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Interviews, Literature Review, Brainstorm, Sketching, Video Script, High-Fidelity Prototyping
Denise Baran, Kesava Karthik Kota, Nalin Bhatia, Xindi Wang
Brief outline of the process we followed for this project
How might we develop a solution that assists people with limited learning abilities?
Our preliminary research led us to a surprising statistic. The National Institute for Literacy estimated that 47% of the adult population in Detroit are functionally illiterate. By functionally illiterate, it means that their current skill level in reading, writing, arithmetic impedes everyday activities.
We began to investigate the situation further with an aim to build an intervention that assists our target population. The target population we began with were adults with varying degrees of reading level.
We reached out to non-profits, libraries, U.S. Department of Education and other avenues to collect information and current resources that are used by this population.
As part of this, we conducted structured interviews with Susan Taylor, Literacy Specialist at the Detroit Public Library and Allison Austin, Program Manager at Washtenaw Literacy.
Further, we got in touch with a learner at a literacy program in the Detroit Public Library who was gracious enough to accept our request to interview them remotely. Through the interview, we were able to empathize and understand the difficulties that they face in everyday situations such as buying groceries, navigation, etc.
We conducted an extensive competitive analysis covering different parts of the problem space. We found that the majority of the applications that had content relevant to our target audience were designed primarily for children.
This was also mentioned by the interviewee as a major pain point, especially making them feel conscious of using the application in public spaces.
Furthermore, we analyzed existing applications such as Elevate, Luminosity which helps people practice skills in reading, arithmetic, and writing through the use of gamification techniques.
Narrowing down the focus area
Brainstorming to identify different solutions
We held multiple group meetings to brainstorm and ideate different kinds of solutions. We began by understanding the level of access to technology our target audience had.
Our solution is a mobile application that brings back control to users where they learn without human help. The application has two main components:
Users can scan any object in their surroundings to get more information about it. It also tries to replace difficult words into words within their reading range to allow for better comprehension. An added audio read-out option reads the words slowly to further support this.
Customizable modules that allow users to pick their areas of focus such as reading, arithmetic, writing, or all.
We firmly believe that everyone should have access to education. For our chosen community, education plays a key role in carrying out everyday tasks which inspired us to take action and design a solution that would assist them. We intentionally made design choices throughout that would allow individuals to independently take action without feeling embarrassed.
Through this design solution, we hope to make people feel empowered through education!
This was by far the most challenging project that I’ve been a part of. I’ve had the pleasure to work and interact with incredibly amazing people during the course of the project without whom this project wouldn’t have been successful.
This project helped me to break out of the comfort zone, especially in terms of conducting user research where we had to constantly fine tune our interview protocol, as well as iterate on our research questions to understand user needs deeply.Â
Perpetually in a state of beginner's mind.
© 2022 Vishal Reddy
