Case Study: Equa, a browser with a purpose
Have you ever wondered how important a role a browser plays in your life?
No? Well that’s great, because the sole purpose of a browser was to stay in the background, letting you access all the information you need, ensuring your focus was on the task at hand. Well, at least that was the initial idea…..
With browser wars starting in the late 90’s, terms such as “productive”, “optimized” and “fast” became key drivers behind design & development goals for modern day browsers.
As developers raced to optimize and make their product snappier than their rivals, packing more features than a user even realized he required, the race collectively lost track of it’s initial purpose which was to-
“Build a gateway, which enabled access to the internet with the least friction to the widest possible audience.”
Note the last 3 words above - widest possible audience.
This is really crucial, as the inception of the internet was to provide everyone with a common knowledge pool, irrespective of age, education, region and other discriminatory biases.
As times progressed, focus shifted towards adding productivity features, improving loading times and enabling discount coupon extensions within search bars(sorry Honey). The persona for which a browser was being updated day-in & day-out, became narrower and narrower only to suit a very specific group of people. Allow me to explain-
Of the approximate 7.9 Billion people in the world, 65.1%* have access to the internet(which is amazing!). But, when you also consider stats of illiteracy in the adult population(13.7%*) and the percentage of people with at least one physical/mental disability(10%*) you start realizing the fact that there are over a billion people who aren’t enjoying the browsing experience in the same way as you(heck maybe even you belong to that minority, I for sure do)
Take for example Pete, a 34 year old guy who suddenly lost his eyesight due to a car accident. If you put yourself in his position, the world is dark all of a sudden and a task as simple as buying something on Amazon, would require you to navigate across the desktop, aimlessly for hours. Ideally you would enable the narrator app, which would give feedback on your every click and navigating across a page would be with the help of the tab button.
Now you might argue that using a voice assistant like Google Assistant or Siri would help(in the case of mobile browsing)but imagine you’re on the payment page and need to input your Card details in the form within a limited time window! You wouldn’t want to shout your card details out loud for everyone to hear now would you, and to be honest if you were lucky enough to make it till the billing page what with every product opening in its own individual tab, that’d be a miracle on its own.
Not only was the screen reader inaccurate at providing necessary information, but the number of times it just kept repeating the same useless information like the search query and the time in which it fetched the results, I genuinely felt like folding my laptop the wrong way around!
Another common persona might be that of Jordan, a 20 year old grad student suffering from ADHD (a permanent mental disorder which causes a person to have a very poor attention span and makes them forgetful and distracted).
With a deadline to submit 4 assignments the next day and every single citation website constantly popping ads, the number of distractions he has to endure is infinite and keeping himself focused requires an enormous conscious effort, thus reducing his motivation to work. How is this productive?
With all these questions in mind and a very exhaustive persona list , I set forth on a mission to learn the process of designing products for an audience, free from personal bias, and stumbled upon the powerful concept of Inclusive Design.
I present to you, Equa.
With inclusivity at its forefront in the design process, I’ve tried to construct solutions which not only act as accessibility features, but also as optional features for fully-abled users. Following such a process in my opinion creates an empathetic product, unlike when a product is built and accessibility is then added as an afterthought, to ensure that guidelines are met.
With exemplary inclusive design tools such as the immersive reader feature in Microsoft Edge, and Google’s AI generated Live captions, my aim was to take this a step further in providing the most optimal browsing experience for you, the user.
Here is how Equa is different from the rest.
1. The Onboarding experience.
A browser which once setup, is kept almost unchanged till one makes the conscious decision to change something in particular.
For such an important decision during installation, we generally are prompted with a very short onboarding process on most browsers which usually pester us to set them as a default and rarely go through the setup procedures.
2. Browser Presets built by the community for the community.
Community is about doing something together that makes belonging matter.
Build Equa for the better. Custom setups of Equa can be tailored to suit various user communities. Colorblind friendly presets, mental disorder friendly tool additions(like activity headers explained further below), gesture controls and keyboard shortcuts, YOU get complete control of the interface and can publish presets to help fellow users.
3. Activity Header
Activity Header is a tool designed to remind you of the task at hand. With a quick prompt at the beginning of the browsing session, simply input your objective and it gets pinned on top to remind you throughout the current session, hopefully keeping you away from distractions.
Coupled with a timer to keep your session limited, this feature not only targets users with ADHD, Alzheimer’s, Dementia but also all of us who start a YouTube tutorial on web design but somehow end up in a rabbit hole of cat videos /ᐠ。‸。ᐟ\
A small tool. Simple, yet effective.
The next one is a mobile specific feature;
3. Animation free tabs
I’m sure most of you would relate to this.
You’re reading your daily dose of news, or just going through a recipe on making pancakes when suddenly BAM! A popup opens in a new tab and all of a sudden your browsing experience gets completely off course.
My solution to this is certainly not a traditional pop up blocker, which would create additional prompts in websites saying “you’ve enabled a blocker” but a subtler one…
With a simple count change in the tab section instead of the animation opening, animation free tabs serve both purposes; the advertiser gets his click and you get a disturbance free browsing experience. Win-win.
4. Intelligent Screen Reader
This is a conceptual stretch and I’m not completely aware of the challenges implementing something like this would create, but having an inbuilt AI assistant scan and narrate the important pieces of a search query, would make it so much more easier for the visually impaired to go about their task.
Here’s a real scenario with actual tested feedback.
When a visually impaired person searches for airfares in a ticketing website, it usually ends up reverting with the narration of the advertisement banner image at the top of the page and not the actual pricing information or the availability.
Here’s how an intelligent screen reader would change this
Based on data collected on how maximum users interact on a given results page, it should be fairly straightforward to classify a page into zones with different priorities. As seen above, Zone 1 which is the most important information would be the first part for the narrator to start followed by Zones 2 and 3. This would not only enable a really helpful and quick interaction process for the visually disabled, but also provide insights for advertisers as to which part of their website is most often interacted with.
5. Cognitive Assists
Brain Injuries are not as rare as they were in earlier days. ABI(Acquired Brain Injury) and TBI(Traumatic Brain Injury) have long-term effects which can be triggered by a number of situations whilst surfing.
UI related assists could be ideated in the direction of making flatter interfaces with less perspective effects thus helping those having depth perception. Similarly, touch/interactive components like buttons and form fields could be made larger for those with hand tremors and other health conditions like Arthritis.
Content related assists(which again I’m gonna rely on AI coupled with ML to solve) could be content grading. For example, videos which are overtly bright and change colors rapidly could be graded ‘seizure trigger’ and this could also be scaled to websites with a lot of dynamic animations, which could potentially cause mental stress as well as visual strain.
The features included are only a fraction of what ideally can be achieved and I have not touched upon various other physical and mental disabilities. Each one has their own shortcomings and devising solutions to every single one of them by myself would be impossible, but herein lies the beauty of collaboration.
Creating this, has been a long and informative journey, as I had to look at various kinds of accessibility challenges and their implications. This process was quite humbling, as putting myself in the position of a person facing difficulties in something as common as browsing, was not an easy task and finding solutions was even more difficult.
I call upon the beautiful UX community to review this ambitious case study of mine and hopefully someday, this could actually turn into a real product.
As always, I’m open to constructive criticism and would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section. Thanks for making it till the end.
Hope you have a lovely day :)