Travel Hands

Travel Hands App enables visually impaired people (VIP) to find verified makeup artists or enthusiasts nearby to assist them in putting makeup.

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Inspiration

Travel Hands Charity is built to ease the outdoor commute of VIP by pairing them with sighted & verified volunteers to walk together to similar destinations ensuring a safe, convenient, and inexpensive travel experience. Travelling safely, cheaply, and independently is incredibly challenging for the 285 million Visually Impaired People (VIP) worldwide. Covid-19 has made it even harder for them to move around in the city as they might require physical assistance to navigate. There are 42,300 VIP in London and 360,000 all over the UK trying to find a solution to the problem.

We surveyed our community of 170 VIP Travel Hands users to identify their challenges in accessing beauty products and putting on makeup. Sharing some of the touching feedback from the responses:

  1. People think just because blind women can’t see, they don’t care about what they look like. This is completely incorrect.
  2. I want to put makeup on so that I look like a mature and well-informed professional lady ready to take on the challenges as others do. It boosts my confidence.
  3. I would like to go to the store to understand what the products can do and then choose the ones I like. I always have that one person from the store to help me choose the product that is more accessible or easily identifiable to me, such as products with different shapes or tactile.
  4. I normally would have someone do eyeliner for me because I cannot do it very well myself.
  5. I often exchange my makeup products with my friends, which definitely helps our friendship. We read magazines together and even try new products on each others’ faces.
  6. When my husband and my mom are not around, I have to call them through FaceTime to get feedback on my makeup. I usually have a hard time zooming in and out for a specific part of my face. And the light condition affects the automatic exposure of my camera which makes my face look a slightly different color. I would prefer more personalized feedback from their friends and family if they are available.
  7. I have experienced that a random person came without any background knowledge or even vocabulary of makeup while I use BeMyEyes for help. I wish they could pre-filter some people based on my needs.

What it does

MakeUp with Travel Hands is an additional feature in the application where VIP can find sighted and verified volunteers to assist them physically with makeup activities. These volunteers will either be makeup enthusiasts or professionals interested to provide their time. The volunteers can help put on makeup or verify if it is done correctly. VIP can also book a volunteer's time for assisting them to buy makeup products from the nearby store. Every activity or journey will record feedback from the experiences, which can be shared with the beauty brands for user research and product accessibility improvements.

With the Travel Hands app, a VIP can submit a trip request that is automatically sent to a volunteer near them, alerting the volunteer to their location. The accepting volunteer will then come and pick the VIP up and walk towards the requested destination. The VIP pay for the service and Volunteer help in a flexible way and walk more. Volunteers are vetted through Enhanced DBS, and trained by us. As a thank you, they receive reward incentives based on the distance walked with VIP through affiliate corporate partners. Beauty brands can join us especially to reward the volunteers who assist VIP in MakeUp with Travel Hands.

How we built it

I have a degenerative eye disease that introduced me to the world of blind or partially sighted people. Luckily, my eyesight has improved manyfold times but the experience has inspired me to improve the lives of VIP as we like to refer to them. As the first step in this direction, I published a white paper in 2018 for my MA in Service Design degree from the University of the Arts London (UAL) on the topic, “How to increase employability for the VIP in the UK?”. Volunteering with the Blind Aid charity helped define the problems; thus, VIP World Services Limited was born. The VIP community shared their outdoor travelling challenges and the idea of Travel Hands was born accidentally in a social activity.

The service launched in May 2021 in London, in the form of a call centre, with 350+ journeys completed, 170 VIP sign-ups, and 78 active volunteers. This has helped us to gain experience and validate major assumptions. The algorithm of the mobile app is created from learnings and feedback from these journeys. We have initiated a pilot for ‘MakeUp with Travel Hands’ with the ladies in our community and received some initial feedback from them.

Challenges we ran into

We faced multiple challenges along the way; Lockdowns severely disrupted plans, cofounders quit, VIP did not want to go out after the pandemic. But, we have managed to navigate through each hurdle. For MakeUp with Travel Hands, a set of new volunteers had to be contacted and explained ways they can add value to assist in putting on makeup. We ensured them that this generally would involve picking up the right shade, describing the labels on the products, ensuring that VIP applies not too much or too little of the product and finally commenting on the final end result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The web-based application and mobile app have been designed following the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and following user research and testing with our VIP community. We have tested the technology with our signed-up users and submitted the apps to Android and iOS app stores. To develop my business, I was awarded the Start-Up Visa (2019) by UAL and Innovator Visa (2021) by Innovate in Britain. Despite lockdowns, we persisted in testing Travel Hands, creating a positive impact, winning Innovate UK and Sport England grants and winning the Global Design Challenge 2022.

We have managed to register Travel Hands as a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) in the charity commission in the UK. (charity no. 1201509)

What we learned

We have iterated the service based on the learning and created our safety measures, training module and base of the mobile app. Our VIP users have used Travel Hands for shopping experiences and feel that the service has helped them to navigate up, and down the beauty aisle easily as all the products are usually close to each other. The volunteer helps to guide through various brands easily. On the MakeUp with Travel Hands pilot, we received feedback such as more makeup-related meetups will increase confidence and make us more likely to play with and enjoy the makeup process. Makeup becomes a way to connect VIPs with other people, specifically to form friendships with women.

What's next for MakeUp with Travel Hands

We will continue our pilot for 2 months and collect feedback. Based on the response from the audience, we will iterate the feature and add this to the mobile app. Following this, we have to define the pricing for this activity and the business model when VIP contacts a professional makeup artist through the app. In the future, we would love to add people with disabilities who use Travel Hands for their outdoor travel and other activities such as assistance with beauty and makeup.

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