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Mar. 10th, 2021 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amazonvUnblocking Backlog Jams with Multi-Dimensional Accessibility Audits
Going through how making products accessible which make everyones experience better
~these experiences didn't come about to avoid being sued (compliance focused), or bolting it on at the end
Wonderful products come about because of focus on design and made accessibility a focus form the start - which leads to products which are simply better for all customers
~ if your personas don't include varying abilities you are failing to build empathy
she gets into incorporating accessibility into the design system
person quotes:
I'm curious how many of you are using personas as part of the design work at your organization. I imagine if we were in a room, we would see a lot of hands going up right now. Personas are great, they're a great tool for helping teams step into the customer's shoes. But the problem with them is I see a lot of personas that never account for the fact that within a given persona, we have people of different abilities. I'm showing you an example here of a is he season in a called an tunist Ally. Ally is negotiating for a new push. He's a white man, he's there on his telephones, talks about his goals, motivations and attitudes. But it doesn't say anything about the fact that we have people within this persona of Ali with different abilities and we need to account for that when we design. And this is really problematic that most pep so he in as don't have that. Because what happens then is by sees tend to creep in, you know, this persona of a white man negotiating a car purchase kind of per spelt waits the stereotype that men are better than negotiating than woman, for example. And that could alter the viewpoints of the team that's designing braced on the personas. This also makes it problematic when personas are used as a tool for empathy. You're not representing your customers and there are not empathizing with them. So there's different approaches for solving for this challenge. One approach I've seen is companies using accessibility personas and there's some great sets out there. Whitney and Sarah ton have a web for everyone that has pore so he naps you can adopt. Barclays has a nice set as well. These can be great if you're trying to aware awareness around accessibility in your organization. They can be useful if you're writing user stories that are specifically focussed on accessibility. They can also be really helpful if you have projects that are aimed at improving the accessibility of a product where you really want to hone on the needs of users of different access bits. And they can also be great as a launchpad for ideation. Let's start by designing for someone like Emily who has cerebral palsy. The problem with these is I often see design teams getting overwhelmed because they now have accessibility personas they need to design for as well as these business personas that have been created that are more focussed on goals, needs and observations. So for that reason, one method I'm seeing gain more traction in organizations is this idea of applying inclusive design lenses on top of your existing business or design personas. Here's how this works. You want to focus on your most important personas, and add these lenses to them. So for example, asking what if a customer in this persona has vision loss? Will the solution still work for them?
Or what if the customer in this persona has, you know, is attention limited? Will this solution still work for them? And so on and so forth. We can apply other lenses too, like hearing loss, mobility challenges, etc. So let me show you an example of how you can actually put these lenses in practice. The first thing you can do is as you're sitting there at your desk making that design decision, writing that piece of content, apply each of these lenses and ask yourself three questions for each. The first is related to he can iffiveness. If a customer in this persona is blind, will they still be able to get value from this solution? Second is around ease. Will they find the experience easy to use. And the third is around emotion. Will they feel good when they're using this experience? Is it evoking good, positive emotions? Here's an example. I have a screenshot on this slide from a consumer electronics website. This is from their homepage where they have kind of this three-panel design in their homepage. There's an area about free shipping, an all right area about extended returns and an area about flexible financing. And under each area there's a link and that reeds reads learn more. So all three links are called learn more. So by applying the lens of a person who is blind who uses a screen reader and exploring that question will people in, who are blind, find this experience easy, this might prompt us to actually revisit the this design. Because we know that when learn more links are taken out of context, for example, if a screen reader user pulls up a list of links out of context, they're just going to letter learn more, learn more, learn more, it is not actually telling them anything useful about the target of those links. So you get the idea by asking these questions, applying these lenses, it is going to cause us to question our solutions and challenge ourselves to be better. So instead we might take an approach like Aetna does on the homepage of their website. They also have a design like this where they have different panels of content but their link names are incredibly specific. For example, they have a link called types of healthcare plans. H sapping or FSA. What's the difference? And health plan perks. Very specific names. You know what you're going to get when you click on those. Now, another way you can bring those lenses in to your process is when you're actually together with your fellow designers, design teams all embrace the methodology of design critique. Maybe in your next design critique you start asking more questions of your fellow designer's solution that is they're sharing. Questions like how will this design sound if read by a screen reader is this Or will that tern you're using be understood by a non-Native English speaker
In or, hey, have you tested the color contrast of the color choices on your design? So the idea here again, challenge one another to be better and work together to create solutions that will ensure we're not excluding anyone in your customer base.
Approach accessibility as a customer experience imperative, not a compliance driven initiative.
And I'm not saying to ignore the legal benefits. Those are important and those will come from doing this work. But by framing accessibility in this way as a customer experience imperative and tying it to those customer experience efforts probably already in place in your company, you will be more successful in helping your organization move past this thinking that accessibility is the check the box exercise the thing that we have to do just about meeting standards and instead, shift that thinking and shift your methodology and approach to creating better experiences for all customers.
Dave Rupert
watched a little while waiting for the other talk to stop having tech issues
found interesting article - How to be an open source gardener https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener
He brought up the good point of effort to win - if something gets fixed that gets used thousands of times a day it's a much bigger impact
he also got into triaging, how grouping things together was key to assigning it out and having it addressed without being overwhelmed.
