Client

Product Design and Development (PD+D) Business within Target Corporation

Project

UX Research and Facilitation to improve the accessibility of Target's furniture assembly instructions.

Case Study Summary

I was asked to provide some human-centered and accessibility design principles to Target's furniture assembly instructions team. As is often the case, even the best assembly instructions can have usability issues and not enough thought had been given to the variety of end users who may be assembling the furniture. I had the unique opportunity to lead user testing in a school for the visually impaired.

In the end, we learned simple changes in communication can have great effect on a wide set of audiences yet those small changes can have severe constraints for practical implementation.

Background Context

• PD+D produces more than 80,000 own brand SKU's (individual products + product variants) every year.
• PD+D creates furniture for most any place in your home ranging from couches for living rooms, beds, and patio furniture sets.
• To lower cost for manufacturing and shipping most all Target's furniture requires assembly by the guest. "Guest" is Target's term for audience/user/customer.

Problem

• Even complete and accurate assembly instructions can have usability issues due to clarity of the copy and diagrams.
• How might we establish assembly instructions that help all guests, even those with varying levels of blindness.

Assumptions

• Designing products for all means being inclusive of differing levels of ability.
• Changes would be simple to implement as text in PDFs.
• Clarifying order of steps, labels, and refining the copywriting would lead to improved furniture assembly experience for all guests.
• The PDFs would be trivial to add to the website on the given product detail pages.

Process

• Stakeholder interviews and collaborative conversations
• Which furniture and instructions to test
• What did we need to learn
• Draft research protocol for usability study
• Test the test within the team
• Revise the test and test internally
• Target's accessibility team had blind team members interested in participating
• Run the usability study
• Run the test partnering with a local school for the blind, Blind Inc..
• Review, synthesize, summarize findings
• Create recommendations for new instructions
• Share the story of the research and new patterns for instructions

My Role

• UX Researcher, Facilitator, and Consultant

Core Team

• Sarah Emerick - Team Lead and Design Engineer
• Amber Holladay - Accessibility Expert
• Stephanie Hornung - UX Researcher
• Rob Stenzinger - UX Researcher
• Tim Urban - Furniture Engineer

Outcomes

• I'm humbled and deeply affected by the unstoppable willpower of members of the blind community.
• I can now tell a story of being in a woodshop with power tools running, a teacher teaching, students cutting wood, while in pitch black lighting.
• Provided a story with data to help others participate in the conversation. Research provided specific quotes, and concerns with the instructions, where things go wrong with the copy and why.
• Improved instructions design template.
• Improved instructions review process.
• Awaiting full collection adoption to then make PDF instructions available on the web site.
• Video instructions were not as popular as expected or as fast to navigate as a PDF with proper annotation.

PDF - Test Plan for Accessible Furniture Assembly Instructions