Let’s Go is an app designed to teach people with intellectual disabilities the necessary skills to travel and live independently. It is an ongoing collaborative project involving IADT and St John of God’s.

For one of my projects I had the opportunity to develop a section of this app. The section I chose to develop was a body language tutorial.

I have included this project in my portfolio for several reasons:

• much of my work as self-directed and involved independent critical analysis;
• this project demonstrates my web design and development skills, i.e. research, sketching & wireframing and design & development (using the 960 grid, HTML & CSS, Photoshop for content editing and Javascript to implement basic interactivity);
• my work was selected to be tested with the intended user group;
• I assisted in the user testing which gave me the opportunity to see the next stage in the development process first hand.

Development Process

The Research Stage was challenging due to the lack of assistive technology that exists for this user group. Two examples, however, were useful for guidance and inspiration – Money Counts (a website that teaches money management skills to people with intellectual disabilities) and Pesky gNATs (a game that teaches CBT techniques to children).  These applications helped me to realise that images and concrete metaphors would be more helpful to this user group than abstract concepts.

There may be a shortage of technology for the user group, but there is no shortage of academic research. This helped me to:

• identify foundation level social skills so that I could pinpoint the areas of body language to focus on and how much detail to give,
• identify a need in the user group to increase confidence so that they could become more sociable,
• identify the teaching methods that would work best for this user group, i.e. images, prompts and modelling.

The sketching and wireframing stages allowed me to get ideas for the design down on paper and easily refine them. For example, my initial design included a slideshow tutorial about body language with images, voiceover and text – however I reconsidered this after wireframing because I felt that the text might be distracting for the user.

Development  and Design built on the skills I had learnt in previous projects. I felt confident in my HTML & CSS skills, so much so that I decided to add Javascript to enable certain features such as audio links and the slideshow. To help me with this I completed an online course in basic Javascript.

Design decisions included keeping to a simple layout so as not to distract the user. I chose to include the slideshow tutorial mentioned already, along with a video to build on the material included in the slideshow, and a game to reinforce learning and allow for user interaction. There was no requirement to pick colours or design a logo and these had already been decided. A resource called Photosymbols was made available which contained images of people with IDs; I used these as much as possible in my design as I felt the user group would more readily identify with them.

User Testing was conducted over two sessions. During each session, four users were observed as they tested various modules of the app. Due to the ethical issues of conducting research with this user group, it was not possible to record the tests. As an alternative, assistant researchers also observed the tests, thereby ensuring accuracy in the data.

My role as one of the assistant researchers was to help some of our participants with their pre-test questionnaires and to record my observations of each person for a specified period of time as they used the app. I enjoyed taking part in this process, particularly meeting the users involved and hearing some of their feedback. The current round of user testing has now been completed and the app is going through another phase of iteration before the next round of testing later this year.