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interview

research

iterarion

insight

testing & feedback

wireframe

prototype 

Be My Eyes

Mobile experience redesign

Solo Project

2 months

jump to final design

Research

It is estimated that about 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision.

 

Perhaps you've heard the term "Legally Blind." This does not always insinuate total darkness, but vision impairment is significant enough that one cannot function without personal or technological assistance due to the extreme loss of visible acuity.

 

The fact is around 90% of visually impaired people have some kind of vision, and each one of them has a special view of the world.

 

Individuals diagnosed with low vision are able to see colors but struggle with having poor acuity (a vision that is not sharp), cloudy vision, central field loss (seeing only the edges of the visual field), or tunnel vision (seeing only the middle of the visual field), Those who have a vision impairment that is beyond diagnosed low vision are considered blind. Blindness, by definition, is substantial, uncorrectable loss of vision in both eyes.

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Be My Eyes connects people needing sighted support with volunteers and companies through live video around the world.

Interview

Questions:

  1. How often do you receive a call? /How often do you use the app?

  2. What kind of request you’ve received?/In what situations you’ve called someone for help?

  3. Do you want to keep in touch with the blind user/volunteer you’ve talked to?

  4. How do you know this app?

  5. Do you find any difficulty using this app?

  6. What other features do you wish this app could have?

Potential helpers/volunteers; Blind or visually impaired users

Test group:

Insights

Ideation

Wireframes

Testing & Feedbacks 

Chat history page for sighted people need inproment.

Iterations

Button UI improvement — separate three buttons

Prototype

My plan was to interview a blind user when I receive a call on Be My Eyes app, but neither I nor my friends have gotten any call in the past two weeks. Then I found out, since Be My Eyes launched in January 2015, more than 2 million volunteers have signed up, and are offering help in more than 180 languages, but most volunteers only receive 2 or 3 requests per year because there are only 122 thousand blind and visually impaired people using this service.

 

While searching for more information about Be My Eyes, I found that around 2000 users had shared their stories in App Store. So I decided to totalize users' feedback about this platform and try to find some common problems.

Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call. Every time a blind user requests help on this app, the system will pair up with a random volunteer. However, after the call ends, there's merely a way they can reconnect again.

 

You might think blind people are using this app only for emergencies, truth is, lots of volunteers have received requests like describing a photo, reading letters, picking up an outfit, etc. In these cases, I think blind users might prefer suggestions from a friend more than a stranger.

Pro:

  1. Blind users could call for help 24/7, in all languages.

Cons:

  1. Feel a little awkward for both sides if it's a short conversation.

  2. More blind and low-vision people need to know this app.

  3. Unstable video quality.

  1. The blue box

  2. Microphone Pal

After each call ends, users will be asked if they want to become "microphone pals." If both sides agreed, users will be allowed to send a 5-minute maximum record to each other to keep their relationship as microphone pal. Also, the volunteer will be called first when its microphone pal needs assistance.

3. Newsletter

To help sighted volunteers acknowledge the difficulty and tasks visually impaired people face daily, and also receive updates on the latest technology that benefits visually impaired people, we have a newsletter section on the sighted version's home screen.

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