ITERATING WITH INTENT: A RETROSPECTIVE ON ACCESSIBLE HUMAN CENTRED DESIGN PROCESSES

Disability will affect everyone at some point in their lives. Childbirth, breaking a bone, car accidents, and aging are just a few examples of life events that force a change in daily habit or routine. Whether permanent, temporary, or situational we will all need products and services that help us adapt to our physical and digital environments. However, despite this, accessibility is often brought into the product development process only after ideas have been fully developed. To break this cycle, our team studies the intersection of accessibility, user needs, and innovation to create a concept that matters to end users. The human-centered design process is never a straight line; many rounds of discovery research, design exploration, and concept evaluation go into developing a single idea. To do this, we talked directly with over 60 end users with accessibility needs, designed 10+ concepts for evaluation, and developed a functional PoC for our top conceptual direction. The goal of this paper is to reflect on this complex product design process in the accessibility space, where our team takes a conceptual idea to a PoC by working collaboratively with the visually impaired and Deaf/hard of hearing communities. This paper will examine our process, lessons learned, and how to iterate with intent.