Word of Hands

To begin our design process, we needed to first figure out what kind of platform or medium we would be utilizing. We considered several possibilities, including non-digital solutions like designing a physical study space at UCSD that adheres to Deaf-friendly guidelines and supports inclusivity. However, we met some roadblocks as we'd need to coordinate with the school itself to get an area to work with, as well as come up with a large budget. 

Ultimately, we decided to design a digital solution. In choosing this platform, we found several interview insights extremely useful as justification. One, particularly useful, came from the Deaf ally on our design team, who was also the UCSD ASL Club President.

Competitive Analysis

With our sights set on a digital solution as the best platform both for us as a team to work on and for people from the Deaf community to use, we began brainstorming the different routes we could take. Among these was the idea to facilitate reviewing businesses for “Deaf-friendly”-ness. Our team decided to explore this option further by doing a competitive analysis of existing platforms that purport to fill this space. You can see a short overview of our findings here.

In summary, we found that all of these platforms suffered from the same issue: they became obsolete and outdated due to inactivity. Few people knew about them; without an active userbase, they couldn’t be sustained. We saw this as an important issue to address when designing our own solution, and this is largely what led us to develop an add-on rather than a standalone app. By connecting our solution with something that is already popular, like Yelp, we'd have a higher chance of maintaining an active and self-sustaining userbase.

Having established our platform and completed our competitive audit, we definitely wanted to focus back in on our own product. To do this, we mapped out a general user flow—the golden path—to contextualize the ideal scenario that a user of our application might experience. 

In the user flow, we wanted to highlight that Word of Hands is meant to be easy to learn and easy to use. Additionally, mapping the flow together helped us align internally, between the team members, on the target audience we wanted to reach and how our application would ultimately improve the experience of looking for a business to visit.

The next step of our design process was simply to sketch out the screens that would be necessary to fulfill the user flow that we had outlined. Our first iteration was sketched on a whiteboard, in extremely low fidelity to simply establish the concept of Word of Hands’ experience. After bringing our designs to Tommy, our Deaf ally, we incorporated his feedback and criticisms into a second round of iterations. This time, we went more in-depth with the details and discussed topics like microinteractions and technicalities, documenting everything on the whiteboard through sketches and notes.

With our concepts finalized in low-fidelity, we took to the computer to flesh out the actual screens in Sketch. Throughout this whole process, we constantly validated our ideas with Tommy to ensure that we were staying on track. In total, we implemented 3 iterations of design, the third being the final screens displayed above.