Results

Through a two-year engagement spanning design and strategy, I shaped both the product interface and its route to market.

• UX Overhaul: I designed a robust Onboarding & System Preferences flow. This allows users to front-load their accessibility needs, ensuring the app adapts to their specific capabilities immediately upon first use.

• Strategic Validation: Through the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program, I validated the product-market fit.

• Roadmap Definition: I defined a deployment strategy that bypasses direct costs to the user, ensuring the technology remains accessible while maintaining operational sustainability.

The Process

My work followed a dual-track process: Participatory Design followed by aggressive Customer Discovery.

Phase 1: Co-Design & UX (July 2023) - To ensure the app solved real-world friction, we embedded the community into the design process.

• Synthesis: Over five weeks, we synthesized data from 60 user interviews and 10 focus groups.

• Team Leadership: I helped lead workshops to train 30 team members in UX best practices, ensuring the engineering team understood the "Why" behind the design decisions.

• Execution: We found that users needed granular control over how navigation data was presented. I designed the preferences screen to allow users to toggle between haptic, auditory, or visual cues, and an onboarding flow to teach them how to maximize these features.

Phase 2: Commercial Strategy (NSF I-Corps) - The following year, I focused on the transition from research to market.

• Customer Discovery: I conducted over 100 interviews across the US with stakeholders in the assistive tech landscape.

• Economic Modeling: We recognized that high poverty and unemployment rates within the disability community made a standard B2C subscription model unethical and unviable.

• Strategic Pivot: I used this data to pivot our business case toward B2B or government-subsidized models, ensuring we could get the technology into hands without imposing financial constraints.

Opportunities for Improvement & Expansion

Looking back, I would deepen the integration of hardware and external partnerships:

• Venue Partnerships: I would aggressively pursue B2B partnerships with large venues (airports, malls, stadiums). Selling the service to the building rather than the user would solve the revenue problem while improving data accuracy.

• Hardware Integration: I would explore integrating with existing wearables (like smart glasses or haptic canes) to move the "Last Meter" feedback off the phone screen and into a heads-up or tactile experience.

• Community Ambassador Program: To scale adoption, I would formalize a "Super User" program, empowering early adopters in the blind community to teach others how to use the specific onboarding features I designed.