Testing the Accessibility waters

Key Takeaways

During my courses I make notes of the most important things I want to keep, and try to incorporate that in my work. After taking this course, I have a few major takeaways I will keep in mind:

• Usability is a requirement, not an item on the wishlist.
  Countries actually enforce laws and international standards on ergonomics, usability and human-centered design. This has even lead to lawsuits and hefty fines for companies as big as Domino’s, where a blind man was unable to order food due to a bad website (2). Agencies often have ‘Usability’ in the form of an extra fee or upsell, which in my eyes is totally unacceptable now.
• The Technology Chasm
  When creating a product, there will be ‘early adopters’ who try out your creation before the user majority will be able to use the full product. These early adopters take issues or bugs for granted due to sheer enthusiasm, but the majority that follows prove the real challenge. They will not accept that, and the designers needs to make decisions on what to fix accordingly.
• The Golf of Execution and Evaluation
  This method of design thinking allows for clear usability guidelines for every product, but is especially important for experiences such as eCommerce checkouts. The ‘Execution’ and ‘Evaluation’ pieces both have two important ‘goal mapping questions’:
  
  1. How do users know their goal is attainable?
  How do I know (indication) I can actually buy this product? (A mention of a store)
  2. How do users know what to do?
  How do I buy this product? (Is there a buy-button, or do I have options?)
  3. How will users know they have done it right?
  Do I see anything change? (A ‘1’ appears on the Cart-icon, or the Buy-button changes?)
  4. How will users know they attained their goal?
  Can I buy the product now? (Is there a new ‘Checkout’ button, or am I redirected to the cart?)

  The best responses to these questions are a direct ‘Yes, because of ‘, which is a Direct Match. These are often the same across many websites and cause the expectations of a customer to be set before the action is performed. As a customer you expect to see payment/shipping options when pressing ‘Checkout’. This is a direct match.

• User Stories vs Persona Stories
  User Stories are widely used across the industry, but suffer from serious flaws. User Stories generally go as follows: “As a , I want so that “.
  These get highly repetitive to write and become more of an abstract picture rather than a serious plan, due to the constant ‘As a’ prefix. It also ties certain actions down to a job, rather than allowing individuals to use the site. It restricts the amount of actions that can be taken.
  A persona story solves this by removing the prefix, putting focus on the task rather than the goal (allows better design thinking) and working with persona’s rather than jobs.
  ” so that “.
• Navigation Menus
  The navigation of a site should reflect the site’s concept, as well as be consistent with navigations across other sites of the same industry. This hooks in to a broader point of terminology, which is best to keep familiar to the users of your site. In practice, use ‘About Us’ rather than ‘Company Narrative’.
• Fitt’s Law
  Fitt’s Law states that the size of a target determines the impact of the action. If a Buy-button is large, it is more attractive as an action. In a Usability aspect, if a menu button is larger, it is easier to hit that target on a mobile device.
• The Gestalt Principles of Perception
  This is actually a topic I want to do a full course on, so it is a great introduction in my first course. A great companion to the abovementioned Fitt’s Law, the Gestalt Principles focus on ways to convey similarity and structure in a design. ‘Proximity’ (if an item is close to another item and has no space between it, it must be related) and Similarity (if it looks the same visually, it must be related), Continuity and Closure.
• Change Blindness
  When two very similar screens with minor differences are shown, but are seperated (as briefly as a millisecond) by a blank screen, this different is very hard to spot. When the transition is direct, you can easily see what has changed. But when, for example, a website refreshes and seperates the frames with a white loading frame, you will not be able to spot what changed. This is why it is important to animate elements if they are important for usability.

Finally, a quote of Steve Krug really stuck with me. About the use of content in our website to convey important messages. To really get to the core of your message:

“Halve your text, then halve it again.”

– Steve Krug