Polygon Education: Understanding Accessibility & User Research
Year 2020
Client Polygon Education
Role Lead Product Designer - User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Time 3 Weeks
Team Nico Marie Sierra Lawrence, Pearl Suh and Christian Barreto Salgado
Goals Facilitate Polygon’s goal of streamlining and automating the onboarding process for new clients and to craft an inclusive and engaging user experience.
Deliverables Research, ideation, UI design, end-to-end prototype and testing
Tools Figma, Sketch, Anima, Zeplin, Adobe Creative Suite, and IBM Equal Access Toolkit
Client Polygon Education
Role Lead Product Designer - User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Time 3 Weeks
Team Nico Marie Sierra Lawrence, Pearl Suh and Christian Barreto Salgado
Goals Facilitate Polygon’s goal of streamlining and automating the onboarding process for new clients and to craft an inclusive and engaging user experience.
Deliverables Research, ideation, UI design, end-to-end prototype and testing
Tools Figma, Sketch, Anima, Zeplin, Adobe Creative Suite, and IBM Equal Access Toolkit
Who is Polygon Education?
Polygon Education is building the first consumer-facing end-to-end telehealth platform that enables psychologists to administer online assessments for learning differences with a primary focus on dyslexia via remote teleconference in effort to reduce the cost and time of getting an assessment. Having worked with Polygon to facilitate its goal of streamlining and automating the onboarding process for new clients.
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Goals and Objectives
- Development of a scalable and automated onboarding form design to ease the flow.
- Create a premium user experience that allows for a comfortable online environment during the onboarding process.
- Onboarding content development to emphasize a warm and open dialog during the user journey.
Problem Statement
New clients with possible learning differences or who have children with a learning difference need a simple and trustworthy way to share sensitive history information with a telehealth service provider in order to get the diagnosis they need to access the tools and resources that can help them succeed.
Guiding Questions
- How might we streamline the onboarding process by consolidating new client onboarding tasks and present it to users as a premium experience that educates and inspires trust?
- How might we automate the administrative portion of the onboarding process?
- How might we design a fully accessible experience that considers people with learning difficulties, ESL speakers and people with low-tech proficiencies in order to build in better scalability for the full life cycle of Polygon?
Analyzing these pages visually for accessibility purposes, these problems are found:
- Limited navigation mechanisms and complex page layouts that are difficult to understand and use.
- Complex sentences that are difficult to read and unusual words that are difficult to understand.
- Long passages of text without images, graphs, or other illustrations to highlight the context.
- No orientation cues.
- Very little visual and semantic white space.
- A feeling of being cluttered.
- Not much color contrast to separate foreground from background.
- Font is small with very little leading.
- Lack of clear and helpful error messages, errors on radio buttons cannot be undone.
- No opportunity for customization of visual preferences, which is important for those with dyslexia and ADHD.
System Usability Scale Score
Based on the initial our user interviews, the original onboarding acquired a SUS score of 67.55. This average score based on participant responses was an indication that the usability of these online forms was a high priority and needed to be fixed.
Comparative & Competitive Analysis
In the comparative and competitive analysis, we researched certain web services that required extensive and personal information from the user and the design choices they made to ease the sharing of those details.
User Survey
Polygon’s original onboarding process did not give users the option to create an account. Instead new clients have a unique url emailed to them to access each of the different portions of the forms - one each for the Release of Information, Consent, Payment, Scheduling, and History form portions. Giving new clients the ability to create a user account was one part of our prospective solution to automating and streamlining the onboarding process as well as giving users a sense of security over the sensitive information they shared with Polygon. To test this hypothesis before actually incorporating it into our design solution, we conducted a survey in order to assess user attitudes and preferences about this exchange of information online as well as broaden our understanding of user feelings and behaviors concerning long online forms.
View User Survey PDFThe Solution
Minimalistic approach to design to lighten cognitive load, and abide by WCAG standards with additional usability considerations for people with learning differences.
- Avoided visual clutter: redundant links, irrelevant images, and any extraneous typography flourishes that would slow users down.
- Kept to recognized UI patterns to further reduce cognitive load by familiarity.
- Conscientious in use of white space, contrast, and sizing of elements to not only meet but exceed WCAG recommendations.
Prototype
Based on user feedback the project we prioritized which features to include in our designs that would most effectively address our users’ greatest needs and frustrations, we constructed a table listing possible ideas and then ranked them as informed by our research in order to identify the most important features.
View Full PrototypeSeeing Results
Accessible design doesn’t have to be complicated. And telehealth onboarding forms can be more than a formal collection of information from the user that is visually austere and tedious and uninspired in tone. By simplifying the onboarding process and instilling the copy and visual design with a buoyant spirit and informative transparency, we were able to craft a user experience that’s welcoming and painless. And one of my favorite quotes from this phase of testing was -
Boom, boom, boom- it feels like an instantaneous sense of completion with one question per page.
Accessibility Research DocumentProject Learnings
1. Simplicity is strength
The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it.
2. Prioritize
Create a strategic plan to launch with the clients branding needs.
3. Seek out feedback early and continually
Collaborate closely with the development team to ensure the site is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust on both the front and backends of the design process and attend to any potential engineering constraints.
The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it.
2. Prioritize
Create a strategic plan to launch with the clients branding needs.
3. Seek out feedback early and continually
Collaborate closely with the development team to ensure the site is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust on both the front and backends of the design process and attend to any potential engineering constraints.