Stockgrok Research

A large part of being user experience designers is developing empathy for our users. As five sighted designers, we wanted to better understand the day-to-day relationship between a person with a visual impairment and technology.

Reducing bias with disability simulations

As five sighted designers designing for people with visual impairments, we sought ways to confront our misconceptions about the abilities and disabilities of our target users. We first researched best practices for empathy exercises (also known as disability simulations), and learned that empathy exercises should be created and run in context of the tasks and tools in question, with the knowledge that people who are blind develop expert skills for adapting to the world without sight – skills which can't be approximated through a few minutes with a blindfold.

In this way, we focused on learning how to use the Apple VoiceOver screen reader to check our own financial information. This experience helped us approximate the pain points of our specific problem space without making any claims at understanding the full lived experiences of people with visual impairment. Our team experienced firsthand many common difficulties while navigating finance applications with VoiceOver: difficulties that would soon be validated and echoed in our interviews with visually impaired screen reader users.

A male hand is holding an iPhone with a black screen in front of an open laptop.

Visual impairment in finance requires a solid understanding of two disparate domains. We sought to become, ourselves, financially literate to the extent that we might be able to understand various parts of a finance professional’s workflow. At the same time, we sought to develop a solid foundation in the accessibility world.

Literature review and subject matter expert research on accessibility

There’s a wealth of research and writing about accessibility. We conducted a literature review into both technological developments in accessibility, and the pain points people with visual impairments face in the workplace. Since many interfaces for people with visual impairments are not screen-based, we found it useful to undertake a survey of the existing emerging technologies we might later leverage in our designs.

In addition, we also took many valuable insights from this process, including a strong understanding of how design decisions alter the workflow of people with visual impairments, how they decide to adopt new technologies (or not!), and a better knowledge of the experience of people with visual impairments in the workplace.

People in the accessibility world were excited to speak with us about our project, and transfer as much knowledge to us as they could. We had over ten calls and meetings with accessibility experts. These chats were invaluable in that they allowed us to ask every question we could possibly think of, pointed us in the direction of more resources, and served as valuable introductions to potential user groups.

A woman stands in front of a wall with green post it notes grouped in clusters with written questions above them reading 'how do viz impaired use tools?,' 'What are the hacks? Do they work?,' 'design patterns,' 'who is the user?,' 'what are the mental models of how diff people consume data? What are our assu...'

Making sense of our secondary research by clustering ideas into questions

We used the contextual inquiry framework during user research. We spoke with both people with visual impairments, as well as sighted finance experts. We sought to better understand their workflows, specifically in the context of interacting with technology. We hosted interpretation sessions where we condensed these interviews into individual notes, and clustered notes from all sixteen interviews on an affinity diagram. From this diagram, we synthesized a number of insights across both the finance and accessibility domains.

Contextual Inquiry process

An overview of steps in the contextual inquiry process

Understanding users in context

Contextual Inquiry focuses on interviewing people in the context of, interpreting those interviews into individual notes, and synthesizing insights from those notes in a bottom up fashion. We began by talking with ten people with visual impairments, as well as six sighted finance experts. We walked through the financial workflow for each user, focusing on interactions with technology. For people with visual impairments, we sought to understand how assistive technology fits into these interactions.

As an example, we would ask an interviewee to walk us through the process of checking their finances via online banking. With sighted finance experts, we focused more on the decisions making process of buying and selling securities. We would ask an interviewee to take us through a recent buy or sell decision, from becoming aware of the security, researching it, and finally making the final call, how they would make decisions. Teammates would interpret the interviews and condense them into a set of individual notes. From there, notes were placed onto an affinity diagram, which is a clustering framework designed to help find patterns within qualitative data. We gained a number of insights from this diagram, six of which we found most promising for evaluating our future designs. A male stands in front of a wall of blue and purple post-it notes with illegible printed text.

Piecing together our affinity diagram, post-it note by post-it note

What information do experts need to access to make buy or sell decisions?

The process of making a buy or sell decision is very long. We wanted to focus our designs on a slice of that process. We developed a general task flow that our product would need to address. Given that we were working with data visualizations, it made most sense to highlight the portion of the process where experts are looking at price history. Our first iteration of this task flow focused on the expert’s usage of candlestick charts, as well as identifying important cross points. Once we understood the cross points to be more important, we updated our task to reflect the time experts spend making sense of price as a relation to other indicators.

