Persona
Since yesterday I made up a quick persona, Jane, which might help me focus my design to this specific demographic.It can be quite difficult to make people understand that this is.. That you can’t park a car up on the pavement. Environmental changes and obstacles are sometimes difficult to avoid.. It’s not just for the visually impaired, to make sure that the area is safe. Accessibility should be universal.Jane is a 24 year old who has just been accepted into a local college. She uses the GPS on her phone to help her navigate around. She uses her laptop on a daily basis for college work.
Jane doesn't feel very comfortable being out on her own, especially in new places. She finds it difficult to avoid temporary obstacles like cars parked up too close or up on curbs and she generally doesn't spend a lot of time exploring the city centre. Jane prefers to run her errands and not stick around.
One of Jane's goals is to become more independent and not rely on her parents to come out with her a lot of the time. Jane loves art and being creative and would love to enjoy the local culture and attend galleries and different exhibitions more often. She wants to feel more comfortable navigating around the city on her own.
System Features
There are 2 different users and perhaps 2 different versions of the mapping system. The visually impaired person is one user who uses to app for navigation, being made aware of obstacles and places of interest. They can plan a route using their own destination or they can scroll through mapped points of interest and choose one as a destination.
The second user is the person who is mapping and obstacle or a place of interest. They use the app (which is an app at the moment - it could take a different form after further development and testing) to map out an obstacle and add some details as to what it is, how long its there for etc. The place of interest also requires some detail like what the event is, which is sorted into categories like food, design, art, entertainment etc, a description about it, the opening times and the cost of entry. All the details are relayed back to the visually impaired user to find out a little bit more about the type of event that is going on.
The other part of the system is the actual navigation - the language, the directions, the obstacle detection. It will be important to try out a few different versions of the navigation and user test it in order to get it right. One of the questions that I have right now is whether the obstacle detection consists of a voice telling you there is an obstacle or using sounds or vibrations to make the user aware of the obstacle, e.g. there is an obstacle on your left side so a vibration or sound comes from the left side of the user. I am also not sure how that would be implemented in real life but it is something to consider and keep it mind.
The screens are done at a very low fidelity level at the moment. The next step is to create a lo-fi working prototype and to user test it and get some feedback to be able to develop it further.
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