Introducing Product Design Students to Accessibility
The Test Pilot team regularly collaborates with an array of teams both inside and outside Mozilla. Last year, for example, we worked with the Internet Archive to launch the No More 404s experiment. This year, Test Pilot has forged relationships with a number of schools to help us further diversify our experiment pipeline. There was the collaboration with students at Tatung University in Taipei a few months ago, and more recently, Test Pilot team members helped support the open design sprint run by Mozilla’s Open Innovation team and researchers at Stanford. Last week, the Test Pilot team embarked on another partnership with a design and media school in the United Kingdom, Ravensbourne. (If the school’s name is familiar, it might be because Ravensbourne is also the home of MozFest, which kicks off on October 27.)
Test Pilot playing the client
Over the next six weeks, Test Pilot is playing the client for one of Ravensbourne’s foundational product design courses. Test Pilot Product Manager John Gruen and I attended the first day of class last week to meet the roughly 25 second-year product design students and introduce them to Mozilla, Test Pilot, and the domains of web accessibility and inclusive design. We chose accessibility as the area we’d like students to work on because it illustrates Mozilla’s mission and because of the considerable Mozilla staff and community expertise we could leverage to support students.
Over the next six weeks, students working in small teams will engage in a variety of iterative design activities to generate accessibility-related experiment ideas for Test Pilot. Students will perform design research to understand their chosen problem areas. They will engage in activities related to concepting and prototyping. Students will also learn how to conduct relevant primary research such as expert interviews and usability testing on their prototypes. Finally, students will learn how to craft and deliver a product pitch. To support these activities, students will meet on a weekly basis with Mozilla researchers, designers, engineers, as well as Ravensbourne faculty.
John Gruen and I will provide feedback on experiment concepts half-way through the project and will return to Ravesnbourne to evaluate the final pitches. We will also select a winning team, whose members will receive a cash prize, be featured here on the Test Pilot blog, and have their concept further evaluated by the Test Pilot team in hopes of building a related experiment.
Students choosing problem areas
During the first class last week, through a “how might we” exercise, affinity diagramming, and small group discussion, each student team selected the problem area they will pursue for their Mozilla project.
The seven teams started out with a wide range of problem areas, but by the end of the class meeting, most teams set out to address challenges under one of the following topic umbrellas:
- Accessibility of browser UI and web content for individuals with dyslexia
- Workflows and online safety for older adults
Students’ next steps are to continue articulating research questions, conduct secondary research, and begin planning primary research. We fully expect that some teams may change directions once their research gets underway.
Learning together
Accessibility and inclusive design are complex topics for anyone to tackle. We hope that the Ravensbourne students will gain valuable knowledge, skills, and experience from working with Test Pilot and Mozilla this term. In turn, it’s already apparent that working with the student teams will help Test Pilot further refine the ways we collaborate with other teams and inspire more experiments with clear ties to Mozilla’s mission.
