FreeWheeling

The Hotel Finder that has your Wheels in Mind

Team
Madeline Heffernan interviewer, product designer, task analysis, computer, logo designer, tagline, writer, editor Sang-Wha Sien: recorder, product designer, inquiry analysis, web designer, interactive prototype designer, writer, editor Siruo Zhao recorder, product designer, task analysis, facilitator, poster designer

Problem and Solution Overview

Traveling can be a hassle for anybody; staying in a bad hotel or picking the wrong airline can ruin an entire trip. And this problem is completely amplified for those in wheelchairs. When traveling with a wheelchair, options for accommodations, travel services, and activities are reduced, which makes planning a worry-free trip difficult. Therefore, we propose to create a travel application specifically for those in wheelchairs, which will help simplify the planning process for them and hopefully provide more helpful and targeted information than theyve previously been provided with.

User group, Stakeholders, and Contextual Inquiry Participants

For our project, we are targeting one main user group (primary stakeholder): those who are traveling with someone in a wheelchair. We would also have hospitality services and vacation/event venues as indirect stakeholders, since it will be their businesses that will be listed and vetted by the users. We did three initial contextual inquiries with three different primary stakeholders. All three didnt seem to have a specific process for planning trips and seemed to just go through conventional channels, so we did more of a conversational, imagined contextual inquiry (the scenario was to walk us through the process of planning a long-distance trip): Janice: Janice is a recent graduate from the University of Washington and has been one of the primary caretakers for her mother, Carol, ever since Carol had a stroke in 2008. Carol has since been confined to a wheelchair, and Janice has had first-hand experience planning trips with her mother. For the interview, we met Janice at her house.

Peter: Peter is a chef in Seattle and both of his parents are in wheelchairs, due to fairly severe Cerebral Palsy. He has been their primary caretaker for almost a decade, and has been involved in almost all of their long-distance travel. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, we were forced to conduct the interview over Skype instead of meeting Peter in person. We also asked him what the process of a road trip would be like with his parents. Cameron: Cameron is a graduate HCDE student at the University of Washington and has been in a wheelchair since getting a spinal chord injury at the age of seventeen. Cameron was the most capable and independent of the wheelchair-bound people we talked to/about, and was a frequent traveler, often traveling long distances by himself (he was the only user to have flown on a plane with a wheelchair). We met him at the Husky Grind.

Contextual Inquiry Results

Many interesting things came out of our contextual inquiries, however, in the interest of space, we will limit our discussion to the most pertinent discoveries that informed our design. Probably the most important observation we noticed was how broadly they thought the public defined the term wheelchair accessible. They would find inconsistent standards when they visited hotels and restaurants, and often times found that accessibility only went as far as entrance ramps. However, all three of our users mentioned many other amenities that were required to make a hotel stay comfortable, the most important of which seemed to be low furniture height, stabilizing handlebars in the bathroom, and space to maneuver a chair. All three users mentioned how difficult it was to find out if a hotel room fit these specific needs. Though the participants shared many needs, we noticed that there were still plenty of differences. Cameron had a spinal cord injury but was otherwise healthy, whereas Janices mother and Peters parents had more complicated needs. Cameron tended to worry more about maneuverability and efficiency and would like to have information about the condition of the sidewalks, especially since he has a manual wheel chair. Janices and Peters parents, on the other hand, were more concerned about comfort and safety. They refused to travel by plane, opting to go on short road trips with the family instead. They tended to be more sensitive to their surroundings and what the establishments provided because they had very limited movement compared to Cameron.