Design a phone for the blind.

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Design a phone for the blind.

Asked at Google over a year ago

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sowjanya yaddanapudi · Answer 1 · 2021-11-09T07:22:27+0000

Blind or visually impaired people are dependent on care takers, I would like to build a product that will help visually impaired people to be self-able and completely independent.

Users :

Mild

Moderate

Severe

Blind

I would like to focus on the blind , about 32.2 million people in US are completely blind and not able to see anything even after wearing glasses.

Use cases:

As a user of the phone, I should be able to

Add / update / delete a contact	P1
Make a phone call	P1
Disconnect the call	P1
Get notifications of the messages	P1
Send / respond to the messages	P1
Intelligent workflow with all the P1 tasks	P1
Edit phone settings	P2
Make payments using the phone	P2
Open and interact with apps downloaded	P2

All of the above features are self explanatory except for the intelligent workflows, here are the insights into intelligent workflows for all the P1 features.

Build intelligent workflows

1. Asking the user to help with saving the contact after speaking for some time, this means that the user knows the person calling and might have the need to call them in future

2. Helping with a notification on a missed call and a call back reminder when the user leaves a voice mail

3. Messages due response, reminding the user the response due after an active conversation from the other user

4. understanding the context of the message and coming up with possible responses.

Solutions

Solution	Impact	Effort	Pros	Cons
Phone with the keypad in braille	Medium	High	Adding the contacts is possible Making the call and disconnecting the call is possible	User Typo’s, user should be well versed and be pro to be able to understand the landscape to avoid typos Notifications on the new messages is not possible
Phone with Voice	High	Medium	Helps with the basic needs of the phone with a trigger word	Predicting the user routine is not possible with this solution
Phone with voice and intelligent workflow completion with AI & ML	High	High	Intelligence helps the user automate some of the routine tasks and enables them to be independent	User might be frustrated with the recommendation requests coming from the phone. We can counter workflow for this to have the user turn off the feature

How do we measure the success of the Product

1) Contacts saved – initiated by the user vs initiated by the workflow

2) Total missed calls to the missed calls attempted after the reminder

3) Total messages due and messages responded after the reminder

4) No. of times the possible responses for the messages accepted by the user

As a counter metric:

No. of users who unsubscribed the intelligent workflow features by type

Risks

Voice enabled systems and specifically to be able to identify and build intelligence into the workflows requires a lot of sample data and might change from user to user