia.
- Participants used the word ‘ simple ’ to describe the app. Some other. Words used to describe by them include ‘useful’, ‘innovative’, ‘user-friendly’.This indicates an approval of the app by the target users.

