Mid-term Review & Insights

Oct. 24, 2020 (10.18.2020–10.24.2020)

This week we finalized and proposed our solution of our project to the UPMC enterprise team, and received lots of helpful feedback. Below are summaries of all of our work up till this point of the semester (which we presented), notes on the feedback we received, and our plans for next steps.

Process Overview

Identifying the Problem Space

Current State

The development of the new UPMC Rehabilitation and Vision Tower will bring in many new and diverse people, including patients with visual disabilities, to these neighborhoods; however, there are mismatches in Pittsburgh communities that are not inclusive towards these new neighbors and creates a barrier that keeps them from being welcomed into the community.

Research Goals

1. Understand patient’s needs and problems within the subject space
2. Understand the community’s current level of knowledge of people with visual disabilities
3. Understand how Pittsburghers currently view their community

Interviewing experts

We interviewed several experts, including Gretchen, Melissa, and Deepan from UPMC, and Rebecca Fater from Perkins School of the Blind. We learned that:

People with visual impairments want to be included in the conversation and they want to be at the forefront. They want sighted people to just ask, instead of avoiding having conversations. It’s also observed that establishing personal connections with people with visual disabilities breaks down social barriers and misconceptions

Knowledge graph

Our research shows that most people have a basic understanding for visual disability, yet the knowledge level is low.

People have a very basic level of knowledge about visual disabilities, however it is mixed with other emotions of discomfort, fear, pity, and stigma.

Participatory research

We set up a public forum in order to understand how people see their communities in Pittsburgh currently, and to understand what people hope their communities will become in the future.

People want their communities to be diverse, inclusive, and connected. We learned that Pittsburgh community members have a positive sentiment towards their communities, but also hope to work towards the future for a community that is more inclusive of its diverse population.

Pinning down the Problem

From our research and insights, we pinned down the existing problem that we aim to address. Currently, visual impairment is one of the top 10 disabilities among adults, yet studies show that more than half of Americans are not comfortable around people who are blind.

There exists little resources and opportunities for sighted people to learn about and understand the experiences of people with visual impairments. Thus, they rely on personal biases and misconceptions which result in barriers to inclusion and prevent social progress.

For people with visual disabilities, the lack of confidence and trust in their communities trickles down into similar attitudes towards their experiences in the community’s local healthcare — resulting in them feeling unengaged, anxious, and confused in conversations with their healthcare provider.

Ideation

High-level question

To better guide our design approach, we ask ourselves:

How might we motivate sighted people to want to learn to understand and empathize with people with visual disabilities?

Solution goals

Our overall goal is to encourage our audience to learn to understand and empathize with their new neighbors that have visual disabilities. To do that we will:

1. Have our target audience recognize their personal biases and preconceptions of people with visual disabilities
2. Listen to people with visual disabilities in order to better understand their experiences and perspectives
3. Overcome the awkward/uncomfortable barriers they have when socializing with people with visual disabilities

Our Approach

Our approach involves designing to raise the level of sighted people’s knowledge of visual disabilities through motivating them to learn about visual disabilities and removing social obstacles between the sighted community and people with visual disabilities.

Our Stakeholders

The three stakeholders we have are new neighbors, community, and local health enterprise.

1. New neighbor: New members of the Pittsburgh community that have visual disabilities
2. Community: Existing neighborhoods with an already established culture and members that already connect with one another.
3. Local Health Enterprise: A part of the community; where members of the community go to for health related concerns

Stakeholder map

This stakeholder map analyzes all of the major and minor stakeholders within our system, and the relationships between them.

Value Flow

Focusing on making new neighbors feel welcomed in the community allows them to feel more comfortable and confident with the local health enterprise like UPMC. All of this together builds for the necessary understanding and empathy to develop an inclusive community.

User Journey Map

We created a user journey map to understand the flow of our design approach better.

Storyboard

We created a storyboard to better explain how a user experiences our proposed system.

The system has three parts: highlighting the facilitation of knowledge to action for sighted community members, the more inclusive experience and feelings for new neighbors with visual impairments, and finally how UPMC benefits from the overall experience.

Project Naming

We came up with the name SeePittsburgh because we want it to be an experience crowdsourced by Pittsburghers, made to welcome new neighbors to explore Pittsburgh in any way, for anyone.

Existing crowdsourcing products

Since our design solution is centered around a crowdsourcing product we’ve been looking at some other notable existing products that successfully used crowdsourcing.

Visual considerations

We aim to create visuals with bright, high contrast and clear sans-serif fonts to improve readability for low vision, and will be taking into account all types of visual blindness.

The overall vibe of our design would be friendly, fun, and welcoming.

One thing that we will be noting is that we won’t be putting images behind text as it’s difficult for screen readers to pick up.

Moodboard

Here is our moodboard to give you a better idea of our visual considerations. We are looking at bright colors and friendly, fun shapes.

Solution deliverables

We plan to create deliverables of multiple forms as described in our storyboard:

• Large scale posters
• Handouts
• Social media promotions
• Mobile app

Next steps

Moving on, our next steps include defining the visual system and campaign language, and creating low fidelity prototypes.

Feedback

We received lots of constructive feedback for our project during the mid-term review. One of the main feedback that we received is to think about how we can argue for why we are creating a new mobile application as there exists so many crowdsourcing application on the market.

Deepan also told us about a mobile application, developed by a Canadian company, called “AccessNow.” It is another great example of a crowdsourcing app. On AccessNow, people share accessibility information, ranging from not accessible, partially accessible, to accessible. AccessNow explains that “every pin added on our platform is one more instance of advocacy, one more experience that highlights the accessibility of a place.” This would be an interesting resource to look into when constructing our system for the application.

Next Steps

As we move forward, our next main focus would be to construct low-fi prototypes of the mobile app and to define our visual system which would tie in all of the deliverable across our system.