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Pattern is Language

indoor navigation system for visually impaired people in the micro space

Year

2022

Category

Design research/ Way-finding/ Product design/ Master thesis

With 2.2 billion people being visually impaired, navigation is a critical issue in their daily life. However, many current tools had different levels of limitations. The visual impairment community still faced many challenges, especially in micro-space (e.g., residential units, hotel rooms, or hospital patient rooms). Therefore, this design project aimed to develop a tactile icon system to improve their navigation experience in those places. Results showed that VI participants could not understand the majority of design interventions. This was caused by the designer’s bias based on the visual experience. Overcoming this visual bias for a better outcome is one of the challenges for further study. Another potential next opportunity will be combining this icon system with other support assistance.

Video summary

Acknowledge

Thank you to my participants for the user test to share their precious experiences. With their generous attitude, I was able to finish this design project.

5 min overview

1. Issues

With 2.2 billion people worldwide facing visual impairment, navigation remains a critical issue, impacting daily life and mobility. Despite current navigation tools with various limitations, individuals with visual impairments still lack good options. The designer has sought new ways to create feasible and easy-to-implement solutions that could broadly benefit this population.

2. Opprotunities

Following extensive reviews of prior research, the designer concluded that the real issues were never about the navigation of visually impaired individuals through large spaces but rather in the final step of arriving at their intended destinations and landmarks in the environment played the key in helping visually impaired individuals identify their path. Meanwhile, designer also found that there was a niche that was neglected by most of the studies- micro space(i.g. hotel rooms or patient rooms)  

So designer proposed this hypothesis- if there is an icon system which could be tactilely discerned and situated within micro-spaces, could it effectively improve navigation difficulties for visually impaired individuals?  This system is not to replace existing tools but to assist in helping people who need it to put the last piece of the puzzle. 

3. Research

There were three stages of the research process, narrative experience, video survey(due to Covid, the design had to find alternative ways to access primary data), and SME interview with 3 environmental design experts.  

A sense of security was the most important element for visual impairments while doing their wayfinding. It was built on two other criteria concluded from the interview and survey, maintaining orientation and esthetic.

4. Design

In order to obtain a diversity of perspectives, designer recruited 5 grad school students from diverse cultural backgrounds for 2 rounds of focus-group to create  5 icons with numbers variant.

5. Testing

Designer tested with 2 visually impaired users (one totally blind; another partially sighted). Results showed that almost all assumptions of icons failed. Only the direction indicators matched their mental models. Meanwhile,  the material testing showed, for the texture metaphor of the material was more important to users. 

6. Revision

According to all feedback from user testing, desginer produced the second iteration. Showing as below.

7. Conclusion and Next step

Designer concluded that this project was a long-term trial-and-error process because designer did not have experience losing vision. Many ideas came from the designer's visual experience. 

 

How to reduce this gap could be developing a co-design workshop framework for designers and the visually impaired community. Further, for the practical aspect, this icon system had to work with other supportive elements to help the visually impaired community access this icon actively. 

Full Research

Limitatioms

Background 

In 2019, WHO investigated that approximately 2.2 billion people are visually impaired, including partially sighted and totally blind. This population is still growing since there are many potential risks in our daily life (WHO, 2019). Being unable to access visual elements and information about their current location, these visual impairments (VI) faced the challenge was finding the way and arriving at their destination safely in unfamiliar spaces.

Let us take a step back and think of a scenario- if, one day, you suddenly lost vision, how would you walk safely in your home? Even under the frame of a familiar environment, we probably cannot do so, not to mention an unfamiliar place. Due to lack of vision, VI might not obtain opportunities to travel, move to a new house, or find a job (Jeamwatthanachai, Wald, & Wills, 2019; Rener, 2017); this affects their life autonomy. Therefore, creating a barrier-free environment and assisting in guiding safely in the indoor space are the demands for good mobility, which is the first step to supporting VI’s life autonomy.

Limitations of  environment and current tools

While VI walked indoors, both environmental factors and tool limitations would affect their navigation results. Previous study pointed out a few common disorientation factors in the space:

​

Alkhanifer, A., & Ludi, S. (2015, August).

For the tool-limitation part, there were two types, low-tech and high-tech.  

Low-tech

  • White Cane: One of the most popular navigation tools for VI. However, its usage strongly relied on O&M training, and it only detected certain areas in the environment. 

