Roaler: Increasing the Confidence of Wheelchair Users whilst Navigating Old City Centres
Delft University of Technology - Project: Interaction and Electronics
Research: Janneke van Oorschot, Maurice van Bussel, Cas Marien, Maxim Houdijk, Cynthia Ko
Design: Cynthia Ko
Old city infrastructures with cobblestone streets and steep bridges may make it challenging for wheelchair users to commute, even if they feel the drive to be active and go out. How can we solve this problem, while making our users feel empowered and confident? Changing the city infrastructure would be a huge task, but helping the users navigate more confidently was feasible.
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Roaler is a navigation app which helps users to plan wheelchair-friendly routes whilst encouraging physical activity. Routes are evaluated on the amount and severity of obstacles and blockades through crowd-sourced data.
Planning a wheelchair-friendly route
Roaler shows different options to get a location (whether it's by wheelchair, bike, scootmobile, car or public transport). These options take distance, time, amount of wheelchair obstacles (e.g. steep bridges) and blockades (e.g. stairs) into account to suggest the best routes.
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The interface has a sportive and trendy look in order to instil the feeling of empowerment in wheelchair users. This choice was made based on interviews with wheelchair users, where participants stated that they did not want to feel like helpless victims while using the app. The app had to recognise that these wheelchair users are normal human beings who are capable of physical exercise and socialising.
Logging obstacles and blockades - en route
During the journey, users can pinpoint obstacles and blockades which they encounter. These may be put in manually, or automatically recognised by the gyroscope in the case of slopes. The data is automatically updated to the platform - the more users contribute to this crowdsourcing, the more accurate the platform becomes.
Going outside becomes good for the body, but also the community.
Inspiring physical activity
Wheelchair users mentioned that they felt a surge of confidence and energy whenever they 'overcame' certain obstacles or made certain kilometres. The amount of travelled kilometres are logged during the journey, which should inspire the user to keep their physical activity going.
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Various community statistics are also available on the application. This way, the user can see what their contribution is to fellow wheelchair users by logging obstacles and blockades.
Design process
We immersed ourselves in the wheelchair experience by renting a wheelchair and navigating through Delft. This made us experience first-hand what kind of obstacles the user could deal with.Through interviews with active wheelchair users, we distilled different types of vehicles that they made use of (some have a bicycle or scootmobile as well).
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The first designs were paper-prototyped and digitally prototyped by the team to test usability issues with. The final smartphone design has been an adaption of this group process; creating an interface of my own.
What did I learn about?
Design research: user immersion, interviewing, usability research.
User Interface design: wireframing, making flowcharts, paper prototyping, Adobe Creative Suite, Axure.