Inspiration
When going shopping for beauty products, we usually browse products on either online or physical stores, look up its colors, shades, textures, compare prices, and maybe tryout before we decide to buy them or not. Unfortunately that would not be an easy task for people with blindness and visual impairment.
From a several conversations with people who are from completely blind to have some issues of navigation through due to limitation of their vision, we found out the biggest problem that they encounter, is the lack of accessible product information to make an informed purchasing decision.
We are shocked by how dependent they are to their friends, families to help them pick and choose beauty products. Whenever I do by themselves, the mistakes of buying wrong products due to misreading is inevitable. Some also express their frustration to return beauty products due to shopping policy
The saddest part is, there’re a large population of people with visual impairments, 2.2 billions individually, according to WHO, will encounter the same problem. An the number is rising due to the global increase of aging population.
Within this context:
How might we make the searching for beauty product more accessible, inclusive, and intuitive for these people?
What it does
We created Iris as a virtual shopping assistant, which can provide users an autonomy to find product information without asking for help from others
Iris is a web application on a mobile version that allow users to look up information for a specific product by voice command or search barcode. Later on, we plan to implement Wishlist where users can save their favorite products and Marketplace which lead users to common shopping sites such as Amazon, Shepora, Ulta.
Due to time-crunching and we are unable to develop the last two feature; however, I are proudly to present the two most important features that help users find a product, which is the first step helping them making purchasing decisions.
On the searching by bar code, the app will ask users their permission to access to their device camera to scan product barcode, and gather information from that product.
On the searching by voice command, users will say specific name of product and the app will be able to look a product from the internet, gather its information and present them in an organized way.
We also pay lots of attention to display product information in the most intuitive, frictionless, and easy method. At the product page, the categories bar act like an anchor tag that will navigate user to specific information.
We also make sure all the content present on our web application design follow WCAG standards so users, who either use screen reader or partially see the content, can easily read through information.
We foresee these features also help people with other disability such as physical disabilities and mental illness find this feature helpful because it require less cognitive loads and physical gestures as traditional steps of searching for beauty products.
How we built it
React for creating the website. Styled Components for styling the website. Vercel for deploying the website. Alan AI for voice command. Firebase for storing user's data
Challenges we ran into
- Understand in-depth problems that users encounter and find the best solution to make their shopping experience easier and better.
- Process a large amount of knowledge in a short period of time to apply into product development would be challenging and rewarding experiences to have.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Collaborative and teamwork spirit
- Be able to deliver well-functional product that is intuitive, accessible, and helpful for people with visual impairments
- How much efforts, time, and dedications of all team members invest in the project
What we learned
- We learn from working with each other, from their skillsets, ways of thinking, and working styles to make progress in our project
- Ability to learn a large amount of knowledge and how to apply them in real life.
What's next for Accessible Shopping Assistant App
In the future, we plan to develop two additional features: a Wishlist, where users can save products they are interested in purchasing, and a Marketplace, where users can make purchases for their saved products.
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