Element C: PRESENTATION AND JUSTIFICATION OF SOLUTION DESIGN REQUIREMENTS

Introduction

Design requirements were generated based on a variety of resources including experts, scholarly articles, and the examination of other products. Our emails with blindness technology expert James Gagnier helped us to flesh out some basic requirements of a device. The major requirement he pointed out was that the device needs to be portable enough to fit into a bag or pocket and that it would need to emboss between 3 to 4 braille cells to convey the value of the note. Further design requirements were generated through research where it was found that on average people with visual impairments have a lower income than people without visual impairments and set the bar for speed and accuracy. In examining other products it was noted that most products used haptic feedback to aid people who died and that they posed a variety of user feedback to aid in the use of the device. 

Chart 1: Experts listed features from most important (10) to least important (1). These charts show that our experts think that accuracy and stamping braille are the most important features when designing our device. Other things to consider is portability, rechargeability, repairability, and the cost of the device to consumers. 

note: the 3rd picture of the results was done in the opposite way; 1 is the most important and 10 is the least important

Design Specifications:  

List from highest to lowest priority.  What is most important? 

1. accurate

2. stamp braille

3. announce value of bill

4. user feedback if device worked

5. portable

6. toggle between voice only, stamping and voice, or only stamping

7. repairable

8. rechargeability

Benchmarks:

How will you know if your product is successful?

Design requirements were generated based on a variety of resources including experts, scholarly articles, and the examination of other products. Our emails with blindness technology expert James Gagnier helped us to flesh out some basic requirements of a device. The major requirement he pointed out was that the device needs to be portable enough to fit into a bag or pocket and that it would need to emboss between 3 to 4 braille cells to convey the value of the note. Further design requirements were generated through research where it was found that on average people with visual impairments have a lower income than people without visual impairments and set the bar for speed and accuracy. In examining other products it was noted that most products and software used haptic feedback to aid people who are deaf. Our research found that most physical reading devices had an average total id time of under 30 seconds (https://www.bep.gov/media/881/download?inline) which is an important benchmark to reach as if this time is not reached people will just use a pocket money brailler. Finally, a fair amount of requirements such as identifying the value of the currency and adding braille were added due to our problem statement and rest on the validity of our problem.

The specifications google form was unsuccessful as the question that we wrote was clearly confusing (and potentially inaccessible) to some of our experts and poorly worded making our main ranked importance of requirements question worthless. Also with our small pool of experts, we have failed to capture meaningful data from that question. However, other questions like the time it should take to identify a bill and the minimum accuracy of the device rendered useful results allowing us to put a measurable number on these requirements. This is the first section of our form was not successful however the second half of our form which described and showed our sketches rendered useful results. The phone-based device seemed to be the one our experts thought was best with one of our experts commenting that they would rather not carry around an extra device if they have their phone on them. As a result, our second iteration of brainstorming was all around phone-based devices Meaning that this section will probably have to be revisited and updated to account for this change in tack once these ideas of more fleshed out.