The Story of a Magic Box: Designing for Accessibility
My colleagues and I were interviewing a hunter during one of our client visits to get some insights for a new application for hunters. It was interesting and insightful to learn about hunting as a family tradition and culture in that community. Halfway through our interview, we decided to get feedback on the prototype of the Harvest Reporting Application we had been working on for a couple of weeks. My colleague took an iPhone out of his pocket and opened the InVision prototype on his phone. We asked the interview candidate to go through the prototype flow. He took some time to get started, and he struggled a bit. We assumed the reason he was taking more time was due to the learning curve of this new application. Once he was done with the prototype testing, we asked him about his final thoughts. He replied, “The cell phone I have isn’t a Magic Box like you folks have here. The cell phone I have is the one where you dial up and that’s it.”
Many companies hypothesize that their users are young, urban hip, smartphone-toting, wearable wearing, mobile app consuming, and gamers. But in reality, that is a very small segment of our overall population. When you speak directly to your end users, you learn whom you are truly designing for. And it might surprise you.
Designing for Senior Citizen Users
We still remember that hunter as the funny “magic box” guy. He was a gentleman in his 60s with no exposure to smartphones. From our research, the hunter community is aging, and current community members are not as acquainted with smartphones as their younger counterparts. Our client hopes to attract a younger generation with a more mobile presence, but at the same time doesn’t want to fail their current customers. And in the meantime, the reality is that the demographic skews above 50.
According to this usability study by Nielsen Norman Group, senior citizens clearly have more difficulty using websites than younger people due to reduced visual acuity and confidence. They need bigger fonts or the flexibility to increase font size for readability and clickability purposes. My father got a new iPhone couple of months ago, and the first thing he asked me to do was to increase the font size after barely using it just for a couple of days. We went inside the iPhone settings and modified the font size based on his requirements. It was a blessing to him!
In the past several years, a lot of work has been done to improve usability and accessibility on the web for elders and others, and iOS dynamic type is a positive step to serve this purpose on mobile too. By keeping this use case in mind when we design the Accela Inspector application, we can directly address issues of usability for users like the building inspector we met during our on-site visit. He used more voice commands and paper as his thumb was too big to work the small type on a small screen.
Designing for Less Technically Proficient Users
When we visited the Parks and Recreation center in a small town a few months back, we came across a few folks who get anxious while using a computer for checking-in patrons every day. Almost everyone told us that it was because of his or her fear of messing things up. We decided to observe the check-in process to understand the real reason behind this fear. We found the culprit — a cluttered interface with so many steps for a simple check-in process. The user was not at fault, but the product was. It’s very helpful to reflect on this common situation when you are designing for an enterprise product. In this instance, they are the experts of their domain and workflow, but they are not technology efficient. This is not uncommon. Not only do they have a higher learning curve, but sometimes they need a different user interface to serve their mental models.
Below is the picture of our visit to observe a user working on our hunting-fishing licensing product in a Dick’s store. This poor frustrated guy wants to sell a hunting or fishing license within 2–4 minutes, but a cumbersome interface with so many steps doesn’t help him at all.
I would call this a Design Fail. And THIS is the user we want to convert into a product evangelist.
In an enterprise business model, buyers of a product are very frequently not the real end users. Buyers just have a checklist of a bunch of features; and if a product satisfies that, then they buy it. It’s the end users who have to deal with the product on an everyday basis. And so, in experience design, it is our responsibility and our mandate to design engaging and user-friendly products for our real end users, not the buyers.
A user shouldn’t feel that the product is smarter than them just because it’s complicated with a bunch of features (We recently met a maintenance supervisor who thought his smartphone was smarter than him). In an overcomplicated or unfriendly UI, a user’s fear of getting into pitfalls can overshadow any good design aspects. A feature, which is useful on its own, may create a clutter or be irrelevant next to other similar features. Making sure to design the holistic experience to serve your user’s mental model will go a long way in ensuring that you have not overcomplicated a standard workflow, and your user will feel more confident in the product and in their job. And that is a good design experience.
At Accela, we are designing experiences that empower all of our users, including the growing senior citizens user base and the technically less proficient users. We are working to demystify the “magic box” with intuitive products, and replacing unnecessarily complex processes with simple, smart workflows.
