Easing Communication amongst Blind Technology Enthusiasts

Connecting a Community of the Blind and Visually Impaired through Tech

Overview

This project was a solo project that took place over a three month internship, at a small startup that provides assistive technology for blind and visually impaired people. The goal of this project was to shift over communication amongst Aira users from their listserv email platform to an Aira moderated communication platform. Throughout this project, I completed each stage of the double diamond, from user research, to defining the problem statement, designing the product, and iterating until and shortly after a product release. 

 Getting to Know the Listserv

Affinity Mapping

In order to understand the needs of the Explorers for their new communication platform, I began by analyzing their current usage of the listserv. I started by copying the subjects of the emails onto post-it notes, and categorizing them into general trends of communication on the listserv, until it was clear that there were patterns and categories of communication amongst the explorers. The general categories that I found were: Tech Issues, Story Sharing, Questions about Aira as a company, and talking about how to use Aira.

Engagement Analysis

After recognizing the categories of topics within the listserv, I started to notice that users communicated differently depending on the topic itself. In order to explore this idea more, I analyzed more emails in order to quantify engagement across these topics. Tech related questions/issues were the subject of more emails. However, storytelling posts were getting multitudes more responses, whereas tech related posts rarely had more than a few replies, unless there were multiple solutions on how to fix an issue, or a given solution didn’t work.

Getting to Know the Users

Now that I had a pretty strong understanding of how Explorers were using the listserv, I wanted to understand their current frustrations and joys with the listserv platform. I conducted half a dozen informal interviews in order to understand their unique perspectives about online communication as blind and visually impaired people.

Users Liked the Listserv:

• Save/Delete Function

• Drafts

The listserv had a multitude of frictions.

Repetitive Information

Because the listserv was just essentially an email group, users wouldn't necessarily see previous posts without specifically looking for them, causing nearly identical questions to be asked over and over by newer users. Users who had been on the platform for longer felt that they were bombarded with repetitive questions that were no longer relevant to them.

This is particularly a problem for blind and visually impaired people, as they have to use JAWS in order to read a screen. This makes it nearly impossible to disregard the irrelevant information without reading it first, because they can’t just glance or skim over information the same way that a sighted person is able to. 

Overwhelming Volume

The repetitiveness of the information also created an overwhelming volume of emails. Because people couldn’t sift through information easily, it led them to just making posts which was the easier way to find information. Within an hour, it wasn’t too uncommon to see the same topic posted multiple times by multiple people. 

Irrelevant Topics

The listserv essentially just connected hundreds of blind and visually impaired people, who each had a different set of needs/wants out of the community that arose from the listserv. While some users wanted access to all of the emails, tech questions, Aira-related, or how to use Aira differently, and the social community, most of them only wanted to really be a part of one or two of those topics. Similar to repetitive information though, it was difficult to know that it was irrelevant because they had to open an email before they could know the subject of the email, especially when email subjects were vague.

Difficult to “re-find” information

As mentioned above, due to the repetitive and overwhelming volume of emails, it was extremely difficult for users to find a post that they had previously liked if they didn’t save it right when they read it. This difficulty was particularly frustrating for users who were engaged in the social and story sharing aspect of the community and wanted to re-share exciting stories of other blind people living their lives, or having new adventures.

Threading Comments

Not everyone is as skilled as others when it comes to replying to the right person. The reply all button seems to be the bane of blind users, especially the ones who reply all to ask to be removed from a conversation, looping the same dead email to the top of the inbox.

 Problem Statement

Aira Explorers are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of potentially irrelevant/repetitive posts. They need a way to tailor their community experience to fit their individual interests.

Hypothesis

By providing Explorers with a topic-organized community forum, they will be able to:

• Avoid irrelevant posts

• Find relevant posts more easily, which will cut down on repeat questions/posts

This will increase Explorers level of satisfaction with the online communication, and feelings of support.

Approach

Building on my understanding of the needs of the Aira Explorers, and their current usage of the listserv, I wanted to get an idea of the design patterns and other online community experiences. I used competitive/comparative analysis of other online communities (Quora, Reddit, Facebook, etc.)

I used my competitive and comparative analysis in order to start drafting potential designs, and take note of digital experiences that were difficult, even when common. Using JAWS to navigate these sites, I identified features that I wanted to avoid. Specifically, Facebook is a great example of a site that although extremely successful and popular was terrible to use with a screen reader.

The newsfeed layout ranked particularly low on heuristics such as efficiency and satisfaction with a screen reader. Because Facebook floods the newsfeed new content when users engage, tasks such as finding the next post were exceedingly difficult for such a simple goal. This helped me eliminate any sort of newsfeed style of content as a potential design when creating the new community platform.

The next community platform I wanted to learn from was Quora. Quora was a great competitor to look at specifically because people can ask a range of questions from problem solving, to personal, both of which were goals of the Aira platform. Quora ranked higher on the efficiency and satisfaction heuristics, but lower on learnability and memorability. Of course, Quora is intended for a much larger audience with a large diversity of interests, questions, and purposes in using the site.

