Knowing Users with Mild Intellectual Impairments in UX Design Processes

Living with mild intellectual disabilities leads many people to struggle against several daily difficulties. For instance, a user with mild intellectual impairments is often not able to complete basic tasks independently (e.g., moving around the city, managing the home, shopping) and, additionally, he/she always depends on another person like a caregiver or a legal guardian. Starting from these hypotheses, the motivation behind this work is to design an interactive system for supporting users with mild intellectual impairments by improving their autonomy and, consequentially, the quality of their lives. In order to understand the needs and problems of this user group, this paper presents the first stage of a UX design process based on the Double Diamond model that was carried out using the Empathy Map tool to visualize the information gathered in the interviews with 15 users with mild intellectual impairments and three of their caregivers. By applying this approach, we reach a full understanding of the users and their environment which, as conclusions of this work, allows us to set the most appropriate decisions about the future interactive system design and development. The Empathy Map tool has turned out to be a valid tool for use with the specific target of people with intellectual disabilities, however, some tool extensions could be considered to be carried out in the future.