  • Sighted guides (people): Another popular navigation tool for VI, but people without training could provide inappropriate and insufficient information to VI. Then, this might lead to worse results. 

  • Guide dogs: they were NOT an affordable or accessible option in some countries. There would be a window period for VI while their partner dog retired. 

  • Tactile map: the least popular tool. It lacked standard language, so VI had to spend the effort to learn the content of tactile maps.

High-tech

With the progression of mobile phones and wearable devices, there were various technological navigation assistances for VI. Each of them had different pros and cons. Here we only talked about 3 common limitations.

  • Need special infrastructure: The majority of those high-tech tools were applications on smart devices and communicated with users via WiFi, Bluetooth, and LTE. However, not every area was not able to access stable sources of those communication approaches. 

  • System Maintenance: No matter what kind of technological tools need to be maintained, either hardware, software, or network. This was a potential concern for places that would like to support the VI community.

  •  High cost: Above 2 points would spend both financial and time costs, so was not a  feasible option for any organization or place.

Williams et al., 2013;Almeida, Martins, & Lima, 2015;Halder & Ghosal, 2016;Cheraghi et al., 2017; Jeamwatthanachai et al., 2019;Simões et al., 2020

Problem framing

 Wayfinding and Cognitive mapping ability for VI

When people moved from one place to another, we relied on wayfinding skills. This skill correlated to cognitive mapping ability, which was related to visual information. However, early research suggested that although this ability was related to vision, visual impairments still had it, and they could do wayfinding well(Passini & Proulx, 1988).  

Wayfinding included 3 stages: decision making, decision executing, and information processing. Decision-making was the stage we read the map and decided on the route. Decision-execution was while people started walking in the real field and adjusting the route. The last stage- information processing, was the stage of detecting details obstacles while walking on the path. With current technology support, VI was able to read the map without much difficulty, but the latter 2 stages were problematic for VI.

Alkhanifer, A., & Ludi, S.2014; Alkhanifer & Ludi, 2015

Later, Alkhanifer et al., (2014) concluded that there were 3 phases of cognitive mapping from interviews for VI group . Researchers also indicated that landmarks and consistency of wayfinding elements performed as  essential sources to support VI wayfinding process.  

Scope

Through reviewing related works, designer finds that one part was left behind- micro space (e.g., residential units, hotel rooms, or hospital patient rooms). Current studies mainly focused on large-scale indoor spaces, and not much research touched on these micro spaces. Some people might question that situations of these micro spaces were simpler than large-scale. Although the scale is small, if the space were unfamiliar to VI, it would still require them to explore.  Therefore, design scope would narrow down the signage for common places among those spaces.

Common places in hotel room and patient room

Purpose

Based on previous studies, designer proposed the idea of design intervention would be a tactile icon system as the landmark in micro spaces to support visual impairments to navigate themselves safely. This new design intervention did NOT tend to replace any current navigation tools; instead, it would be an aid to fulfill the last mile to the destination in a feasible way.

wayfindng model
Scope
research

Design processes

Research

There are 3 stages inculded in this process: narrotive experiecne, video survey, and SME inertiew.

​

資產 7.png

Diagram for 3 key points from research porecess

Ideation

The purpose of focus group was to obtain diverse points of view; therefore, designer decided to collect concepts from the brainstorming process from five graduate students from design school with different study backgrounds. 

​

Before the focus group, designer set up three design principles, based on the result of SME interviews and previous research,  for focus group: 

After brainstorming with five participants from design school, designer analyzed their mind map with theme analysis to get keywords for each subject.

Results of Theme analysis

Draft of each subject

First iteration

Washroom/bathroom

Entrance-Set1

1st iteration of Entrance

Entrance-Set2

Light switch

Direction indicator  set1

Direction indicator  set2

Prototype of 1st iteration

(These icons should be the same material, but with some technical issues, designer had to use different fabrication skills to finish them on time)

icons1
user test

User testing

In order to understand the limitations of prototypes for target audiences, designer conducted 2 parts of user testing: 

  • Icon meaning interpretation: 

During this part, designer would examine if the new design could match their mental model.

  • Material semantics:

In this part, designer would like to find out which material could be most associated with each space.

Designer recruited 2 participants; One is low-vision(LV) and another one is totally blind(TBL).

