When Blippar decided on a target audience for their Augmented Reality (AR) product, we ran an elaborate research study to learn about young people’s perspectives on technology. Since AR was such a visual bias technology, I also wanted to see what would the blind community thought about it. We ended up partnering with the youth leadership program from a non-profit organization called San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
In this talk, I’ll talked about how we designed the study, selective insights we gathered from the young adults, and the unique perspectives from the blind community. I’ll compare the differences between the blind and the sighted group. Inspired by these findings, the product design team recommended a series of new design directions.
Inclusive design was not meant to address a specific group of users, and to design special accessibility features. It is meant to see a different perspective from a unique user group, and gather new insights to innovate for the mainstream product. In this case, an AR product.
