PathVu Nav

Project Overview

From January through August 2021, I was the Technical Lead for my five person MHCI Capstone team. Our project goal was to make pedestrian transportation more accessible for people of all ages and abilities. My team worked with a volunteer organization for older adults, SWPPA, and a local Pittsburgh startup, pathVu, to research the problem space and design a solution which will help pathVu Nav become a mobile application which provides an accessibility-focus sidewalk navigation experience.

Special thanks to my teammates who made this a fantastic experience: Aditi Dhabalia, Meo Zhang, Thuy-Vy Nguyen, and Andrew Kyroudis.

For a more in-depth look at our process, check out the team Medium here!

Research

When researching to understand the problem area, my team realized that in order to create a fully supported, helpful application, we would need to understand two main types of users: data consumers and data providers. Data consumers are app users who primarily want to navigate using accessibility information while data providers primarily use the app to report accessibility data.

Navigation & Data Consumption

pathVu and SWPPA are passionate about inclusive design and want to make sidewalks and pedestrian navigation more accessible to everyone. This means that my team focused on creating a better, more accessible navigation experience for people with mobility impairments including wheelchair users, older adults, and those with temporary impairments like a broken leg.

Our research for this focus was about understanding what information needs to be collected as well as how it needs to be displayed to allow users to quickly understand what obstacles they may face when trying to go somewhere. In order to understand, we conducted contextual interviews and virtual & in person walk-alongs to safely understand the biggest challenges people with mobility issues are currently facing.

To understand where people need information during their journeys, we created a method called Card Mapping which is a combination of card sorting and journey mapping. This technique allowed us to understand that our users are more concerned with pre-planning their routes and need a tool to consolidate all accessibility information. Currently, many people use google street view to try and see conditions of locations or they call places but these methods are not reliable and our participants expressed great interest in a mobile app that could provide all this information. {card mapping}
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Reporting & Data Providers

The other focus of our research was understanding how to motivate and educate able-bodied people of all ages to collect information for pathVu to help populate the app with both permanent and temporary obstacles. While most of our participants with mobility impairments said they trust others with shared experiences to provide the best information, only a small percentage of adults in the US have a mobility impairment. Therefore it is imperative for able-bodied people to provide reliable, accurate data to support navigation in our solution.

We utilized storyboarding and paper prototype testing to explore how comfortable able-bodied people felt with reporting accessibility information. We found that almost all people wanted to help but felt unsure of what information was actually needed. This led to our team creating and testing different education techniques which were integrated into the final solution. 

Using iterations from low to high fidelity prototypes, our research found that once educated, able-bodied people understand what to report and will initiate a report but want the process to be as efficient as possible. This is because the data they are reporting has limited value to able-bodied people and they want to spend as little time as possible completing the task. Additional testing that we did showed that able bodied-people would need extrinsic motivation in order to download an app and actively report data. However, our testing showed that small rewards, similar to the Starbucks star system, would be motivating enough for the majority of able-bodied users to continually use the app due to the combination of personal reward and helping their community.

Solution

Our solution is the creation of a sustainable, scalable system to support the mobile app designed for pathVu Nav. Because our clients are a volunteer organization and a start-up, our team decided that a plan for the implementations of our designs would best serve our clients’ needs. 

The mobile app will be an all inclusive tool that allows for easy reporting and navigation for people of all abilities. We designed the navigation side of the application to allow for easy pre-planning of routes based on the feedback during co-design rounds with people with mobility impairments. Based on feedback from our participants, we employed progressive disclosure which supports people who want to skip quickly for information as well as those who want to know as much as they can about the application.

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The data collection flow in the app is designed to collect objective information which reduces the burden on able-bodied people and instead gives everyone the ability to accurately report a condition. The flow has been designed to encourage photos as they are the most reliable type of information as well as gather additional information where needed. Eventually, as more advanced technology is integrated, we believe that auto-tagging of images can even further reduce the time needed for active reporting.

Key Takeaways 

People who have mobility impairments need a tool for pre-planning trips which has all accessibility information contained in the same place.

Sidewalk and building accessibility information are both key to know before traveling for people with mobility impairments.

pathVu Nav should provide accessibility information quickly while also allowing for more detailed information to be accessed.

Able-bodied people want to help improve accessibility but are unsure of what information matters or how to help.

Reporting accessibility information should be as efficient as possible and photo-driven to provide the most value.

Extrinsic motivation combined with the knowledge they are helping their community is the most motivating for able-bodied people for long term reporting.