TJ.
Wayfinding App Poster

Wayfinding App for the Visually Impaired

This app was created as part of my final semester, a project where we worked in teams with a real client to create a functional app in 3 months. Our client was Ingenium, a Canadian Crown corporation that owns three national museums in Ottawa: the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum and the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Their goal was to create a wayfinding application to help the blind and visually impaired within the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum (CASM), taking advantage of IoT devices and the STQRY template. I was the user design lead for this project. The project went through all stages from conception, to design, to building, to user testing at the physical location.

STQRY is a content management service that allows you to build PWA and native apps. Particularly, you can create guided tours, collection lists, maps, and other useful media related to museums. Ingenium wished to use this platform so that what was developed for the CASM could easily be transferred over to their other museums in the future. We learnt this medium from scratch, and were even able to get in contact with one of the lead developers in New Zealand to discuss the app and get access to the API for easier development. In my user testing using screen readers, we were able to find some issues with the apps interactions with VoiceOver and submit these problems to the company for review in their next accessibility audit.

The IoT devices we did testing with are Bluetooth Beacons and NFC tags. The original plan was to place the Bluetooth Beacons within exhibits, where users that have activated the tour would be able to simply walk nearby them to activate them. While this worked in classroom testing, we found that within the museum there were problems, particularly with Android devices. It’s theorized the main problem is that the metal of the building and aircrafts interfered with the beacons. However, the testing we did with the devices is still very good and could theoretically be used within other museums in the future. For the CASM, we ended up using NFC tags to activate tour stops instead. While requiring more user interaction than beacons, they are still easier for those with little or no vision to activate with proper accessible signage, as it just requires tapping the phone rather than QR codes requiring the camera be properly lined up.

A fully functioning and tested app was passed over to Ingenium in April for their further development, such as adding French language support. While I cannot provide access to the app here, below is a YouTube video showing off the functionality and design.

Youtube thumbnail

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