Navigating a city.
Without sight.

Directions were only part of the problem.

Reaching a destination meant continually interpreting an environment: confirming a bus stop, noticing an approaching bicycle, finding a building entrance, or responding to construction on a familiar route. A cane, a guide dog, a phone, and remembered landmarks each provided different pieces of that picture.

Our early work focused on outdoor urban navigation, primarily in Seattle. The plan prioritized working adults who traveled through the city and older adults adapting to sight loss. We wanted to understand how people combined tools and learned techniques—and where information was still missing.

How might we improve the experience of navigating cities without sight?

The team’s design question, recorded on page 8.

The intended direction was to complement existing navigation tools. The question was what additional information would help a traveler act safely and independently, and how to communicate it without competing with the senses they already relied on.

A seven-stage journey, with a loop inside it.

The journey map gave the team a common structure for discussing nonvisual travel. It also revealed why navigation was not a simple sequence: encountering an obstacle could send someone back into the work of establishing situational awareness.

1. 01

   Planning

   Find accessible crossings, mark places, and compare ways to travel.

2. 02

   Receiving directions

   Follow route segments and control the pace of guidance.

3. 03

   Situational awareness

   Understand the surrounding space and ask for more detail.

   PROJECT FOCUS
4. 04

   Obstacle detection

   Notice an obstacle, its dimensions, and whether it is moving.

   PROJECT FOCUS
5. 05

   Mode change

   Find an alternative route and assess its accessibility.

6. 06

   Last mile

   Locate an entrance or recognize that the destination is near.

7. 07

   Arrive / reflect

   Record useful details and save the route for another trip.

Find the gap around tools people already used.

The team compared Aira, Be My Eyes, WayFindr, and BlindSquare across navigation tasks, data sources, connectivity, and feedback. This was a March 2020 landscape assessment, rather than a current product comparison.

That review helped focus the project on situational awareness and obstacle detection. The aim was to enhance the surrounding tool ecosystem while investigating other ways to deliver useful environmental information.

View the original competitive matrix +

Participants as experts.
Designers as facilitators.

None of the team members were blind or visually impaired. The plan therefore positioned participatory design as a way to involve people with lived expertise throughout research, ideation, prototyping, and evaluation.

The methods were intended to build on one another: interviews with travelers and subject-matter experts would inform experience-based surveys; shadowing would reveal behavior in context; co-design sessions would turn participant priorities into requirements and prototypes.

Three proposed rounds of co-design

The team planned three participants and four researchers per session, with time between sessions to revise the prototypes. These were recruitment and scheduling targets, not verified attendance.

At the start of each session, participants were to revisit the design question and requirements. The plan defined success through continuing alignment between participant needs and product features, rather than through a predetermined technical solution.

A cross-functional team.

I was named UX Research Lead, with responsibility for research and usability. The plan brought that role together with product design, accessibility and content strategy, and project management. These are the roles recorded in March 2020; they are not claims of sole authorship over the team’s work.

The plan is recovered.
The final chapter is still coming.

The plan was issued March 20, 2020, with a planning horizon through June 12. It called for successive requirements lists, design specifications, low- through high-fidelity prototypes, and a final process book. Its schedule also named progress reports, a video, and a poster.

The existing portfolio account describes a later pandemic adaptation: a game-based remote research method that could travel to participants when in-person work became impossible. That account is retained here as later context; this planning PDF does not document the game or its results.

Archive synthesis: the recovered plan makes the project’s central tension visible—providing more situational information while protecting a traveler’s attention and agency. Evidence of how the team resolved that tension belongs in the final-stage materials.