Making Everyday things easier for the Colourblind
This project was done over a stretch of 5 weeks, where it revolves around studying and understanding the difficulties faced by colourblind people in their everyday life. The effort was to consider their pain points and explore how design could make their everyday life much easier.
UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT
Colour is the characteristic of human visual perception. This perception of colour derives from the stimulation of cone cells in the human eye by electromagnetic radiation in the visible.
Colour-blindness is the inability to distinguish the differences between certain colours. This condition results from an absence of color-sensitive pigment in the cone cells of the retina, the nerve layer at the back of the eye. Most of the colour blind people are able to see things as clearly as the other product but they are unable to fully see red, green or blue light. There are different types of colour blindness but the most common is the red- green colour blindness. there are also extreme cases where people are unable to see any colour at all.
Types of colorblindness
Trichromacy (Normal vision), Protanomaly (reduced sensitivity to red light), Deuteranomaly (reduced sensitivity to green light), Tritanomaly (reduced sensitivity to blue light), Dichromacy (red/green)
People with dichromatic colour vision have only two types of cones which are able to perceive colour i.e. they have a total absence of function of one cone type. Lack of ability to see colour is the easiest way to explain this condition but in actual fact it is a specific section of the light spectrum which can’t be perceived.
There are three types of Dichromats:
- Protanopes are more likely to confuse — Black with many shades of red, Dark brown with dark green, dark orange and dark red, Some blues with some reds, purples and dark pinks, Mid-greens with some orange.
- Deuteranopes are more likely to confuse — Mid-reds with mid-greens, Blue-greens with grey and mid-pinks, Bright greens with yellows, Pale pinks with light grey, Mid-reds with mid-brown, Light blues with lilac.
- Tritanopes The most common colour confusions for tritanopes are light blues with greys, dark purples with black, mid-greens with blues and oranges with reds.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Colorblindness in Everyday Life…
Simple daily tasks are made more difficult when you have color blindness. Just getting dressed in the morning can pose a problem for choosing colors that match. Even driving can be problem as the red and green colors of a traffic light will be in the wrong position. Cooking can be frustrating for anyone with color blindness. If you’re unable to differentiate between colors it can be difficult to determine when some foods are cooked or when fruits are ripe. When it comes to career choices, there are some professions that may not be an option for you as they depend on accurately perceiving color. This includes professions such as graphic design, piloting an airplane, or any other career where it’s essential that colors are correctly recognized and identified.
DATA ANALYSIS
Taxonomy mapping:
This mapping was done to understand the analyse the collected data through different entities that make the sense of data and help in the formation of initial ideas.
Brainstorming of ideas
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY AND CO — DESIGN
Contextual inquiry and co — design was done with two of my friends who are colourblind and are pursuing their masters in design background. This was done to understand the difficulties these two individuals face in their everyday life.
Story of Anand
Anand a friend of mine who is colourblind often finds difficulties in his daily life mainly when it comes to food. He always says that, when a cuisine or a food item consists of too many colors the food does not feel visually appealing to him and he often lands up not eating many times. When asked him about the toiletries in his house or malls when he goes to shopping, an interesting insight that he gave me was that he looks for symbols and to identify specifications to identify a product. As nowadays even the text on few of the bottles get camouflaged with the liquid present inside the bottle which makes the identification difficult.
Story of Siddharth
Siddharth another friend of mine who is colorblind too told me that he often finds difficulty in wearing clothes that suit him the best. He normally wears a jacket on top most of the time as he is conscious if the shirt and the pant are suiting each other. Especially during festive times where the ethnic dresses are normally of bright colors he gets frustrated at times and ends up wearing a white kurta. When asked him about the toiletries he confessed that he has actually named each of the product with a piece of paper and has stuck on it to avoid confusion.
Contextual inquiry was also done with common people with normal vision, by targeting a little older group of people to understand if they find certain difficulties in their everyday lifestyle keeping in mind concept of colourblindness.
Few elders of age group between 50–65 years also told me that, they find it difficult while shopping in supermarkets. The section where it comes to house products, that is fully color coded and they get confused with toiletries and cleaning products since many of them look similar. To validate this I went to the nearby supermarkets to do shadowing, from where I found out that these insights actually turned out to be true and i found few common people as well struggling to find products. After all this research I found that my concept came out to serve the purpose and I went back to validate this with Anand and Siddharth to validate the same. They too said that this would work out well and would be literally helpful to other people as well. That is when I thought of making this concept ‘universal’.
DESIGN THINKING
WHY?
It is a known fact that colourblind people find difficulty in identifying colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel and there vision is often overlapped with colours. They often find difficulty in recognizing various products that are used in everyday life. The packaging of the products are often very colour coded and the text too sometimes get camouflaged with the packaging as well as the product inside it. Based on the research few insights were also derived as the not only colourblind people it is few of the common people ( especially elders ) also face problems and confusion in recognizing different products used for various purposes.
WHAT?
‘Design of icons with various graphics that represent different products of toiletries respectively, that makes it easier to differentiate these products both for the colourblind and the common people without any confusion’.
HOW?
We often see people getting confused in supermarkets while buying the cleaning products and toiletries as most of the packaging and colours look similar. There is often a confusion with toiletries that are of same usage but different brand.
For example, The face wash, shaving cream and a shampoo look similar in appearance as the shape of the bottles are almost same and also the colours. These icons that would be used as stickers and tags in malls and supermarkets and also will be embossed on products would help people differentiate the products easily. These icons will either represent the product itself or the purpose it serves which will make it easier for the users for identification.
IDEATION
After the formation of the idea I started building upon the design outcome through persona and empathy map based on the insights formed from contextual inquiry and co -design.
EXPLORATION
After building upon the whole concept of designing icons for easy recognition of toiletries, product-semantics activity was conducted to understand how different people of various age groups associated/ identify the icons with certain toiletry products.
For this activity, various different icons for products such as toothpaste, mouth freshener , shampoo, face wash, shaving cream, hand wash were selected. The above mentioned products was selected in particular in order to understand if people get confused with shampoo and conditioner, hand wash and hand sanitizer and similar products as such.
The icons were printed in the form of cards and people were asked to segregate them into groups such as most typical, typical and atypical.
AVERAGE TYPICALITY MAP
This map represents the placement of icons in the form of a graph where 1 stands for most identified icons (most typical), 0 stands for less identified icons (typical) and -1 stands for least identified icons (atypical).
KEY OBSERVATIONS
The key observation made was people recognize images with the product and the purpose of the product rather than just the images of the product or its purpose. People were not able to recognize few icons a it looked very different to them. Understanding of the experiment was people either recognize the product correctly or they do not recognize at all. Confusion created by the images was comparatively less.
People do associate products with icons. They do find it easy to differentiate products with icons. But the icons need to be bold and place on the face of the tube right below the name of the product.
MOVING FORWARD
Tags printed with such icons would be helpful to organize products at homes and hotels. Icons being placed on the product bottles would suffice much more that stickers. But stickers in malls used on broads for organizing would be even better in helping people for shopping. In this way the design could be made simple, recognizable and universal irrespective of normal vision or colourblind vision.
END NOTE
As an experience designer I have tried to understand the problem by selecting one of the least attended sectors i.e colourblindness. I have tried to address the problem at my best during the length of a 5 week project and provide solution keeping in mind the concept of ‘Design For All’.
I hope you enjoyed reading my work and the entire journey of design process. Your comments and feedback are most welcome, so please do share your thoughts.
You can reach me on — shalinign.vasist@gmail.com
Thank you!