Solution

I created a categorized forum style platform so that users could click into specific topics that they were interested in learning about more. The categories were two level, based on the affinity mapping I did during my user research phase. 

On this new platform users could also favorite, and mark as read so that they could return to a conversation or mark it so that they would no longer see that particular conversation even if there were new replies

The comment section was also threaded so that Explorers could reply to a different user, or could reply to the post, in order to curb the “reply all” responses that were confusing and repetitive.

Usability Testing and Iteration

I usability tested with a small handful of explorers before iterating and retesting. Through my first round of usability testing, users liked that posts were categorized, but didn’t necessarily understand or like the way that categories expanded to two levels.

Because they had to click into a category and couldn’t visually see the categories expand to more specific ones, without scrolling over the text with their mouse, the value of these expanding categories was lost. Users were confused about why sometimes they had access to the more specific categories, and sometimes did not.

Although better than a drop down, the expanding categories were inaccessible due to the fact that it was a hidden allowance, which can be a particular nuisance to blind and visually impaired people, as they don’t have the luxury of seeing the subtle animations that we are used to as sighted people.

They also liked the way that they could save/pin a post, and that the comments were threaded.

 Lifecycle of the Online Community 

After some minor changes to the categorization of the posts, based on the usability testing, the Community Forum went live in September. Although those who made the switch to the community loved the new online forum, many Explorers continued to mainly converse over email.

Another main problem came in the form of the hosting site, which had some accessibility issues that they wouldn’t change, which caused massive problems, since a more accessible community was the original goal of this project.

Unfortunately, these issues caused Aira to step away from the platform and move back to the listserv, which is what they are currently using now.

Results and Reflections

Accessibility as More than WCAG

The most important takeaway was about the design patterns that we often see on social platforms and how they relate to accessibility. While a site may be categorized as fully accessible by the standards of WCAG, it doesn’t necessarily create the most efficient or pleasurable experience for disabled people.

One huge measure of accessibility for blind and visually impaired people is the way that information is labeled and accessed from a particular site. Using JAWS to test the accessibility of my own site, it became clear how expanding menus can be particularly confusing, especially in a drop down menu. One thing that I will continue to push towards as a designer is creating better ways of denoting hierarchy and distinction for audio.

As a designer, it is easy to use color, size, proximity, etc. to create a clear visual hierarchy of information. Creating that verbal hierarchy is something I wish I had the time to continue to expand on, in order to make the categories function of this project more useful to the Explorers.

I also learned about how important it is for layouts to be the right proportions. When using a screen reader, there is no way to know where to scroll over in order to find the correct info. While blind people are amazingly adaptive to using new technology, and finding efficient ways to do so, it is vital to keep their ways of exploring a website in mind. This is especially true for people who are fully blind. 

The UX Process

I started this project with almost zero knowledge of what UX was, never mind the best practices or methods to achieve particular goals. At the time, I was a college sophomore studying cognitive science, and the methods I chose were loosely based on the psych experiments I had been learning about at school, and assisting with in the labs.

That being said, I learned a lot about best practices through the mistakes I made. For one, I can say that I learned not to ask “what do you want in a product” because everyone has an opinion, and a solution, and it may not be the best solution when considering everyone. That being said, it did push me to design for a diverse range of desires and interests in the platform.

I also learned a lot about iterating. One UX mistake I made was that before the final project, I actually made three websites, and A/B tested different platforms and designs, rather than putting all of my energy and fine tuning one solution that I felt was most strongly supported by my research and understanding of the problem.

As someone who didn’t know any web development languages, I was limping along with my knowledge of Python and Java. I wasted a lot of time that would have been more beneficial making sure that the final project had all the kinks worked out. While divergent thinking and design is critical in the early stages, I now know that by the time it comes to developing an idea, it should be the strongest idea, simmered down from the user research and problem statement, and developed into a hypothesis that addresses the most critical features.

Just Cause You Love an Idea, Doesn’t Mean it’s the Best Solution

This project also really forced me to critically examine my own biases. This project has always been near and dear to my heart. At the time of making it, I took a lot of pride in the steps I took to help provide blind people with another platform to be and feel heard and connected.

However, I also started with a vision for how I wanted the community platform to look like and work, and almost let it get in the way of what was best based on my user research. Letting go of features/designs that you love can be a really difficult part of the design process, but ultimately as designers we should be striving to create the strongest design, rather than what we love most. 

Final Thoughts

This project taught me many lessons, and has inspired me to continue to grow and improve. One of the biggest takeaways, even if the community platform didn’t last, is the impact we can make through technology, whether that be in the form of connecting people with disabilities, empowering informed decisions, inspiring environmental action, or any other imaginable cause. As a designer, working for Aira has sparked a passion to continue to improve the lives of others, through better accessibility, through empathy in design, through understanding users.

Although I made this project, as a new UX-er a long time ago, this experience still inspires me to strive to improve the world, each digital experience at a time

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed!