AX: The Missing Weapon in Your UX Strategy

We talk about how everyone benefits from good UX — from the brands who are creating these experiences to the users who are using them.

However, we typically end up designing experiences with little to zero attention to users who are physically and cognitively challenged.

It’s not Universal Design (UD) if it doesn’t cater to everyone.

The Problem with UX Today: Lack of AX

I call it AX or UX tailored for users with physical and cognitive limitations. Most companies aren’t taking a true UD approach and end up doing nothing at all for these users, or end up with really bad AX like The New York Times created.

Not creating an AX for these users today is not just uncool, but can be costly for business, just ask Panera.

Creating a great AX is particularly challenging if you are offering public digital products, like kiosks for ticket purchases at airports, quick service restaurant (QSR) kiosks for ordering food like at Panera, Eatsa and McDonald’s, or in-store retail kiosks.

The lack of solid, well-built UD standards for accessible experiences adds into the problem.

Don’t Make Your Users Kill (With the Five-Finger Death Punch)

iOS, Android and Windows all provide assistive technology like iOS’ VoiceOver, Google’s TalkBack and Windows’ Narrator. These features are all based on the rollover concept.

Like the desktop cursor, users will drag their finger over elements on the screen and the OS reads to them what that content is. When they find a feature they want to interact with, they make the appropriate gesture, say a double tap to activate a button.

Issues, however, could arise with the rollover assistive technology approach because it requires a level of finger placement accuracy by the user.

This is where the dreaded five finger death punch comes in. Users with fine motor skill challenges may not be able to use the solution at all.

And for the final nail in the coffin?

The rollover approach is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) section 508. You want your solution to be section 508 compliant or lawsuits will come knocking at your door soon.

Good UX For Everyone Means Embracing Agile AX

So what’s the best way to provide a great public digital experience for all our users, including those with physical and cognitive disabilities?

First of all, I should mention that I’m focusing on the digital aspect of the experience, particularly for visually impaired users. Of course, there are other aspects to worry about such as physical placement of the kiosk, clearance radiuses for wheelchair access, and capacitive touchscreens for those with prosthetics. However, regulatory standards for these challenges are already well in place.

For the no-vision user, the typical approach is to utilize third party tactile hardware.

Yet the downside to this approach is the cost of the additional hardware and the industrial design to aesthetically integrate it with the store decor plus the limited and fixed input controls.

In today’s lean and agile approach towards user and in-store customer experiences (CX), larger upfront costs for limited and non-adaptable hardware is difficult for companies to justify the budget for.

Just like with mobile experiences, businesses need AX solutions that can rapidly adapt and evolve as these AX best practices do.

Avoiding the Five-Finger Death Punch

A no-vision focused solution we are currently testing with users is to turn the entire touchscreen from a visual experience into a large gesture-based track pad (tactile device) that is invoked when a blind user plugs in their headset.

But we encountered one more problem.

We had to teach users how to use the solution because the closest design patterns they may be familiar with is the physical third party tactile track pad.

Solving this problem was not much different from crafting a typical visual mobile experience — provide value to the user (say ordering a donut) while subtly teaching them how to use the kiosk. By doing so, navigation becomes second nature and doesn’t require the user to exert a lot of effort figuring it out.

This approach has inherently no additional hardware costs. If done properly, it can craft optimal accessible experiences (AX) that aren’t limited by fixed hardware navigation controls.

Onboarding the user with a simple gesture pattern library that they can quickly understand and use in an audio-only experience is crucial.

Standard gesture libraries don’t exist for this and if you don’t do a good job they will easily get confused and may accidentally invoke the five finger death punch!

How We Addressed the Problem Through Agile AX

Here’s how we helped a yet-to-be-named brand (case study coming when it goes public!):

• Started with the visual app map as our reference for the use cases that we would need to support.
• Researched and selected a limited number of gestures that could be easily understood by users and allowed them to accomplish all use cases.
• Created an audio-only, gesture-based design pattern library.
• Built an audio storyboard to the app map showing where the user is in the audio-only experience. In a visual experience, users can quickly jump to any area of the screen.
• Added displays of available gestures, actions that resulted, and the audio that would be played.
• Created standard interactions that the user could access at anytime to do things like orient themselves when confused such as figure out how many items were in their cart.
• Worked with development early on to make sure that they understood the approach.
• Worked with an accessibility expert early on to help confirm that our approach would be compliant.
• Used the app map as a prototype that we quickly, and frequently, tested with blind users and non-blind users who could easily provide us feedback by closing their eyes as we simulated the screen reader.

The Results

The end result was five standard gestures, swipe up, down, left and right, double, tap and long press that allowed the user to navigate the entire kiosk.

In addition, we avoided expensive and fixed third party assistive hardware and created a tactile device that we could enhance purely with software. Early prototype testing is doing extremely well with users.

Most importantly we are creating not just compliant but delightful experiences for non sighted users. We’ve also help positioned our client as a leader in accessibility experience (AX) that is quickly becoming a legal requirement.

A follow up case study with our full results will launch when the product does in Q1 2017.

Got a UX/AX conundrum?

Shoot me a note at steve at agilitee dot com. We would love to help!