Approach Accessibility As A Customer Experience Imperative: It Starts With Design
watched a little while waiting for the other talk to stop having tech issues
found interesting article - How to be an open source gardener https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener
He brought up the good point of effort to win - if something gets fixed that gets used thousands of times a day it's a much bigger impact
he also got into triaging, how grouping things together was key to assigning it out and having it addressed without being overwhelmed.
Approach Accessibility As A Customer Experience Imperative: It Starts With Design
Gina Bhawalkar
Going through how making products accessible which make everyones experience better
~these experiences didn't come about to avoid being sued (compliance focused), or bolting it on at the end
Wonderful products come about because of focus on design and made accessibility a focus form the start - which leads to products which are simply better for all customers
~ if your personas don't include varying abilities you are failing to build empathy
she gets into incorporating accessibility into the design system
person quotes:
I'm curious how many of you are using personas as part of the design work at your organization. I imagine if we were in a room, we would see a lot of hands going up right now. Personas are great, they're a great tool for helping teams step into the customer's shoes. But the problem with them is I see a lot of personas that never account for the fact that within a given persona, we have people of different abilities. I'm showing you an example here of a is he season in a called an tunist Ally. Ally is negotiating for a new push. He's a white man, he's there on his telephones, talks about his goals, motivations and attitudes. But it doesn't say anything about the fact that we have people within this persona of Ali with different abilities and we need to account for that when we design. And this is really problematic that most pep so he in as don't have that. Because what happens then is by sees tend to creep in, you know, this persona of a white man negotiating a car purchase kind of per spelt waits the stereotype that men are better than negotiating than woman, for example. And that could alter the viewpoints of the team that's designing braced on the personas. This also makes it problematic when personas are used as a tool for empathy. You're not representing your customers and there are not empathizing with them. So there's different approaches for solving for this challenge. One approach I've seen is companies using accessibility personas and there's some great sets out there. Whitney and Sarah ton have a web for everyone that has pore so he naps you can adopt. Barclays has a nice set as well. These can be great if you're trying to aware awareness around accessibility in your organization. They can be useful if you're writing user stories that are specifically focussed on accessibility. They can also be really helpful if you have projects that are aimed at improving the accessibility of a product where you really want to hone on the needs of users of different access bits. And they can also be great as a launchpad for ideation. Let's start by designing for someone like Emily who has cerebral palsy. The problem with these is I often see design teams getting overwhelmed because they now have accessibility personas they need to design for as well as these business personas that have been created that are more focussed on goals, needs and observations. So for that reason, one method I'm seeing gain more traction in organizations is this idea of applying inclusive design lenses on top of your existing business or design personas. Here's how this works. You want to focus on your most important personas, and add these lenses to them. So for example, asking what if a customer in this persona has vision loss? Will the solution still work for them?
Or what if the customer in this persona has, you know, is attention limited? Will this solution still work for them? And so on and so forth. We can apply other lenses too, like hearing loss, mobility challenges, etc. So let me show you an example of how you can actually put these lenses in practice. The first thing you can do is as you're sitting there at your desk making that design decision, writing that piece of content, apply each of these lenses and ask yourself three questions for each. The first is related to he can iffiveness. If a customer in this persona is blind, will they still be able to get value from this solution? Second is around ease. Will they find the experience easy to use. And the third is around emotion. Will they feel good when they're using this experience? Is it evoking good, positive emotions? Here's an example. I have a screenshot on this slide from a consumer electronics website. This is from their homepage where they have kind of this three-panel design in their homepage. There's an area about free shipping, an all right area about extended returns and an area about flexible financing. And under each area there's a link and that reeds reads learn more. So all three links are called learn more. So by applying the lens of a person who is blind who uses a screen reader and exploring that question will people in, who are blind, find this experience easy, this might prompt us to actually revisit the this design. Because we know that when learn more links are taken out of context, for example, if a screen reader user pulls up a list of links out of context, they're just going to letter learn more, learn more, learn more, it is not actually telling them anything useful about the target of those links. So you get the idea by asking these questions, applying these lenses, it is going to cause us to question our solutions and challenge ourselves to be better. So instead we might take an approach like Aetna does on the homepage of their website. They also have a design like this where they have different panels of content but their link names are incredibly specific. For example, they have a link called types of healthcare plans. H sapping or FSA. What's the difference? And health plan perks. Very specific names. You know what you're going to get when you click on those. Now, another way you can bring those lenses in to your process is when you're actually together with your fellow designers, design teams all embrace the methodology of design critique. Maybe in your next design critique you start asking more questions of your fellow designer's solution that is they're sharing. Questions like how will this design sound if read by a screen reader is this Or will that tern you're using be understood by a non-Native English speaker
In or, hey, have you tested the color contrast of the color choices on your design? So the idea here again, challenge one another to be better and work together to create solutions that will ensure we're not excluding anyone in your customer base.
Approach accessibility as a customer experience imperative, not a compliance driven initiative.
And I'm not saying to ignore the legal benefits. Those are important and those will come from doing this work. But by framing accessibility in this way as a customer experience imperative and tying it to those customer experience efforts probably already in place in your company, you will be more successful in helping your organization move past this thinking that accessibility is the check the box exercise the thing that we have to do just about meeting standards and instead, shift that thinking and shift your methodology and approach to creating better experiences for all customers.
