THE GOAL
Develop a digital experience that enables designers to viscerally empathize with a blind person.
Timeframe
1 week
Context
IBM Design Bootcamp
Team
1 User Researcher (me)
2 UX Designer
1 Visual Designer
1 Front End Developer
User Research
_______
What designers said ...
I don’t think accessibility should take precedence over the 90% of people who are going to use these products. There is a clear balance that has to be met.
I’ve never really thought about blind users using this product.
I don’t think you can gain empathy for blind users. How can I gain empathy for someone who deals with that every day?
INTERVIEW
What a blind person says ...
Before we could build a site that helps designers build empathy, we first needed to understand the painpoints of needs of blind people ourselves. This video shows some key parts of our interview with Randy.
Research Insights
_______
Lack of Awareness
Designers do not have sufficient awareness or ways to empathize with blind users.
Lack of Access
Lack of access to blind users makes it difficult for designers to empathize with blind users.
The Concept
_______
An Interactive Empathy Map
As designers, we all practice empathy on the daily, but it can still be difficult to put yourself in all those other pairs of shoes. This interactive empathy map should help designers to gain empathy for the blind.
What they say
We did some desk research and found very impressive quotes that explain how blind people see. So we took those quotes, went to the tone studio and created this video.
What they think
Here we wanted illustrate some frustrations in daily life, we might not think of.
What they feel
Sometimes it is nearly impossible to know how something feels like. In such situations analogies to our own lives can be helpful.
What they do
Blind and visually impaired users often rely on screen readers to view text on the web. Screen Readers use software to translate screen content into synthetic speech.
Nothing beats experience when it comes to empathizing with someone else’s live. This is why we decided to create a screenreader exercise for those who see.
Putting it all together
_______
