Vägen till körkortet
Helping driver’s licence students to navigate and plan their road to success with system and visual redesign.
UX Research • UX/UI Design • Industry-based project • Accessibility
At-A-Glance
The platform initiative, Vägen till körkortet (en. The road to the driver’s licence), was a collaboration between the Swedish transport administration authorities, Transportstyrelsen and Trafikverket. They began to create a platform for both driver’s licence tutors and students, to guide them through the driver’s licence process.
Goal: to test the current prototype and deliver an accessible redesign and map out a new target group, dyslexic users.
My role & responsibilities
UX Research: Interviews, Usability testing, Think Aloud Protocol, Explorative Research, Persona, User Journey Map, Affinity Diagram
UX/UI Design: Brainstorming, Affinity Diagram, Conceptualisation, Wireframes, Paper and Hi-fi Prototyping
Project context
Clients: Trafikverket + Transportstyrelsen
April 2021, Industry-based project
Course: Universal Design @MDU
Team: Karolina Meijer, Pakezea Anwar, Sarina Reza.
Tools
Pen & paper, Figma, Miro, recording.
Problem + Challenge
Driver’s licence students in Sweden are failing their driving tests due to insufficient preparations, dropping 11% in 10 years.
The ongoing trend of students failing their driver’s tests, pointing towards insufficiencies in their test preparations was one of the main causes of the website initiative.
Challenge: However, Swedish authorities aren’t allowed to teach, just inform as teaching is monopolised for the private sector. How can we still support students?
Our solution
Visualising progress and goals help students stay on track with preparations, before & after breaks.
Track your progress with integrated systems and visualisation
Using the identification app BankID, the website is integrated with Trafikverket and Transportstyrelsen, saving documentation and update you on upcoming events.
Track and manage your own progress without going through another “creating your own profile” process.
All of your information stays the same, even when life gets in the way.
Multimodal solutions for accessibility
Visual feedback and signifiers to show progress, e.g experience bar, colour-shifts on completion and checkmarks
Text spacing, size, and colours for UI-elements are WCAG 2.1 controlled for readability.
Audial and visual solutions let you decide how to learn.
Consistent visual language support recognition rather than recall.
Buttons and new sections have explanatory text
Creating a community
What do I need to remember at the driver’s test? Get tips and tricks from those who has been on the same path as you!
When the road gets bumpy and uncertain, listen to the collected stories from earlier students and tutors.
Got a question you can’t find the answer to? Ask our support.
Research
Our research was divided into two phases, with tests being recorded and transcribed:
Getting to know and understand our users and after mentoring, the decision to change our scope from dyslexic tutors and students, to driving students overall, but with an accessible perspective.
After analysing our first findings and creating our persona + user journey map. This is where we backed up our findings with scientific data and explored competitive solutions who tackled similar emotional states as our persona.
Usability test of current prototype (4)
Users were left with ‘a wall of text’, in need of visuals from testing stakeholder prototypes
To gain a picture of how the current prototype was holding up for our dyslexic users we conducted a usability test and think aloud with dyslexic students and tutors. Even though the content was well-written, our tests showed a low user engagement, with the users feeling cognitive overload and having no visual anchors.
Example of two pages tested in the stakeholder prototype for desktop.
User interviews (8)
Returning driver’s licence students find themselves feeling lost and anxious in their own driving journey
The usability tests left us with a good idea of improvements for the prototype, but how did the typical user journey look like? How did they get information? What were some challenges in getting a licence? We interviewed current and recently finished students, and organised the answers into an affinity map.
“I feel stressed because I don’t know where to start again and I can’t fail this time around. How much will this cost me in the end?” - Student
Research questions
How has your driver’s licence journey looked like?
How do you feel about your journey so far?
What motivated you to start?
How do you get information about the different stages of getting a driver’s licence?
What kind of support would you have wanted?
Persona + User Journey Map
Creating empathy by visualising findings to stakeholders: The emotionally burdened student
After analysing our findings with an affinity map, we needed to communicate them to our stakeholders for us to have a shared view and perhaps gaining insights from their own research. We created our persona Zafirah and her user journey, labeled by emotional state rather than disability.
Brainstorming + Paper prototype & test
Users wanted to know the ‘why’ behind their actions
To keep our ideas in an accessible scope, I suggested that we would first categorise the ideas under the 7 principles of Universal Design and then assemble them into main ideas: Accessible to all, motivations, stress-reducing, knowledge and economy. I created a paper prototype for mobile to test our ideas and noticed the users actions and context needed to be explained.
Shifting perspectives
The way we viewed accessibility felt uneasy
Our first iterations showed different types of added functions, such as “Dyslectic mode”, using so-called dyslectic friendly fonts. However, we felt struck by feeling like we were comparing “normal” users vs. dyslexic users, with the risk of creating biases from our side. Our mentors advised us to see the similarities, not differences.
Explorative Research
SIZE and s p a c e, does matter
As our perspectives shifted, I decided to delve deeper into Explorative Research. I found a key article from Sethfors, explaining that dyslexic fonts can have the opposite wanted effect on readability. The most important thing for readability:
Large enough font sizes, on phone 16 px
Creating contrast between headers and body text
Lots of spacing
“Letting users choose how to obtain the content is a key to accessibility.” - Sethfors - Axess Lab
Both Sethfors and Davis explain that both users with and without dyslexia gain great cognitive advantages in having multimodal content opportunities which supported our initial findings.
Main insights + iterations
Main Insight: Users need a way to see their progress, trying to recall too much information
Based on the patterns emerging from both research and testing, I found a lack of visualisation in any part of the process for our user. For a student to complete their journey usually took a couple of years, making recalling information almost impossible. We saw 3 major patterns which I created new wireframes for:
Final frames + Style guide
My complete Figma file, take a look!
Impact
Solution got presented at an internal event day to the higher ups
Our work and ideas was presented and highlighted during Trafikverket’s event - Digitalisation Day. In addition, our final tests showed:
Information became scannable and pleasant to read with supporting modalities
All users mentioned the UI was structured, no longer a “wall of text”
Users were delighted to see community inside information from other students
Reflections
Lesson learned + next steps
Accessibility is about involving, not creating dualities. At the start of our project we got too caught up in how we can accomodate to “dyslexic user’s needs”. We accidentally created dualistic mindsets, creating additional features just for dyslexic users with the risk of creating labels. But, as research shows, there are no dyslexic specific fonts, just better or worse fonts for readability.
My next steps would be:
Explore how to integrate features supporting the economic overview for users as it was one of our user’s main pain points.
More iterations and tests is a given, but I would’ve liked to create a more elaborated sitemap with all of the areas we can integrate our system with the stakeholders’ systems, usage of mail notifications and see where integration is/isn’t needed. To finally test which value it would bring the user.