Giving easy access to the specialised activity calendar of young individuals with disabilities
Key takeaways
Introducing "De Treffer," a groundbreaking collaboration with De Lovie, a social organization empowering young people with mental disabilities through recreational activities. Our mission: enhance accessibility through inclusive app design. Departing from traditional UX and UI approaches, we prioritized user testing and direct collaboration, resulting in an empowering app.
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Client
De Lovie vzw
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Services
User interface design — Content hubs and headless CMS — User experience —
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Links
De Lovie De Treffer
Challenge
De Lovie vzw serves individuals with various disabilities, from autism to dementia, offering diverse leisure activities.
Three main challenges emerged:
- Limited Distribution: Activities are only discovered through brochures, limiting reach.
- Network Reliance: Young individuals relied on their networks to filter activities, limiting their freedom of choice.
- Dependency: Individuals could not subscribe to an activity themselves.
To address these challenges, a digital and centralized solution was needed. The question was how to efficiently manage events while maintaining De Lovie’s unique communication style in the app’s UI.
Solution
Our approach combined expertise with empathy. We deeply explored our target audience’s needs and interactions with events, resulting in “De Treffer,” a groundbreaking app. We digitized all activities to enhance access, using universal icons for easy comprehension by users facing reading challenges.
Our UI design may not be avant-garde, but it reflects our dedication to universal accessibility.
Result
Developing an inclusive native app, particularly for individuals with mental disabilities, was a formidable challenge. However, through multiple rounds of user testing and iterative design, we ensured accessibility for all. Surprisingly, standard UI practices resonated well with our testers. Leveraging our React Native and Craft CMS expertise, we tailored the solution.
Seeing users’ joy and pride in an app designed exclusively for them was a rewarding testament to our commitment to inclusive design. This was not just a project but a passionate endeavour driven by our unwavering dedication to making a meaningful impact.
Designing an inclusive app requires multiple rounds of user testing. To tackle this challenge, we quickly iterated towards working and testable prototypes and questioned standard UI patterns to test their applicability to this specific user group. To our surprise, we found that standard practices were well-known and intuitive to our testers.
Jessica Kellner,
managing partner and Social Innovation expert - Bits of Love
Conclusion
At Bits of Love, our commitment to social inclusion and innovation fueled our collaboration with De Lovie. We invested one-third of the development costs and secured additional funding from the King Baudouin Foundation and the BNP Paribas Fortis Foundation. Our pride lies in fostering a sense of belonging for young people who may struggle to find it, leveraging our expertise, empathy, and unwavering passion to create a customized solution that genuinely matters.
Are you interested or curious about what we can do for you?
Be sure to contact us and we will get back in touch with you as soon as possible!