Interaction Design, UI Design, Visualisation, 3D Modelling
Problem
Treadmills are not accessible for visually impaired people. With the current trend of fitness equipment going towards flat touchscreens and less tactile controls, equipment is becoming even less usable. This project investigates how the interaction between treadmills and visually impaired users can be rethought to improve the experience for all users.
Electronic fitness equipment in theory should be a great way for someone who is visually impaired to work on their fitness, due to the multitude of control options having a digital interface can afford a user. However inactivity is still rife in the VI community and feeling like their vision is a barrier to engaging with fitness is still a large barrier.
Simplified User Walkthrough
To understand the journey a visually impaired user must go through to use gym equipment currently, a walkthrough was created utilizing input from interviewees. This helped to establish areas for intervention in the interaction between the gym space, the user and equipment.
User Personas
As mentioned previously rigorous user research was conducted to buiild a strong representation of a visually impaired person’s user experience with gym equipment. With this in mind users were interviewed utilizing surveys and zoom interviews, to gain insight into the different needs and motivations of potential users of Versal’s treadmills.
Wireframes
Treadmill Screen UI Demo
When creating the prototype, having already established a structure for the UI, my main focus then switched to how I could make the elements on the page as legible as possible. Hence why a combination of bright green and dark grey was used to provide a strong contrast for visually impaired users to navigate through.
2D and 3D Development
Exploration of different ways to improve the functionality of the physical interface for treadmills. These designs were focused on decreasing the clutter seen on many current treadmill systems.
The final design tried to maintain a level of clarity that would translate to someone with minimal vision. Meaning ease of tactile navigation, button spacing and console wide audio feedback were the primary concerns of the final design process. As these features were flagged during the research process as greatly decreasing the usability of treadmills.
Demo of Audio and Tangible UI functionality.
A key part of the Versal Treadmill is the way in which controls interact with the audio navigation, this is partially demonstrated in this demo.
