The Challenge
As a personal project, I designed a walkie talkie application, with one-handed accessibility in mind.
The Project
The project involved designing a walkie talkie application that was easy to use and also accessible to all different kinds of users
My Role
My role was to design, prototype and mock up the application. The various tools I used were, FlowMap for designing the userflow diagram. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for the creation of various graphical assets. Adobe XD was primarily used to create both the low and high fidelity wireframes as well as for prototyping.
Date
October 2021 to January 2022
Low Fidelity Designs
I began brainstorming some initial design ideas, by looking for inspiration. The idea was to keep things simple but also easy to understand and navigate.
I decided on allowing users to first create a profile for themselves. I designed this simply by using texts fields so users could input there information.
Next, I added a settings screen so that users can change various settings such as to add more users to the voice channel. In order to implement this, I added buttons to make user additions and removals easier. The buttons would then open another window with to form fields for users to input their information.
Finally for the main screen, I pondered multiple ideas I stared by placing a round button near the lower edge of the screen that users would have to press and hold in order you use the microphone as well as to record audio.
High Fidelity/Final Designs
Most applications like this require the user to hold down a button to talk. Although this is possible with one handed use, I also decided to come up with alternates that would also work.
I added a small UI feature that displays notifications each time a user activates one of the two main features or both. The UI also notifies users each time a new user has joined the channel.
As I was working towards the final iterations I decided to leave in the hold to talk and record audio feature. However, with accessibility in mind I decided to add toggle switches that users could simply tap to activate both the microphone and audio recording features.
The next set of screens were the user profile screen and the channel settings screen. On the profile screen users are able to edit their account information such as their profile picture, their username and email address.
On the channel settings screen, only the user who created the channel can control the number of users within the channel. This can be controlled using both available buttons to add and remove users.
However, there are features that are available to all users such as, the ability to save audio to their device storage as well as the ability to mute their microphone across the channel.
Images retrieved from unsplash.com
Self Reflection
While working on this personal project, I worked on maintaining and sharpening my design skills. I treated this project as a month long design sprint. With this project, I tried to focus on accessibility design mainly designing an application that users can comfortably use with one hand. Because of this, I kept my design choices and interactions very simple.
