Using Participatory Design to Help People with Color Vision Deficiency
Overview
Color plays a vital role and is a powerful communication component, but sadly is also a way of discriminating content by inhibiting its access to a group of the population that suffers from color vision deficiency (CVD), also known as colorblindness.
Suffering from color vision deficiency, it can be difficult to deal with colors. Collaboratively, when you want to choose a specific color while shopping, creating a presentation, or identifying products, it can be challenging at times. Studies suggest that one in every 12 men and one in every 200 women suffer from Color vision deficiency, which means they would see the same colors differently. The image below shows how someone with protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia type of color vision deficiency would see the Pepsi logo.
Problem Statement
Using a participatory design approach, we aimed at exploring different problems in the day to day activities of people with CVD.
Creating a design solution that helps people with color vision deficiency(CVD) solve their challenges in day to day life.
Solution
We designed a digital solution called Colorish. Colorish is a mobile application that helps people with color vision deficiency choose and match outfits and accessories and visualize themselves in the environment using the augmented reality feature. The main idea of the application is to suggest attire based on their personal choice and the user, independent when it comes to choosing color combinations. By uploading photo-based on their preference, the application uses the Augmented Reality feature to help users suggest the color combinations and a quick layout of the appearance, complimenting accessories that would go well together. Users can keep their favorite combination of styles in the app to lessen the burden of choosing outfits in the frenetic routine. The information can be saved and synced on multiple phones through app storage.
Process
User interview
Our main focus for the problem understanding interview was to learn from the participant about the technologies they use daily, how they manage to do it with their color blindness, and their thoughts on technologies they might find useful.
The protocol follows a five-part structure:
Section 1: The introduction which includes covering all the necessary details like explaining the interview focus and how co-design studies are conducted, promising confidentiality, and requesting permission to record.
Sections 2 & 3: First, we familiarize ourselves with our participants’ daily life. Then we ask questions to understand:
- Participant’s needs and challenges associated with color blindness
- Use of technology to manage issues related to color blindness.
Section 4: We focus on the problems that came up when the participant described their daily activities in the previous section. We start to narrow down on the problem by doing some light brainstorming and try to come up with rough design ideas
Section 5: Finally, we will share our understanding and wrap-up the interview.
Learning from the Interview
After conducting the interview, our user spoke about the hurdles and difficulties he faced and how he usually apportion with it. We observed a lot of problems dealing with the color from his day to day life. He explained how he interacted with signboards, colorful graphs, etc. We decided to concentrate on the problem he had in daily living.
To articulate all the information obtained from our participant, we created the following:
- Empathy map: Empathy map helped us create a shared understanding of the participant needs and populate design ideas.
- Detailed analysis of the interview: includes the specific instances
- Storyboards: These storyboards are a representation of the potential design ideas and the problem space
While we debriefed the interview and brainstormed, we came up with the following findings that encouraged us to inform design direction. These formed our set of key insights and are summarized below:
Co-design session
In the session following the initial user interview with the participant, we involved the participant in a few brainstorming activities. We performed these activities to come up with potential solutions that could address the problems faced by our user. In order to create these solutions, we needed to bring our participant in a creative mindset.
We started the session with a series of open-ended questions allowing them a chance to speak freely and reassuring them that this is not an interview with right or wrong answers. Since we were conducting this session remotely using Miro — an online whiteboard, to make sure that the user is comfortable with the software, as an activity we asked them to write on a sticky note for 30 seconds based on a prompt. Before moving on to the process of brainstorming and designing actual solutions, we reviewed notes from the previous session that were laid out on an adjacent board in the form of a journey map. This helped jog their memory, revisit some of the problems they had brought up in the interview and ideas that were discussed earlier. Now that we had eased our participant into a creative flow, we dived into the Crazy 8 sketching activities where all 4 team members (including the participants) spend 8 minutes coming up with 8 different solutions, iterating on a new solution every 60 seconds. By the end of this activity, we had lots of lots of sketches to discuss (an example is shown in image). We approached these ideas in a structured manner using heat map voting (see image) and the six thinking hats (see diagram below) to finalize what to include in the prototype.
Prototype
Based on what we learned in the co-design session, we started working on the prototype. An ideal solution for our participant would be something that makes them independent when it comes to choosing clothes and planning outfits for special events. Providing necessary and accurate color information and allowing the user to visualize themselves wearing the outfit were the main outcomes of the co-design session.
We designed a mobile application called Colorish — that allows users to scan any article of clothing and find the perfect color matches for their outfits. Additionally, it also allows them to create their own personal digital wardrobe and a virtual avatar to try out different outfits in Augmented Reality. Here are some of the key features of this mobile application:
Onboarding — users can sign up and create a profile so that the app can collect information about them and save their preferences.
Digital avatar — the app can scan the users face and generate a completely customizable avatar that they can use to test their outfits in different environments using augmented reality.
Scan outfits — add clothes to your digital wardrobe, see color information, color match percentage based on popular color combinations, check compatibility with the rest of your wardrobe.
Outfit Planner — based on the form inputs and the users’ preferences, our system will recommend the best looking outfit and a list of other recommendation to pick and choose from.
AR — using AR, the system can place the user’s digital avatar wearing the outfit in a virtual environment so that they can visualize themselves in that scenario.
User Testing
During the co-design session, our participant indicated that they liked the overall concept of being able to plan the outfit along with the partner and visualize themself in the environment. We met with our participant remotely to receive the feedback. They looked over the screens and gave feedback about things they liked and made suggestions for some changes.
• They found the chart showing the wardrobe color palette as interesting and insightful.
• They were excited to try all the new combinations from all the clothes in their existing wardrobe that they hadn’t tried before.
• They thought AR might be worth a shot if it works.
• The “add partner” feature led them to think that this application will later evolve into another social media app and will eventually lose its meaning when shopping becomes the main objective afterwards
Reflection
In this inclusive design project, we got an opportunity to learn how to design for and with the participants. It was important for us to have our participants at the core of the design process because it truly empowered us to understand their problems outside the knowledge that we acquired through research. When you include the extremes of everybody, that’s to say, differently-abled people of all sorts, then you produce things that are better for all of us.
Design for one and extent to many: Even though the project is focusing on only one participant with color blindness considering his day to day problems, Anybody who has difficulty in choosing an outfit and color combination could benefit from the Colorish app.
Our team —