First task with candlestick charts. Image opens in a new window.

In the first iteration of the task flow, we focused more on getting specific data values at any point in time.

Final task flow with moving average and price lines. Image opens in a new window.

In the final task flow, we focused more on the user comparing the security’s price against technical indicators.

Exploring chart type

When we sat down with specialists at Bloomberg, we focused our questions around candlestick charts (also known as Open-High-Low-Close charts). This very visual way of portraying a security over time seemed like a good place to start. These interviews introduced us to technical analysis, which involves focusing on price history as a way of predicting future prices.

Specialists used indicators (for example, a 50 day simple moving average maps the average close price of the last 50 days) to elucidate where trends were beginning and ending. Over time, we realized that technical analysts were using these indicators, regardless of the type of chart. It made more sense to move away from candlesticks, and focus more on providing price context, something which people with visual impairments did not previously have access to.

Our biggest takeaway from speaking with specialists was that price is not nearly as important as its relationship to these indicators. This insight led us to make these important occurrences non-visually salient.

We identified the cross point as a cue indicating that a trend may be changing. The other side of this decision is tracking when a price either gets close to, but doesn’t cross over, a moving average or is very far away from it. While obvious visually, we saw an opportunity to leverage the magnitude of distance between the two lines at any given point as a way to. The magnitude of the difference between a price line and an associated indicator allows users to notice when the two lines are close to crossing, or when they are far apart.

Diagram of a single candlestick chart. Candlesticks are given the name for their resemblance to physical candles. The top of the candle is the high price, the next line is the open price, then the close price, and finally the low price. The Open and Close segment of the candle is filled in like a box, with a different color to indicate whether or not the security closed higher than it opened. The line from the high price to the open price is labeled 'upper shadow.' The box from open to close is labeled 'real body.' The line from the close to the low is labeled 'lower shadow.'

The components of a candlestick chart.

A stock chart with a white, jagged price line, and a smoother, blue simple moving average. Both start at the bottom left of the chart, and move to the top right of the chart. Where the two lines are close together, there is a line that says 'low difference.' Where the two lines are far apart, there is a line that says 'high difference. The lines cross on the left, with a circle around the intersection point labeled 'cross point.'

Specialists looked for where the price and moving average lines cross and eyeball the difference in magnitude between volatile price line and smoother moving averages.

We drew on both our secondary research findings and contextual inquiry findings to formulate a number of insights, told from the perspective of a person with a visual impairment. We settled on six of these insights to present in our research book, What Am I Missing?

Read a copy of the book in an accessible Word document or in a styled PDF.

Front cover of research book titled: What am I missing? Cover is white with a blue box in the lower right corner labeled 'image.jpg.'

Spring Research Book: Front Cover

Inside cover of research book reads: 'Understanding Financial Data Nonvisually with an image of a computer monitor with a complex candlestick chart on the screen. In the lower right corner it says 'image.jpg'

Spring Research Book: Inside Cover

Insights

People who help me are interfaces too.

The transfer of info by a sighted person is subject to that their interpretation and expertise.
My assistive technology only provides one piece of information at time.

It’s hard to view all parts of the puzzle at once because screen readers only provide one piece of information at a time.
I use charts as a communication tool.

Highlighting visual cues in charts is the easiest way to justify investment decisions.
There is no normal.

Both PWVI and finance experts depend on their idiosyncratic workflows to get things done.
Changing technology is difficult, so it better be worth it.

A product must offer a meaningful improvement to justify altering a hard-earned workflow.
I use visuospatial metaphors as mnemonics.

Visual and spatial references help bridge communication between sighted and blind colleagues.

Our Research Process

Empathy in Context

Reducing bias with disability simulations

Problem Spaces

Literature review and subject matter expert research on accessibility

User Research

Contextual Inquiry process

Understanding users in context

What information do experts need to access to make buy or sell decisions?

Exploring chart type

Insights

Insights

People who help me are interfaces too.

My assistive technology only provides one piece of information at time.

I use charts as a communication tool.

There is no normal.

Changing technology is difficult, so it better be worth it.

I use visuospatial metaphors as mnemonics.