Penguine

Building a mobile first community for parents with disabilites

Camilo Lizarralde x Shreyans Baid

Building a mobile first community for parents with disabilites

Camilo Lizarralde;
Shreyans Baid

The Concept

The Penguine project aimed to create a virtual community platform for parents with disabilities, focusing on empowering caregiving and fostering connection. The project involved a comprehensive process of design, user testing, and strategic feature development to ensure accessibility, functionality, and inclusivity.

Impact

Conducted 15+ user interviews with parents with ambulatory disabilities, uncovering pain points in community access.
Mapped ecosystem interactions to identify key pain points and design a community-driven platform for accessible resource discovery.

Approach to Designing the Experience

After making strategic decisions based on user feedback and testing we set out to define our design approach to giving this community a face.

Curated : Resource hub

Curated :
Resource hub

Online resource hub for parents with disabilities. With a guided search feature where parents can narrow their search while being directed to the best match possible.

Online resource hub for parents with disabilities. With a guided search feature where parents can narrow their search while being directed to the best match possible.

Collaborative

Community Chat
Facilitated Support Groups
Peer to peer Mentorships

Accessible

Penguine collects the accessibility information from users and use it to provide curated connections, and verifications to safeguard community standards and build trust.

Penguine collects the accessibility information from users and use it to provide curated connections, and verifications to safeguard community standards and build trust.

Design Challenge

The challenge of designing Penguine was to build an accessible, emotionally resonant solution that not only supports parents with disabilities in caregiving but also fosters community through a curated virtual safe space for connection and shared experiences.

Web Inaccessibility:

98.1% of website homepages have detectable WCAG 2.0 failures, highlighting a widespread lack of accessibility compliance

[Source: WebAIM, 2023].

Navigation:

71% of users with disabilities report difficulty navigating online platforms due to poor structure, lack of keyboard accessibility, or unclear labels.

[Source: WebAIM, 2022].

71% of users with disabilities report difficulty navigating online platforms due to poor structure, lack of keyboard accessibility, or unclear labels.

[Source: WebAIM, 2022].

Inclusive Representation:

Inclusive
Representation:

A survey showed 64% of users with disabilities feel underrepresented or overlooked in community designs.

[Source: Level Access, 2023].

Feature Prioritization Workshop

Objective:

Prioritize the development of platform features based on their importance and frequency of use.

Method:

Workshop with other strategic designers. During the workshop, each participant assumed a specific user persona (e.g., Mother with disabilities, expecting mother, father with disabilities) and classify the platform features along two dimensions:

Frequency of Use: How often the feature is used by the target user persona.
Importance: How critical the feature is to the overall user experience of the platform.

Frequency of Use: How often the feature is used by the target user persona.
Importance: How critical the feature is to the overall user experience of the platform.

User Testing

Objective:

Identify usability issues: Discover areas on the website that are confusing, difficult to navigate, or frustrating for users to interact with.
Validate design decisions: Confirm that the website layout, functionality, and features align with user expectations and needs.
Prioritize improvements: Determine which usability issues have the greatest impact on user experience and should be addressed first.
Gather qualitative feedback: Collect detailed user opinions, thoughts, and feelings about the website's design and functionality.

Method:

Unmoderated and moderated usability testing

Unmoderated and moderated usability testing

Key Design and Accessibility Considerations

There are four main guiding principles of accessibility upon which WCAG has been built. These four principles are known by the acronym POUR for perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. POUR is a way of approaching web accessibility by breaking it down into these four main aspects.