Cybozu is trying to develop products that are accessible to people with disability and the elderly so that they can utilize our products without any issues. In our latest accessibility research, we teamed up with UXPRESS. We wanted to understand what kind of problems would occur for our users with visual disabilities when using our cloud service, “Kintone”.
UXPRESS has networks with local organizations for people who have disabilities. We needed just 6 participants for our research and UXPRESS was able to exceed our requirements by recruiting 10 candidates for us. They thoroughly explained the details of each candidate profile to us. As a result, we were able to select 6 participants who matched closely to our target users.
People with visual disabilities use PCs and smartphones with various types of assistive technologies such as voice reading and magnifying software. In our accessibility research study, we wanted to reproduce the natural environment of our various participants as much as possible, so we decided to allow them to bring in their own devices. This enabled the participants to more easily work on the tasks that were provided. However, this made the research setup more difficult as the recording equipment for our research had to be adjusted to accommodate different devices. UXPRESS prepared various tools to adapt to these challenging scenarios and tailored the setups for each interview. As a result, our research was smoothly completed thanks to their preparation.
I was thoroughly impressed that UXPRESS had paid extra attention to detail in regard to disability etiquette throughout the entire research project. For example, they communicated with a concerned participant’s family member who was worried about the research environment and explained their security precautions on their interview site. They also patiently waited for an Uber driver on the street before the participant who was blind arrived and guided him safely to the interview room.
Overall, our research was completed very successfully. We could collect a lot of useful feedback from the research participants. We are now planning to conduct ethnographic research with UXPRESS after the corona virus pandemic is over. I highly recommend UXPRESS to anyone who is thinking of conducting accessibility related research.
