Thank you for being to hear about our amazing design: TellMe an app for accessibility created by Deisy as a web developer, Taha as UX designer and me as UX strategist.

Image that one day, you wake up as usual and as soon as you open your eyes you start experiencing dry eyes and the itching sensation is unbearable. Then you go to the kitchen to prepare your morning yummy coffee and you realized that you're having an episode of cloudy and double vision.
So you go to the doctor and he said that you have an eye infection and your optic nerve is swelled up, so you have to take antibiotics and stay blinded for 3 months.
How would your life change?
Your routines, your behaviors, the way how you interact with the world will be totally different, right?

So this is exactly what millions of people have to face regularly. Trying to access to simple things like withdraw cash at the ATM, shopping groceries, ordering food or re-loading the presto card, it's a huge effort to obtain what they need because they have to deal with touchscreen devices.
And that means that not only people with sight issues but people with tactile issues, Parkinson illness or any mobility issues.

We concluded that the best way to provide access to our users is by using voice commands.
That's why we call to our app: TellMe. Simple, friendly and with some sort of oracle character.
So TellMe is basicly a detection system. It identifies places around the user and describe the details, and help them to navigate into the options of that specific place.

The detection system is connected to the places by using RFID chips located at the places (restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums, etc), TellMe app will sense the places make them discoverable and triggering the app to provide the information to our users about what they are offering (menu, movie listing/times, events, gallery shows, etc).

As I mentioned the voice recognition feature will resolve the actual problem of our target audience. So anyone that has any kind of trouble using touchscreens will love the app.
However during the usability testing the participants said that they would use the app even without having issues because it is easy to navigate specially when you are driving or with your hands full.

The RFID technology is an innovative, viable and feasible way to include more places to be discoverable by the app and that could also provide revenue opportunities to the businesses while give more access to our users.

And another really good characteristic of TellMe is that users won't be overwhelmed by the tons of options that they might have. The cognitive load will be less because TellMe will only show them nearby destinations.

In the future, TellMe will call to action, not only helping the users to get access but increasing the engagement of those users with the places that join to the app.
More customization options will be provided by linking the app to the social media feed the information provided will be more personalized to their interests and adding command options to detect a specific category of places and narrowing down the search using their personal account.
The customization options relates also to the settings per se like male or female voice or the speed.
And we need to explore other ways to detect places rather than RFID to increase the range that the app can cover.

Since the prototype tool did not have the voice command feature, we performed the usability tests using the paper prototyping principles.

And we not only found that the participants actually liked the app and due to we asked them to close their eyes to conduct the test they felt vulnerable but at the same time it was nice knowing and being part of this kind of developments for accessibility, understanding that anyone could be in that position.

So 4 key insights came up from the tests, where they mentioned that it was no option to go back or repeat the menu because they forgot it.
They also said that they was not sure if the app understood or not what they said so they didn't know the status of their command.
They said that it would be nice to have customization options such as male voice or female voice and speed voice settings.
And the last one which is really important, It's the fact that we need to teach them somehow the trigger word because at the beginning they won't know that "Hey, TellMe" is the trigger.

And now Taha will show you guide you to the wow effect of TellMe.