Summary of  icon meaning

Washroom/bathroom

For LV participant, only the one with two waves and a water drop worked. The other one failed. For TBL participant, both failed. Participants suggested that if a person has never seen it before, they cannot understand how a water drop looks. It was because water drops could not be seen in general cases. Thus, they could not understand the water metaphor and the connection between this metaphor and the washroom. However, LV participant did mention that he thought that the icon with two waves and one water drop gave him the idea of a shower curtain. This could be one potential idea for the next iteration.

Entrance set 1

Four of them all worked with LV participant, but not TBL participant. TBL participant noted that these icons mean room because of the realm, but he understood the label means the doorknob. 

Entrance set 2

Both participants were not able to read the meaning. Initially, designer was thinking that showing the movement of the doorway could help VI understand how to operate it as the usual floor plan map showed. However, this assumption did not match both participants’ mental models of a door. LV participant even mentioned that he thought this icon was a jigsaw puzzle.

Light switch

This icon also failed with both participants. This icon could not deliver any expression with light. LV participants said he was confused because two symbols were overlapped. This feedback echoed one previous study. In that study, the researcher found that overlapping one message, either shape or text, on the other one could disturb VI’s reading (Han, 2020). This recommendation should be taken to the next iteration. Also, LV participant thought that the pulling strip could represent the meaning of light switch.

Direction indicator set 1

This set could only work out with LV participant while they were in pair. For TBL participant, he understood the meaning of “get-out” icon. With “get-in”, TBL participant misunderstood it with other meaning. For “get-in” icon, TBL participant said that this icon means turn on/off for him and the location of this switch because the dot represented switch (knob) and the arrow indicated the location. However, he understood that “get-out” icon. Participant did not directly say that the size of realm caused him had different reading. With observation, designer speculated that small realm represented the small item and big realm represents the space. This finding provided the insights that even icons are the same shape, its size could have different interpretations.

Direction indicator set 2

Both participant could not understand the meaning of this project. However, LV participants pointed out that transitional surface (both rising and sinking) represented the meaning of stairs rather than in/out. 

Bed

Both participants expressed their though of bed image which matched the common image about the bed.

Material semantics

The results showed that with the washroom image, both participants agreed that staying inside this space with water, users had to beware of falling.  They selected the material with the meaning of non-slip, although the materials differed. Another agreement was shown in the light switch; however, neither participant could provide a clear reason for this choice. Meanwhile, designer found an interesting result was that the low-vision participant chose clay as the material for the doorway icon. While the participant did not explicitly provide a reason for this choice, the designer observed that the participant was repeatedly moving back and forth between the smooth and rough parts, suggesting that the half-glazed texture creates a sense of transition that matched the meaning of the doorway-space transition.  From those results, designer concluded that the texture metaphor of the material was more important to VI community.

Second iteration

icons2

Based on that feedback, designer modified icons and developed the second iteration.

Conclusion

Overall, feedback from user test were frustrating for designer, but it had been expected. After finishing this whole process, designer concluded that this project was a long-term trial and error process, and each design was an assumption. As far as designer was concerned, due to past visual experience, design interventions were similar to current icons. This had to be overcome with further research in the future. However, from a service design perspective, this project did not only bring to benefit visual impairment group but also for the tourism industry, especially the hotel service with customer loyalty and a good reputation for supporting equity.

Limitations and Future works

Limitations of this project could be divided into two perspectives, research, and practice. For the research side, the sample size of the user test is too small, so those results might not be credible enough and represent all VI populations. Also, it lacked primary data from O&M trainers, so some of the design principles could not reflect challenges for VI. The possible extension of this project for research purposes was to develop a workshop frame to facilitate VI to join the design process. The point would be how to build the bridge for VI to deliver their thoughts to designers and how to transform those messages.

For the practical side, the limitation is that VI can only passively access navigation information. There are two options to address this issue. Options one is a feasible approach- a paper version tactile map. With raising lines on the paper, VI can read the layout and the meaning of icons. Option two is combing with the BLE beacon system, so VI can obtain audio guides from their mobile devices to describe icons and the room layout.

Reference

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  3. Almeida, M. d. X., Martins, L. B., & Lima, F. J. (2015). Analysis of wayfinding strategies of blind people using tactile maps. Procedia Manufacturing, 3, 6020-6027.

  4. Cheraghi, S. A., Namboodiri, V., & Walker, L. (2017). GuideBeacon: Beacon-based indoor wayfinding for the blind, visually impaired, and disoriented. Paper presented at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

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2026 Dershuan

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