Chirping Crosswalks March 1st, 2021
Designers often are told to think about their audiences when creating designs, but they don’t always think about minority groups within their audiences. What I mean by this is their disabled audience is often left out by designs. For this blog post I decided to look at the modern chirping crosswalk and why it is, and is not an effective design for blind people.
How do blind people know when to cross the street? How do they know if there’s a crosswalk or a button to push to make a crosswalk change? These are all questions designers need to be thinking about when creating good crosswalk designs. The chirping crosswalk solves the problem of blind people knowing when to cross. The chirping has a different pitch for which crosswalk is green, left or right, and some even have a voice that says walk along with the chirping noise. This is an effective design, but parts of the design are also ineffective. Something i found ineffective about this design is hope does a blind person know the crosswalk has a button to push to make it change? How do they know where the button is? These parts of the design make it ineffective and hard for a blind person to use.
Pros of this design however is its versatility for non blinde users. In our digital age lots of people walk and talk on the phone or text and often don’t notice when lights change. The chirping crosswalk makes this aspect of the design useful for everyone except deaf people. In this way deaf people are excluded from this design.
Making a good design for all groups of people is very hard. You can have the best intention, but there is always that one what if. What if someone is blind, deaf, or deaf and blind? I think overall this design is successful and a good example of a universal inclusive design that other designers could take as a benchmark for interactive and experience design. Design doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to engage positively with the target audience. What i’ve learned from this design is to have a successful design you always need to try and brainstorm who your target audience is, and how people with disabilities might interact with your design.
