What I needed to understand
- What made everyday journeys feel difficult or intimidating?
- Which environmental conditions had the biggest effect on confidence?
- How did emotional barriers influence willingness to travel outside the home?
Helping people with limited mobility travel with confidence
Stride is a concept for accessible navigation and confidence building, developed as an individual honours project.
View the university archive posts that informed this honours project
Snapshot
- Problem
- Many people with limited mobility avoided everyday journeys because uncertainty, anxiety, and environmental barriers made travel feel intimidating.
- Users
- People with limited mobility navigating local journeys and rebuilding confidence in travelling independently.
- Goal
- Help people feel more confident making simple journeys outside their home.
- Outcome
- The concept reframed the challenge from navigation alone to reassurance, confidence, and supported independence.
Questions driving the project
What I needed to validate
- Would route planning based on comfort and accessibility feel more useful than fastest-path navigation?
- Could better local context reduce uncertainty before a journey begins?
- Would small supported journeys help confidence grow over time?
Challenge
Swipe, use the arrows, or press left and right.
Challenge card 1 of 4: Existing pattern. Navigation tools focused on getting people from A to B as efficiently as possible.
01
Existing pattern
Navigation tools focused on getting people from A to B as efficiently as possible.
Navigation products are good at getting people from A to B, but they rarely account for the emotional and physical barriers that shape how someone travels.
The harder design challenge was supporting reassurance and independence, not just route choice.
Research
Methods
- Interviews
- Contextual observation
- Accompanied walking routes
Key insights
- Fear of falling reduced confidence when leaving the house.
- Busy roads and noisy environments increased anxiety.
- Small obstacles such as kerbs or uneven pavements created major barriers.
- Many people preferred longer, quieter routes over direct ones.
- Social support often helped people rebuild confidence in travelling independently.
Hypotheses
- If routes are planned around comfort and accessibility, users will feel safer starting a journey.
- If local barriers are visible ahead of time, uncertainty will reduce before travel begins.
- If small successful journeys are supported, confidence will increase over time.
Product direction
- Create confidence through reassurance.
- Support independence rather than dependency.
- Use route planning to reflect comfort and mobility needs, not only speed.
- Encourage wellbeing and social connection through supported travel.
Core flows
Accessible route planning
Users needed routes that felt manageable, not simply the fastest possible option.
- Prioritized quieter streets, dropped kerbs, smoother surfaces, and fewer obstacles.
- Allowed route choice to reflect comfort as well as destination.
- Positioned route planning as reassurance rather than efficiency alone.
Local awareness
Confidence dropped when people did not know about barriers before starting a journey.
- Explored surfacing roadworks, path closures, and temporary hazards.
- Focused on information that reduced uncertainty before leaving home.
- Framed local context as part of accessibility, not just supplementary data.
Gradual confidence building
Independence grows through smaller successful journeys, not pressure to do more too soon.
- Focused the concept on achievable local trips instead of long journeys first.
- Explored social walking as a way to support confidence and connection.
- Treated successful travel as a way to build momentum over time.
Iteration
What did not work
- Treating the problem as navigation alone was too narrow.
- Direct route logic did not reflect what mattered most to users.
- Confidence barriers were easy to overlook when focusing only on physical access.
What changed
- Shifted the framing from route finding to confidence building.
- Prioritized comfort, reassurance, and accessibility in route planning.
- Expanded the concept to include local awareness and social support.
Impact
- The concept became more grounded in real user anxieties and decision-making.
- The product direction better reflected independence, wellbeing, and confidence over time.
Outcome
- Reframed the problem from navigation to confidence
- Identified reassurance as a core accessibility need
- Established a concept focused on independence, wellbeing, and connection
- Stride showed that thoughtful product design could support confidence as much as navigation.
- The concept focused less on getting somewhere quickly and more on helping people feel capable enough to go at all.
Reflection
- Confidence can be a bigger barrier than physical ability.
- Accessibility depends on emotional reassurance as well as physical design.
- Supporting small successful journeys can be more meaningful than optimizing for speed.