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Vola is an app prototype that centers on accessibility; it provides an inclusive and equitable experience for all high school students searching for volunteering opportunities and personalizes each user’s experience towards their needs.
Inspired by Amazon’s initiative, your challenge is to design an inclusive experience in a third-party mobile app for high school students looking for opportunities to fulfill community service hours or volunteer to help their local community, no matter what their background or ability.
Jane is a 16 year old high school student at Bloor Collegiate Institute who is seeking more ways to contribute to her community through volunteering. She loves spending time in nature and helping supporting other students in school. However, Jane was born with retinitis pigmentosa, which is a genetic condition that causes blindness. As a result, she requires visual assistance and relies primarily on auditory tools to complete tasks. For that reason, she wants to find an easy way to discover and sign up for volunteer activities near her that also take into her personal needs.
We conducted both primary and secondary research. In terms of secondary research, we learned from online research articles and publications. We also referenced existing applications and identified potential areas of improvement and ideas we could apply to our prototype.
During the first week of the Creative Jam, we had a consultation with an Amazon Product Designer regarding our app design and from this coaching session, we made 2 main alterations:
We decided to change our black buttons to dark green and dark gray. This change reduces the contrast on the eyes and creates a warmer light with the green. On the other hand, we altered the original lighter green buttons to darker green buttons to increase contrast; for individuals with visual impairments, contrast is more significant than color. Thus a darker green would help contrast the white text better on top of buttons.
We adjusted the locations of buttons and other interactive areas of our prototype towards the thumb to improve the usability. We also increased emphasis on areas that users need to interact with, such as creating a shadow behind the login area to draw the users attention towards action items.
To ensure accessibility, we avoided the use of color as identifying tool and primarily used monochromatic tones to assist users with colorblindness and/or other visual impairments. We also decided to use green as the highlight color since it is scientifically proven to be the easiest color on the eyes.
We decided to use simple sans-serif typography since it is more legible compared to over-formatted text, which can be difficult for users with dyslexia and/or visual impairments.
We used a variety of icons to make the design more intuitive, user-friendly, and reduce the need for words.
After I presented our prototype during the Final Ceremony of the Creative Jam, we received invaluable feedback from the judges, which included both successful areas and areas of improvement:
The critique on our design opened my eyes to the many areas of improvement and growth points of our submitted product. However, I was not satisfied with simply receiving feedback and to reflect my learnings after the Creative Jam was finished, I implemented the feedback we received into the updated prototype you now see.
If I were to work on this design challenge again, I would focus on establishing more structure in the design system such as including margins to simplify formatting. I would also focus on creating a more concrete user story through the prototype to reduce the ambiguity of the prototype itself.
