HowToApp: Supporting Life Skills Development of Young Adults with Intellectual Disability
Andrew A. Bayor · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019) · doi:10.1145/3308561.3356107
Summary
This student research abstract describes the co-design and preliminary evaluation of HowToApp, a mobile application that helps young adults with intellectual disability (ID) search for, watch, archive, and share YouTube videos related to their personal skills development interests. The app was developed through participatory action research with 10 young adults with ID (four males, six females, aged 18-34) receiving services from an Australian Disability Service Organization (DSO), along with two support staff, over eight collaborative TechShop sessions spanning ten weeks. The design builds on two prior empirical studies by the same author: the first developed participants’ social media skills across Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram, while the second had participants search YouTube for videos on social skills like manners and etiquette. Through these activities, the researchers identified participants’ existing competencies (content sharing, icon recognition, voice searching), interests (social skills, dancing, cooking), and usability barriers (inaccessible UIs, difficulty with email-based login). The key design principle was competency-based design: rather than building a separate "special" application, HowToApp leveraged icons and interaction patterns that participants already knew from social media platforms they actively use — the magnifying glass for search, two-person icon for friends, star for favourites, and bell for notifications.
Key findings
Three preliminary themes emerged from the co-design and use sessions. First, functional familiarity with icons: all participants immediately recognised and appropriated the social media-inspired design icons without instruction. They associated the "two friends" icon with adding friends and the "star" icon with favouriting content (playlists in this case), demonstrating that their existing social media competencies transferred directly to the new application. Second, engagement and collaboration through sharing: the sharing feature generated significant excitement, with participants wanting to share skills development videos with peers, parents, and their broader networks beyond the DSO setting. One participant exclaimed on receiving a shared video about dancing: "I love this video and the app. So thank you so much." The app mediated collaborative engagement around skills interests that extended beyond the TechShop sessions. Third, contextualising and sustaining use: the DSO itself recognised the app’s value and began creating accessibility-friendly videos to deliver pathway skills training (cooking, mopping, bed dressing, preparing coffee), envisioning sustained use beyond the research project. Usability challenges addressed during co-design included replacing email/password login with QR code scanning, as participants had difficulty remembering credentials.
Relevance
This paper contributes a practical example of competency-based design for people with intellectual disabilities — an approach that starts from what users can already do with technology rather than what they cannot. The insight that young adults with ID have developed genuine digital competencies through regular social media use (icon recognition, content sharing, playlist curation, voice search) and that these competencies can be leveraged in new application design challenges the deficit-focused approach common in assistive technology. For accessibility practitioners and developers, the specific design decisions are instructive: use familiar social media iconography rather than inventing new interaction patterns, replace text-heavy authentication with QR codes, support voice input alongside text, and design sharing as a core feature to enable social support networks. The DSO’s independent decision to create custom content for the app and integrate it into their service delivery demonstrates that technology designed with users can achieve organisational adoption — a significant marker of real-world impact for a student research project.
Tags: intellectual disability · co-design · social media · YouTube · skills development · ability-based design · digital inclusion · self-determination · cognitive accessibility