Access Israel Organization

Small-business owners in Israel:

Basic input:

Based on set of interviews, including small to medium businesses that serve clients on-site: Hairdressers and Barber-shops, bars, small restaurants and private clinics, mostly in central urban areas (Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem).

• Operate in constant "Survival mode": highly taxed, heavily regulated, often reliant on frequently changing personnel and external suppliers.
• Many businesses operate from rented rather venues rather than owned ones.
• Most businesses Plan for approximately two years ahead max.
• Have Limited understanding of accessibility as a field and view it as a "black box" (repeating quote from 2 interviews). Intimidated by the cost & complexity of the accessibility process.
• Rely heavily on social networks for advertising and fear shaming.
• Recognize the importance of subject, identify with the need, as well as seeing a potential in expanding their clientele.
• Interested in being on "good side" of society.

Current user journey:

The journey at point of departure is mostly an intimidating experience, getting clearer as the business owner become more envolved. It begins with ordering (and paying for) an accessibility consultant, who surveys the place, negotiate professionals to conduct the modifications (consultants often connect businesses with their own people).

Proposed user journey (two phases):

1. Disintermediating the accessibility consultants from the early phase. Enabling small business making the initial accessibility check by themselves (final approval still requires a professional):

2. Building a marketplace of verified professional accessibility service providers. Eliminating the pain points on phases 3-4, providing the business owner a transparent and informed ground to make decisions on, and means to streamline everything, under his control, as one seamless process (conditioned on the feedback gathered from phase 1):

Why is a Self-Check needed?

Business owners perspective:

• Reduces costs of an overall expensive procedure.
• “Hands On”. Involvement and control over the process.
• Saves time.

Organization perspective:

• Short term: Reduce overhead pressure on the organization by disintermediating the human consultants from first process phases.
• Long term 1: Encourage businesses compliance with accessibility regulations.
• Long term 2: Building accessibility-awareness and understanding within the business community (Conversion of business owners to ambassadors).

Optional solutions considered:

• a Simple Google Form was considered as most basic solution in terms of costs and schedule. Problematic aspects were possible high friction due to the long list of inputs, and lack of users trust to enter private business data into a platform that might look sketchy.
• Online branded experience was the middle-weight (and eventually selected) solution, that will guide business owners through manually filling the form, and streamline the experience to reduce friction as much as possible.
• Native mobile app was brought-up as high-end option, that will include sensor-supported measuring through the app, to increase accuracy of the input.

Design Principles:

• Reduce friction as much as possible:

  Short questions. Clear inputs. Many small content pieces over few massive ones. Auto-save frequently.

• Educate:

  Include rule and reasoning available for every question.

• Mobile first:

  Consider users will be walking around the location measuring and checking things.

• Gamified, yet accessible:

The entire flow retained AA compliance, yet provided constant rewarding feedbacks in educating, yet playfull tones.

Main experience challenge:

Friction: It is a Very long survey. We were looking for ways to streamline user-flow through all phases, in the most seamless way possible.

Design Goal:

Business Owner will be able to complete full survey,
by using any single input source (Mouse/ Keyboard navigation/ Touch),
without typing.

Basic Information Architecture:

The entire accessibility survey- dozens of questions originally filled into a Microsoft Word document or plain paper- was categorized by physical domains of business location (parking, entrance, elevators, office, toilet, etc.), each forms a chapter in the survey, and validated by several user-tests as a mental model.

Layout and Prototyping:

The mobile layout allowed quick toggling between views of each survey input and a short illustrated data regarding the relevant standard to be met:

The Desktop layout conveyed the reasoning behind each check, by using the additional space to display the two views aligned in a split screen, one next to the other:

High Fidelity UI:

Mobile high-fidelity design

Desktop high-fidelity design:

Visual content: Isometric illustrations

Set of explenatory illustrations was prepared, to support each accessibility domain with visual representation. Isometric style was chosen in order to convey the clearest principle of each section, highlight important elements, alongside with making the visuals less opened for interpretations and the experience as a whole more fun and playful.

Interaction Design

Interaction design for the survey included frequent motion feedback over the potentially tedious survey, With clear switch-off option.

End Product