This is…
This is Ryan Dour who you will hear from later in this story. He served as a project guide, eval for the entire process, and spokesperson for the initiative. What resulted is a project I am very proud of even though we didn’t quite achieve our ultimate goal.
While Apple Park was still under construction, we along with the accessibility team quickly discovered the uniform nature would make if very difficult to navigate for anyone.
I did…
This story is a convergence story and how I rallied colleagues from within the maps team, accessibility team, Apple Park design leaders and other partners to collaborate on a great cause. I initially worked on the first UI for the Apple Watch and iPhone prototypes just to get everything up and running.
I also was involved with styling studies of the map in 3D, route line, and level styling once we exploded the floors for an interior route overview. Once I was able to pitch and convince the importance of what we were doing, I moved onto more Project Management and POC.
Deliverables
We created a working prototype that was successful at navigating those with visual impairments across a mall and eventually Apple Park.
Results
We achieved our goal of creating an application that would let someone who was visually impaired navigate from one part of Apple Park to another.
The details
I was lucky enough to turn the campus during the construction phase. As you can see, the place was massive. You could easily get lost in this space, especially during the construction phase.
There were a few landmarks planned for the exterior but from the interior halls, even the completed signage was typical of Jony Ives very minimalistic and subtle. There was a numbering system planned but good luck finding a conference room at a place this large when we first moved in.
So typical of my team, we connected various pieces we were already working on to create something for Apple Park. Starting with indoor positioning, we helped create an app to survey wifi access points at venues. This resulted in the ability to locate your position indoors at certain venues as GPS does not work well inside.
Using Unity, we then created a prototype to select a destination from a list and navigate there via walking.
To navigate we needed to create a routing graph. We could not follow a similar graph for driving because that is Dijkstra’s algorithm based. In car you typically cannot cut through blocks or corners because of the way roads are laid out. As a pedestrian you can go wherever you want so we created a new paradigm called polygonal routing. This resulted in a new patent!
To make this usable for Ryan we hooked up Siri Text to Speech. The visuals were great but it had to work even if you could not see the map.
Our first tests were at Valley Fair Mall since Apple Park was still under construction. Ryan historically would need the help of someone to find his destination. With the early prototype, it was amazing to see him take off and navigate this space on his own for the first time.
After proving this would work at Valley Fair the next step was to take on Apple Park.
So the prototype worked and out next goal was to get buy in to make it an official project for Apple Park and the maps organization in general. To do this we wanted to create a message with the help of my colleagues in Apple University. They handled the production and editing while a help craft the story. What you will see next is the spot we created for our pitch.
To accompany the video we updated out pitch deck and visual design of the app.
So, how do we design an inclusive user experience for the visually impaired?
- We wanted strong contrast. Dark backgrounds, with light, large text for legibility.
- Audio instructions can give confidence in providing guidance
- Continue to delight all users
- Choose colors that put colorblind users at ease
- Create an architecture with a clear sense-of-place
We continued to refine the prototype on site once Apple Park opened. This included expanding our eval to time of day changes and different parts of the campus.
Armed with this deck and video, I did a road show for leadership including Lisa Jackson and Dierdre O’Brien.
We also partnered with Food Services to include the navigation component to find your food once ordered.
And the product we created reached a good Alpha state. Ultimately we never got out of the prototype code base which doomed the ability to update. And while we didn’t quite reach the goal of an ongoing internal product for all Apple Employees, we took a lot of key elements for other Maps products down the road.