Using Participatory Design to Help People with Color Vision Deficiency
By: Tripti Rajput
Tags: Design Process, Color Vision Deficiency, Participatory Design, Outfit Planning, User Research

Overview

Color plays a vital role and is a powerful communication component, but sadly is also a way of discriminating content by inhibiting its access to a group of the population that suffers from color vision deficiency (CVD), also known as colorblindness.

Suffering from color vision deficiency, it can be difficult to deal with colors. Collaboratively, when you want to choose a specific color while shopping, creating a presentation, or identifying products, it can be challenging at times. Studies suggest that one in every 12 men and one in every 200 women suffer from Color vision deficiency, which means they would see the same colors differently. The image below shows how someone with protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia type of color vision deficiency would see the Pepsi logo.

Fig 1: Three types of Color Vision Deficiency.

Problem statement

Using a participatory design approach, we aimed at exploring different problems in the day to day activities of people with CVD

Creating a design solution that helps people with color vision deficiency(CVD) solve their challenges in day to day life.

Solution

We designed a digital solution called Colorish. Colorish is a mobile application that helps people with color vision deficiency choose and match outfits and accessories and visualize themselves in the environment using the augmented reality feature. The main idea of the application is to suggest attire based on their personal choice and the user, independent when it comes to choosing color combinations. By uploading photo-based on their preference, the application uses the Augmented Reality feature to help users suggest the color combinations and a quick layout of the appearance, complimenting accessories that would go well together. Users can keep their favourite combination of styles in the app to lessen the burden of choosing outfits in the frenetic routine. The information can be saved and synced on multiple phones through app storage.

Figure: Design Process

Process

User Interview

Our main focus for the problem understanding interview was to learn from the participant about the technologies they use daily, how they manage to do it with their color blindness, and their thoughts on technologies they might find useful.

The protocol follows a five-part structure:

Section 1: is the introduction which includes covering all the necessary details like explaining the interview focus and how co-design studies are conducted, promising confidentiality, and requesting permission to record.

Sections 2 & 3: First, we familiarize ourselves with our participants’ daily life. Then we ask questions to understand:

Participant’s needs and challenges associated with color blindness

Use of technology to manage issues related to color blindness.

Section 4: we focus on the problems that came up when the participant described their daily activities in the previous section. We start to narrow down on the problem by doing some light brainstorming and try to come up with rough design ideas

Section 5: Finally, we will share our understanding and wrap-up the interview.

Learning from the Interview

After conducting the interview, our user spoke about the hurdles and difficulties he faced and how he usually apportion with it. We observed a lot of problems dealing with the color from his day to day life. He explained how he interacted with signboards, colorful graphs, etc. We decided to concentrate on the problem he had in daily living.

To articulate all the information obtained from our participant, we created the following: