Visitors interacting with an exhibit.

Developing Attune, a tool for enhanced care for people impacted by dementia

Duration

Skills

Jul-Aug 2024

UX, UI
Service Design
User Research
Project Management

Individuals who have dementia can face challenges in expressing themselves and their personal history, resulting in insufficient person-centred care and reduced quality of life.

Attune fosters mindful documentation of memories throughout life, enabling joyful experiences and enhanced person-centred care for people living with dementia.

My role

Organisation

Role

Teammate

MA Final Project

Product & Service Designer

Claire Henery

As the product designer, over 4 sprints, I led the complete redesign of the Wellcome Collection's Digital Guides to enhance accessibility. Early results indicate significant improvements in their usability and user satisfaction, with further user research planned.

Challenge

The guides faced several usability challenges: navigation favored audio descriptions over BSL guides, audio players stacked on a single page caused slow loading and UI confusion, and the audio player didn’t meet WCAG accessibility standards, to name a few. Additionally, the visual language felt disconnected from the rest of the Wellcome Collection site.

With no UX researcher on the team, I took on the research role, compiling the above insights through HotJar tracking, old studies, and a competitive analysis.

How might we enhance the guides to better support gallery visitors, including those with hearing and visual impairments, while keeping device load minimal?

Key insights

The desk and field research uncovered major usability issues and provided a framework for how other institutions address similar challenges.

This helped me form key insights on how we can improve the guides:

Add visual cues for easier wayfinding

Users need visual cues of exhibits to easier navigate the guide.

Improve navigation between guides

We need to allow users to easily choose their preferred guide type.

Make audio player UI accessible

The UI needs to consider accessibility in UI sizing, typography, colours&contrast.

Improve guide comprehension

We need to offer users the option to view transcripts while listening to the audio.

Ideation

I designed the guides iteratively, while working closely with the developers on my team to ensure their feasibility.

Below: early user flow diagram exploration

Design solution

The new guides address visitor pain points we set out to fix, while providing a sleek experience for users, both in the gallery and across the world.

Improved navigation

Indicate what type of aid you need and navigate the exhibit easily with your digital guide.

New audio player experience with transcripts

Listen to the fascinating voices of the artists and curators and read along.