Co-Designing Interactive Apps with Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

The case study focuses on the use of participatory design practices to provide opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities (IDs) to contribute to the conversation in how technologies can best support them and their individual needs. This process involved a co-design exercise aimed at designing a mobile application to support people with IDs when using public transport. The process involved an exploration of the literature on inclusive design and universal design in mobile apps to create an initial prototype, which was brought to three exploratory group meetings engaging the participants with IDs in evaluating, modifying and updating the initial prototype. These group interviews also included stakeholders of the system (i.e. researcher, moderator, participants, carer/teacher). 

Following this a more detailed one-hour interview was undertaken with each participant, in the first half hour, the interviewer concentrated on engaging with the participants, getting to know them, and gaining knowledge about their current experience with public transport and mobile applications. During the interviews, the participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios exploring how they would cope with unexpected situations that can arise during journeys (such as getting lost or missing a bus). In the second half hour, the interviewer introduced the project design and let participants engage with either a paper-based prototype or a digital prototype, where they were regularly asked to use the “think aloud” protocol to share their insights and envision their own ideas. These interviews resulted in enormous insight, and more improved design. 

The key steps of the process in order to deepen the engagement of participants, were:  

1. The use of concrete initial digital prototypes as “probes” to initiate conversation. 
2. A non-finished feature designed for appropriation and to encourage user creativity. 
3. The explicit inclusion of carers as both proxies for communication but also co-designers. 
4. The use of easy-to-use development/prototyping tools to encourage co-development of changes during the sessions.