Growpad's tree with accessibility.

Client
De Uitvoeringsbrigade
Year
2023
Services
Product Design
User research & Testing
A11Y

Background

"De Uitvoeringsbrigade" supports people who are in disadvanted situations, which often occurs to people with disabilities. They help bring these people back in to society, accompanied by their product: GrowPad. A platform to track goals, see how you're feeling, and to work towards growth with your coach. De Uitvoeringsbrigade needed a redesign of GrowPad that was more accessible. This is where Bas van Ooijen, Veerle Derksen, Juulie Verhoeven, and myself formed a team to work on the Tree of Growth. Though I was involved in the entire design thinking process, I was key during user research facilitation, WCAG checks, and prototyping.

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Challenge

GrowPad as a platform, was not accessible and up to WCAG AA standards, even though most users experience disabilities. To make GrowPad more accessible to its users, contextual interviews, interviews, and usability tests were implemented. Learning about how users currently experience the platform, to find out what they struggle with. As well as testing the new GrowPad.

Key findings

Icon meanings in flows
In the previous GrowPad, there were many icons used in flows to represent actions. These icons had heavy spinning animations and no text to explain what the icon and action stand for. It was purely visual, which made the actions difficult to understand, and as such required coaches to explain and sit along with their users very often.
Self reliance
Because there was unclarity with extensive flows and unclear actions, users could not use GrowPad on their as often as they would like. The product mostly got its use, only during sessions where coaches were together with their user. This showed an opportunity to simplify the flows, and learn how users could use growpad on their own.

Key results

The redesign of GrowPad led to the Tree of Growth. Metaphorically speaking, the tree represents ones growth and visualizes the fruit of ones labor. The fruit of ones growth, connects with the reward system. The rewards system is to motivate users into using GrowPad more often. GrowPad also has gone through accessibility checks, and has been usability tested to align with the goal of the project. As a result: the Tree of Growth has been taken along with other concepts to combine them, and bring it to production.