The Travel Buddy
While cities are typically seen as a world of opportunity, many autistic people find them overwhelming and exhausting. Our research shows that over 80% of autistic people struggle with unexpected interactions, noises, sounds, smells, lights, and disorder when attempting to navigate cities.
While every individual copes with stimuli in their own way, establishing consistent and utilizing successful coping mechanisms in these situations is simply another obstacle for autistic people already concerned enough with getting from point A to point B.
While cities have reemerged over the past decade as our cultural and financial nuclei, stimuli have only increased in prevalence and severity. Modern navigational tools still fail to address these needs.
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions
Survey data strongly suggests two central priorities of any solution — rapid avoidance of unexpected stimuli and natural assistance with coping during moments of increased anxiety. To strike an effective balance between these priorities for many users who all experience ASD differently, our product needs to meet three requirements:
First, it needs to be quickly accessible — the challenges we aim to solve are time-sensitive. Second, it needs to add absolutely no extra overhead to navigation or coping. Third, it needed to seamlessly integrate with — rather than disrupt — already-established habits.
With these objectives in mind, the Travel Buddy was born: A wearable “smart-watch” that provides visual navigation directions while putting heads-up assistance at the center of its’ design. Users can select navigation instructions on their smartphone at the beginning of their route and leave their phone in their pockets for the entire rest of the trip, while the Travel Buddy guides them to their destination.
Testing our Design
After settling on an initial design, our team drafted a paper prototype and began usability testing, where we asked participants to perform two tasks: First, they walked through the process of planning and executing a route involving a bus. Second, they were prompted by the Travel Buddy with suggestions and assistance in coping with stimuli.
Our participants were chosen because of their experience with travel anxiety and knowledge of how individuals with autism navigate. Additionally, we chose several participants because of their similar tendencies to autistic people (for example, having travel anxiety). The first participant was someone who experience anxiety when traveling, and typically chooses less interactive travel methods. The second participant was someone who was not typically familiar with using technology, and thus would be less familiar with the map interface. The third participant was someone who regularly deals with anxiety, especially when traveling.
As a result of our usability testing, we were able to catch some severe design flaws — for instance, some screens afforded no option to escape navigation or return to a previous view, and many screens used inconsistent styles, wording, or layout.
Additionally, while visual navigation was central to our design, it was surprisingly underutilized in the usability tests — participants cited lack of clarity in textual instructions and consistency in design as reasons why the use of visual directions seemed unintuitive.
In the final paper design, our team was sure to develop a standard checklist for the design of each screen — does it meet certain design specifications? Is the intent clear? Can users escape this interface? — before significantly improving upon our design. Crucially, we reorganized the ways in which users could interact with visual navigation to ensure it was central to the use of the Travel Buddy.
A Digital Draft
We decided to draft the Travel Buddy on Figma, in order to allow for users to get a real sense of the device’s rough appearance and interactivity.
While the Figma design appears to be an Apple watch, we intend for the Travel Buddy to be an affordable, stand-alone product that integrates biometric heart-rate sensors to detect overstimulation and anxiety-inducing situations.
The first core feature we implemented was navigation with stimuli avoidance. We support the user as they plan the route by providing tabs on the phone app to see heat maps superimposed on bus, driving, and walking routes so the user can compare and pick the route that is best for them. Users following a route are prompted with notifications about upcoming stimuli, and given the option to immediately re-route and resume navigation.
The second core feature we implement is coping. Biometrics on the watch gently notify users while en-route to inform them that their heart rate is increasing. If users choose to click on this popup, they can select from a list of coping mechanisms, including guided deep breathing, stimming, and navigational help for leaving the situation. When their heart rate lowers again, the watch notifies the user with a positive message.
The experience of drafting a digital, high-level design was incredibly helpful, forcing us to think actively about every design decision that was made. While it may seem like a relatively simple draft, many changes were made to earlier versions that are now reflected in the designs above. A full list follows:
- Phone UI: Addition of a highlight over currently selected transit mode (e.g. walking).
- Phone UI: Various design changes, such as color contrast (e.g. the Back or Send to Watch buttons, and the blue navigation bar) and clarity of text on top of the loud/bright area heatmap.
- Watch UI: We received feedback from our usability tests about adding a progress bar and time, so we added a bar at the bottom of our navigation screens with a person walking to show progress. We display both the current time and the time remaining for the route on the bottom next to the progress bar.
- Watch UI: For the screens accomplishing the task of using coping mechanisms to help someone be less overwhelmed we make the look of the different screens similar and consistent. We also made the initial notification of increasing heart rate be a smaller notification at the top of a screen overlaying the current screen so as not to cover the navigation as much. We also made the different coping mechanism options look more like buttons, since that was some feedback we received during testing.
- Watch UI: For the screen that is just the watch face we have included a navigation button where the user can use their watch to start navigation to common places that they go so that they do not have to always use the phone app to start navigation.
These two core design features are essential to making cities more accessible to autistic people — ensuring that everyone can meet the sensory obstacles that present themselves in order to experience all the comforts of modern cities to their fullest extent.
Final Thoughts
The process of surveying potential users and designing the Travel Buddy showed us that while it’s important to create accessible technology, it’s just as important to plan for the worst — that’s why we balance between avoidance and coping.
User surveys showed that, despite making frequent forays into or through cities, a large majority of autistic people dread their trips due to the navigational challenges they pose. Our hope is that, by designing for diversity, we can assist in reducing that daily dread by as much as possible.
