Context
As a designer I see it as a personal responsibility to create inclusive products, services and experiences that lower the barriers for everyone to participate in our society.
Therefore I cooperated with the local Anna-Bertha-Königsegg-School – a school for physically and mentally impaired children in Pforzheim to develop an intermedia toolkit to foster writing skills of physically impaired children and to support supervising therapists. The school gave me the opportunity to talk, observe and conduct user tests with children, therapists and parents throughout the entire design process.
Research
Foundational Design Research in early stages of the project helped to set up assumptions about user needs, define hypotheses statements and refine the inital design challenge. Objectives that research answered included the general principles of graphomotor therapy, necessary requirements of the children and the social behaviour in the group.
Besides discovering meaningful insights about the childrens problems, needs and motivations, I identified pain points and opportunity areas in the therapist’s mentoring process, evaluated the needs and consequences of monitoring progress and defined stakeholders of the ecosystem.
User and experience journeys described the detailed process of a child going through therapy and the connection between people involved in the journey on a more holistic level. Using methods of Generative Design Research to test and refine those models in collaboration with relevant stakeholders sparked new ideas and set the foundation for design pillars including personas, product ecosystem, user scenarios, user flows and information architecture.
