AllSquare

AllSquare is an easy, accessible, and inclusive messaging experience that is now available at all payment points! A customized and special experience designed for each person.

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Inspiration

  • According to the American Federation of the Blind, there are 7,675,000 completely blind individuals in the United States. National health surveys indicate that 32 million people experience vision problems when not using glasses or contact lenses.
  • 500,000 people are deaf and use American Sign Language.
  • A total of 2 million people have celiac disease in the population and must consume gluten-free products.

With all these data, we realized that many people in society have different needs in their financial transactions.

I'm Atakan, a visually impaired product manager. After experiencing difficulties in discovering new places and participating in social life in my daily life, I realized that inclusive and accessible financial methods are unfortunately very limited. Based on this insight, during interviews with different people, I noticed some key issues.

  • Visually impaired individuals are not provided with visual descriptions of shopping locations. They cannot access menu contents in an accessible format and have to rely on others. It is not possible to see the amount to be paid on the screen before making a payment.
  • Deaf people have difficulty finding employees who know sign language at establishments. Additionally, due to the limited use of sign language, they face challenges in equal employment opportunities.
  • Individuals with celiac disease, vegetarians, and vegans may struggle to find content that suits their dietary preferences.

In general, the infrastructure used by establishments leads to a complex user experience and involves lengthy processes. By combining all these points, I focused on developing a solution that could address them, and we created AllSquare.

What it does

AllSquare is a chatbot that provides a message-based, easy, and understandable shopping experience for end users in establishments.

End users can:

  • Specify their disability information (blindness, deafness, or autism).
  • Specify their dietary preferences as vegetarian, vegan, or celiac patients and receive a personalized experience.
  • Share their location with AllSquare to see nearby establishments. Learn the description of an establishment if they are visually impaired.
  • Easily review the menu and services upon arrival at the establishment.
  • Verify if the menu content aligns with their preferences.
  • View product contents through augmented reality if they are sighted.
  • Access sign language phrases they might need if there are deaf employees at the establishment.
  • Place orders with a single click, make payments using the Square infrastructure, receive personalized service, and leave the places cheerfully.

Venue owners can:

  • Store user information in the Square infrastructure through AllSquare, avoiding the loss of customer data when ordering with physical cards. They can also engage in personalized communication and offer discounts to users if desired, as well as analyze user data.
  • Inclusivity is important for everyone. Venue owners can provide inclusive services through AllSquare by entering all inclusivity data into the Square inventory system. AllSquare connects to the Square infrastructure and provides services based on the data available there. Venues can add atmospheric descriptions for the visually impaired, display 3D images of menu items, and easily manage compatibility for individuals with dietary sensitivities.

AllSquare was initially tested in collaboration with Coffee Public, a Square customer. You can click here to experience the product prototype now.

How we built it

As a visually impaired product developer, when I realized that I had certain needs during the shopping experience, I decided to delve into this issue by collaborating with my team members, Mesut and Defne. We started talking to individuals like Gamze who are visually impaired, vegetarian, vegan, and have celiac disease, and we began listening to their shopping experiences. We noticed that there are intersections of problems, and we can eliminate these issues by customizing the shopping experience according to each person's needs.

Next, we worked on different concepts to create the simplest experience possible, and we decided that the messaging experience, which is commonly used by everyone, could be our main focus. We started developing the AllSquare chatbot.

Initially, Mesut and I determined our technical requirements, while working with Defne on how to create this experience in a seamless flow. We began conducting initial tests with users while the necessary infrastructure was being developed on the technical side. After testing with different users, we made our flow compatible with our technical infrastructure and conducted our first tests with Coffee Public, a Square customer.

We invited visually impaired and deaf friends to the venue to experience AllSquare on their own and share their feedback. We applied the feedback we received to our product in the final days of the hackathon while also working on how to best convey our story.

Challenges we ran into

When we first created our developer account, the web platform was throwing some errors. For example, we were receiving this error frequently: "Some settings didn't load successfully. Try refreshing this page or come back again."

And any access to reach the Weebly e-store builder was throwing different efforts, such as; "You are currently trying to access a beta that is not available in your country or with a currency that is not supported." or "staging.weebly.net refused to connect." We tried a lot of things to correct this but hoped that this was because of the sandbox environment. If we reached the Weebly store, we expected to replace Telegram's native payments module with the Weebly e-store. (Because Telegram's native payment module was not supporting Square payment APIs.)

Lack of some APIs required to imagine/assume some parts in our codebase. For example, what we were trying to develop were requiring aggregated data from multiple venue owners. So in this part, we did API references and tried to find some public page listings we could hack and use as a data source. But after long trials, we canceled this effort and focused on the bot flow.

In summary, the biggest challenge was to design with what was available. Square developer forums were helpful 75% of the time. For the remaining 25%, we believe we stuck to Square's firewall or sandbox environment.

We listed some ideas from the challenges we faced while building so far here.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We imagine a world where everyone can participate equally in production and consumption, and we believe that active participation in social life is key to achieving this. After testing our product together, our deaf friend shared, "For the first time, someone who doesn't know sign language communicated with me using sign language to provide excellent service. I felt very valued." We believe that people feeling good and being able to receive personalized service supports their social participation, enabling us to create a more inclusive world, and we are proud of that.

It was inspiring to witness restaurant owners' journey towards becoming more inclusive and to see how we have facilitated their business processes. The positive reception from both users and cafe owners during our tests at an establishment already using Square made us very happy and excited about the future potential of the product.

What we learned

Learnings from Usability Trials

We realized that conducting user testing before diving into technical integrations greatly facilitated shaping the product. Additionally, when designing an experience for users, we learned that we should prioritize simplicity and utilize familiar experiences that people are accustomed to, rather than complicated and difficult-to-use solutions. At the beginning, while exploring various concepts that appeared visually appealing, we started by simplifying the solution that served our purpose. Upon completing our product, we noticed that anyone familiar with daily life could easily use this product.

Technical Learnings

Actually, building a custom payment system is easier than we thought. We wish to implement more APIs (or implement APIs better). We didn't use the APIs as planned because we had to comply with the messenger app's system. On this occasion, we tried just to demonstrate what we were trying to build, sometimes applying predefined rules or hardcoded things. We're sorry for this, but we tried to balance the lost time with these hacks.

And also, venue owners love Square's design system. So a lot of things can be implemented/integrated into Square's native interfaces.

What's next for AllSquare

During our hackathon process, we started with only two sample venue data and selected the food category. After the hackathon, we want to collaborate with the Square team to conduct user testing with new venues from different categories that already have users, such as beauty establishments.

Currently, we have chosen Telegram as the platform for our prototype product. However, in the future, we imagine working with the Square team to develop a system that can be used on other active messaging platforms that people use, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This system would allow venue owners to activate AllSquare directly from within their Square dashboards.

Next, we plan to reach out to institutions targeting different audiences in various categories, such as the visually impaired, vegetarian and vegan individuals, and celiac patients, in order to increase awareness and usage of the product.

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