Our brief was to select an existing brand and extend it's product line to cater for an underserved user group. In line with Google’s mission to “make the world’ information more accessible to everyone”, we set out to design a new kind of navigation tool to support the visually impaired.

Throughout this project, we collaborated with 5 visually impaired users (partially blind) whom we met via Facebook and Instagram. We started our user research by conducting interviews on the topics of independence & travel, progressively digging deeper into the users’ daily struggles to uncover actionable insights.

For obvious reasons, people with partial blindness struggle to use their phone for navigation. Reasons include difficulty to decipher, eye strain, risk of getting their phone snatched away (in London, one phone is stolen every 6 minutes).

Google Maps and Lazarillo are the most popular audio navigation apps used by visually impaired people. Yet our users reported having negative experiences using them including: getting lost due to ambiguous information or feeling unsafe from not being able to hear incoming danger when wearing earbuds.

Most visually impaired users rarely venture beyond the places that they feel familiar with, unless accompanied by a friend or family member. Fear of being alone and having to rely on strangers' help for directions are the main deterrents.

The first part of our ideation phase was conducted individually — each team member was given 2 weeks to explore a unique product direction as a way to drive divergent thinking and push innovation.

I started my research by looking at analogue navigation tools and came up with the idea of using a rotating dial to provide directions — like a compass, except it doesn’t point north.

A speech button situated under the dial enables users to easily set new destinations and ask information about the surrounding environment without having to take out their phone.

After reviewing all 3 concepts as a Team, we ended up choosing to move forward with my concept for the final delivery.

We explored different ways to test my concept — taking into consideration our limited time and budget. Ultimately, we decided to conduct a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. During out live demo, test users were blindfolded and had to navigate an indoors obstacle course, guided by our Tactile Compass, which was operated remotely by a member of our team.

With Compass, blindfolded users were able to follow directions from point A to B without hitting obstacles with a 100% success rate (excluding technical failure). During the experiment, we observed that users who tried the prototype multiple times in a row became more confident with every attempt — walking faster & with less hesitations — demonstrating an fast learning curve.

1️⃣ Prototype early to test ideas before going into polish
2️⃣The easiest way to test something is probably the best
3️⃣Good visuals and narrative sell the idea