Re:Seed
Introducing Reseed, a receipt storage platform built specifically with accessibility features for the visually impaired. Nowadays, technology is growing at a fast pace, while receipts are still in a gray area. We all know that receipts get harder to read after some time, and most end up in the trash if they are not saved for tax season. Especially when thinking about individuals with visual impairment they have an even harder time reading receipts, and many do not keep them.
Design Process
⭐️ Ideation & Solution Finding
⭐️ UX Research
⭐️ UX Design & User Journey Map
⭐️ Brand (Logo) Development
⭐️ UI Design & Prototyping
⭐️ Business & Marketing Strategy
⭐️ Testing & Execution
The Proposal
The main goal is to create a business idea and be able to help reduce inequalities.
Challenge
The challenge comes with finding out the technical feasibility, what kind of accessible designs fit best with our app, and scanner issues — whether the scanner recognizes the words on receipts and puts them together correctly.
Objective
The objective is to reduce inequalities among visually impaired people. People with visual impairment would store their receipts better for future use (tax season, return, refund… etc.) by using the ReSeed app.
Solution
The main idea is to create a digital application that stores people’s receipts digitally, especially for visually impaired people. The app will come with accessibility features, and the scanner in the app will use its artificial intelligence to recognize the words on each receipt to store a digital version. Moreover, the app will be making money off of subscription models and ads on the app.
Role
UX research — Iteration 1
Business Model — Iteration 2
Visual Design Iteration 3
Timeline: 3 months (January 2022 - April 2022)
Business
Business Model
Subscription Model
The features are designed reasonably and catered to audiences. The subscription plan is separated into the free account and the premium account. With the free account, our users are able to enjoy limited receipt scanning per week, whereas the premium users get unlimited scanning. Moreover, free account users are able to store up to 10 receipts, but unlimited storing receipts with premium users with just $10 dollars per month.
Advertisement
The other way of profit gain is advertisement. Free account users have the advertisement banner below our product. The companies we aim to advertise for are visual-related products specifically, but still open to others. Users will see different advertisements based on their location. Our advertising fee is charged per click by our users. Only $0.75 for pay-per-click since our company would also like to support local businesses.
Marketing Strategy
We plan to use online advertising, influencer marketing, workshops, and sponsorship to build brand awareness and recognition. We will be sponsoring events related to the visually impaired community and setting up booths or workshops in those events. Our advertising and promotion plan's objective is to increase the number of premium users, as it is our main income stream. Our goal is to boost the freemium conversion rate to around 40%. We are offering a 7-day premium user trial for all new users. Also, users can enjoy 2-month free when choosing the annual subscription plan.
Business Analysis
SWOT Analysis
PESTEL Analysis
UX Research
Primary Research
In our initial study, our research focused on understanding our users - people with visual impairment. After the study, we found the definition of visually impaired. Based on the definition, we research different kinds of visual impairment and the consequences of visual impairment. These consequences include personal effects for people with visual impairment as well as effects on social relationships. The second research goal of our research is to understand the tools that can help people with visual impairment. The first is Screen Readers, and the second one is the accessibility features on smart devices. Finally, we also studied physical products that can help people.
Research by Proxy
For the proxy research, we look at users’ reviews on the App Store and YouTube and also comments on Reddit. We discovered that the reason why visually impaired people need to use OCR app to scan documents instead of just taking a photo is because OCR app support voice-over, it can convert images into text and make the searching process more accessible. During the research, we also found out that visually impaired users did not notice that they took a blurry photo or did not scan the whole document. After the proxy research, we decided to add some new features to our product. First, we added a “Search by Item” to the “Find Receipt” page, and we also added a voice and vibration edge detection reminder to solve the scanning problem.
User Testing Results
After user testing, we found that all participants liked our intuitive and clean page design, which helped them to identify the interface elements. When participants used our MVP, we found that users could complete the tasks on their own smoothly in most cases. However, in the task that required participants to use the filter, all participants got confused. This was because the filter icon was designed to be small, and the participants could not see the internal details to confirm what this icon represented. This situation also occurred in our voice bar. Users could not associate the icon with voice assistance and thought it was more like an AI assistant like Siri or a volume adjustment button. In think-aloud, all participants mentioned that the back button in the upper right corner was uncomfortable for them.
We found this in a later review due to our clean UI and high-contrast color settings.
Visual Design
Logo Design
Initially, we had more elements & colors in the logo, then we constantly cleaned and simplified it to our final decision.
Design System
Since we are designing for a target audience of those who are visually impaired it was important that we had a design system that was consistent but was overall functional across our screens. We opted for one accessible font, a monochrome color palette with one accent colour and designed mainly using columns and occasionally grids. The colour palette was adjusted to be blue-based, and high enough contrast to pass contrast tests (minimum of 4.5:1 ratio or higher).
Screen Design
Design Decision
Overall, through three iterations, we started from a functional base to an aesthetically pleasing polish.
For iteration 1, the majority of visual design was focused on the functionality and figuring out the flow of the application. Due to this, the app's design looked very utilitarian, with large buttons, maximum contrast, and many colors. No conclusive design system has been established just yet.
IT2
For iteration 2, we took the functionality from iteration 1 and made it more aesthetically pleasing. We focused on fully flushing out a design system before re-iterating the screens.
IT3
Re-iteration focused mainly on re-iterating and adjustments from iteration 2. Fundamentally, iteration 3 doesn’t look all that different from iteration 2, but a lot of adjustments have been made, from the color palette to navigation bars, and new screens and flows have been introduced to create a more flushed MVP.
Demo below:
ReSeed Prototype Demo