Moment is a product that provides mobility independence for individuals with visual impairment, including both a wearable device which provides directional haptic cues as well as a mobile app to alleviate the stress of preparatory stages.
My role on the project was to lead the primary research including expert workshops as well as participant interviews. With this, I was also lead the conceptualize on the physical product and the system design for the product functionality along side my team.
With the turbulent changes that happened in 2020, our team looked to differences in our lives since the year prior and realized that the implication of these changes are harder to adapt to for people who are visually impaired. Changes from social distancing to different sidewalk layouts have left behind those who can't rely on having perfect vision. How can we eliminate these struggles of adapting to vast and drastic environmental changes that disturb mental maps?
Moment is a product that provides mobility independence for individuals with visual impairment. It has two parts of it which include:
A wearable device that provides directional haptic cues to help users avoid obstacles in public environments. The dual haptic motors use a simple haptic language to provide useful information.
A mobile app to alleviate the stress of preparatory stages in commutes, allowing users to save routes, create custom commutes between multiple locations, and pin haptic alerts to be sent to your device at specific directions on your route.
With the Moment app, keep track of your routes by adding them to your commonly used ones. Add multiple destinations together to create your commute. All interactions are designed to be navigated via touch or voice, with ALT text connected to all labels.
Instead of memorizing specific directions, have them read back to you while also being able to add new destinations and update your route. Pin specific or all directions so that you get haptic cues to make sure you're going in the right direction.
The Moment wearable device keeps track of your surroundings and notifies you of them via haptic feedback. It's designed to be slim enough to comfortably wear but solid enough to give accurate information. Use the app to adjust distances, haptic strength, and even the haptic language yourself.
With the problem space in mind, we conducted research to infuse real-life experience and address pain points that affect the daily lives of our users. We conducted secondary research with a focus on nueral-plasticity to understand how the brain adapts to in the moment changes with variable levels of the five sense. Understand how the brain create rebuilds pathways with on-set or immediate hinderances to vision was critical to the design of the physical prototype as well as the compatibility of the application.
Our team conducted secondary competitive research and interviews with our primary user group and industry leading accessibility experts to better under the gaps in current technology and daily processes. From this we defined what areas of opportunity we be most impactful: on foot commuting.
As we developed the prototype and application we did two rounds of user testing with multiple individuals whose vision range from being partially impaired to completely blind. We gained insights on how to accurately design products for users whose vision can vary and/or decrease over time. This lead to feature such as ADA compliant contrast, ALT text, and quick access navigation that was intuitive to find for any level of vision.
