OVERVIEW

PROBLEM

NCR has put down efforts to make their interactive kiosks accessible for all users including people in wheelchair or visually-impaired. Therefore, they were seeking for a new update on their existing user interface to better incoporate with the existing accessibility feature their kiosks have -- uNav keypad.

Because of the defined physical design of the kiosk model, leveraging existing accessibility feature and creating new interaction methods is the key to imrpove ordering experience for wheelchair users.

Thus, the design challenge is here:

How can the existing user interface interaction to be improved by utilizing the uNav keypad？

SOLUTION

My team created a uNav compatible user interface with tab indexing system for button and action selection and fast movement within high levels of the system. These are the final design of the interface:

INFO

Team Members

Time Frame

Key Words

My Role

Yunfei Wang, Benton Humphreys, Varnit Jain, Kevin Key

Aug. 2019 - Nov. 2019

Accessibility, Kiosk, Food ordering

During the research phase, I planned and conducted field observations, created online survey and usability tests for traget users and field experts.During the design phase, I actively contributed in the brainstorming sessions and created wireframes, storyboards, high-fidelity user interfaces. I also revised the user flow and built an interactive prototype within Figma.

PROCESS

RESEARCH

In order to identify what common points of frustration and difficulty they with interactive kiosks (and more generally, digital technology), and, perhaps most importantly, resulted in an informed design direction for the next part of this project, the team organized a series of three qualitative research efforts:

Field Observation and Task Analysis
Online Survey
Semi-structured Interviews

FIELD OBSERVATION / INTERVIEW

My team observed internal employees interacting with the XK32 kiosk with uNav keypad installed and we break down all actions recorded into sequences of tasks. We discovered that the ordering process was significantly more complicated to accomplish with the external keypad. The current user interface limited the keypad interaction by creating a mouse moving on the screen to help select instead of touching the screen, which almost tripled the time for self-ordering.

With information we gathered from background research and field observation, we engaged several potential users with questions about their previous experience with interactive technology and potential obstacles. After in-depth interviews with users, we discovered that most of them had no experience using any interactive technology in public and were not willing to try because of difficulty. And all of them believed that the existing technology were not efficient enough for them to try self-ordering instead of asking people for help.

SURVEY

After having a basic understand of how wheelchair users interact with self-ordering technology, (and in the constraint of limited target users we could find in-person in the time frame) we launched a survey with questions about their preference and experience about public interactive technology in general to help us form a clear design direction.

According to our survey, most of our target users have not encountered any useful accessibility interactive technology in public. And most of them believe accessibility technology is useful but incorperated poorly with existing system to provide specific interaction for people in wheelchair (sometimes is the physcial space or machine, sometimes is the interface design).

SYNTHESIS

My team processed large amount of diverse qualitative data from interview and survey together and performed affinity mapping to discover pain points related to different stages throughout the ordering process.

We created a design implication table to ensure that our design solution accounts for the differet user attributes for the variety of associates that physical limitation, reach range, and environment.

We also created personas and empathy maps to represent different groups of users by advocating for true end users that we intended to design for.

DESIGN

With a clearly defined problem, the target users, their needs and pain points, we brainstormed potential features that would help address the problems. While we valued creativity, we also wanted to ground ourselves to the feasibility of the solutions and our ideas are not only for wheelchair users, but for all users to enjoy.

Since we have decided to focus on improving existing system to work better with external accessibility components, we generated three design concepts varied in focus that could help encourage people with physical disability to use the self-ordering kiosk and enjoy the experience. We then sketched each idea and delivered them to experts for feedback.

IDEATION

Individual Focus

Users will have access to a web page on their cellphones where they can save personalized information and disability setting and to customize GUI setting for all interactive machines. The kiosk will access those information through NFC chip.

Likes
‍
Easy to set up

Reusability

Personal customizability

Dislikes

‍Hardware requirements

Flexible GUIs with presets

User Group Focus

The updated interface will have a uNav compatibility mode that is easy to control with uNav keypad. There will be a grid that help users to navigate through the whole ordering process with direction buttons on keypad.

Likes
‍
Easy to use
‍
Different modes for users

No hardware requirements

Dislikes

‍Whole new UI system

Physical limitation

Universal Focus

The ordering process will have preset tooltips available to help users in general to proceed, including pop-up information about how to access uNav keypad and other available accessibility features.

Likes
‍
Useful in general

Easy to use

Dislikes

‍Limited help on accessibility

Complicated interface

FINAL DESIGN CONCEPT

From the feedback we got from two rounds of experts feedback sessions, we got many valuable insights about assistive technology and reconsidered about these concepts. Eventually, we were able to generate some feature specific design implications and narrow down the concept scope to the uNav Compatibiliy Mode.

Our solution provides two sets of user interface with one with tab indexing system that can operate efficiently with directional buttons from external keypad. It would significantly shorten the time it took to order for wheelchair users with accessibility keypad.

WIREFRAME

We started out visual design by creating a set of low-fi mockups. The mockups contain the major functions of the ordering process. Considering the limited visual area for wheelchair users, the top 1/3 of the screen is left for image banner and trivial information. Then, we delievered the design to our stakeholers for feedback, and make sure the visual design structure can fulfill their needs.

The stakeholder feedback session gave us feedback on some major visual layout suggestions and how the interface should better integrate with the kiosk model in real life. And stakeholder believed that the side navigation bar provided a faster path for users to move between ordering steps without the need to click many times. They also gave out some suggestions and ideas on visual elements and layout for our final prototype.

FINAL PROTOTYPE

The final clickable prototype had the tab indexing system that is easy to use and learn and we made sure that users can reach any selections on the screen within certain number of clicks. At the same time, all the selections are group by either horizontal or vertical visual grid.

EVALUATION

USABILITY TESTING & NEXT STEP

With the clickable prototype, we designed task-based expert cognitive walkthrough with usability specification rating questions. The evaluation sessions were done with user experience design experts to examine the overall system and logic flow of tab indexing.

We made some small iterations of the prototype between the expert evaluation and the user usability testing to optimized the feedback and testing results. User usability testing was designed to be 2 distinct tasks that ask users to order certain items from the menu and modify their order. The goal of usability testing was to gather behavioral and attitudinal feedback with after-session rating questionnaire. From the two testing sessions, we synthesized all the findings into design recommendations where we could move forward to interate the project, including:

Improve parent-child menu visual hierarchy
Incorporate a “back” button or similar function
Decrease use of green color throughout system to emphasize highlighted elements better
Refine visual linear relationships between interactive elements
Emphasize or add system status indicators to display order progress

Thanks for checking out my work.

Check out My Resume here, and please feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat!