Design: Universal Design

What happens when a site has to appeal to a wide range of people? How do you sort out their different usability requirements? Will they conflict, and if so, how do you prioritize them?

Working on a new Web site to provide information about admission to The Open University (OU) in the UK, Ian Roddis, who is in charge of the OU Web strategy, issued a challenge: How can we make sure that the site will provide the right information in a format that will be useful and usable?

Earlier user research and usability tests that Caroline Jarrett and I had done had shown that users were having trouble learning about the OU’s special form of distance education on the existing site. To solve this problem, we wanted to make recommendations for the style and format of the information as part of our design. Read More

This column, Universal Usability, will explore the social benefits of human-centered design and ways in which we can create better conversations that include more people.

I’m writing this while listening to news reports and public discussion about the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The thought that keeps running through my head is this: the real disaster was not the storm, but our response to it.

The work of planning for crisis response may seem mundane. Long before a catastrophe, officials must prepare emergency and evacuation plans. To be ready for a disaster, they must make arrangements for essential needs like transportation, food, and shelter. This real-world, logistical planning is a lot less exciting than working on cutting-edge, high-tech systems like data mining for surveillance, but people’s lives depend on its being done well. Once a crisis occurs, officials must respond quickly, making and communicating the right decisions, organizing volunteers, and transporting supplies. And they need systems—both online and off—that help them do just that. We won’t know what really happened in the aftermath of Katrina for a while, but my guess is that people far from the daily reality of crisis response were seduced into thinking that technology could supply all the answers. Read More

I rarely talk explicitly about accessibility—not because I don’t care about it, but because accessibility must be so well baked into the overall design process. Plus, there are so many overlaps between accessible design and the concept of design for everyone in every context that my basic design principles and detailed guidelines more or less cover it. On projects, I actually avoid discussing accessibility specifically because I think it tends to lead to project teams’ creating accessibility features, which of course, are all too easy to descope, so teams might never get around to implementing them.

Mobile—and the related trends of using tablets and notebook computers in every environment—has made discussions of universal access even more important. Instead of thinking of disabled rather normal people, it is best to think along the lines of everyone being at least sometimes temporarily disabled. Although much temporary disability is the result of physical conditions, illnesses, or injuries, it can also be the consequence of environmental conditions. For example, sunlight might be coming through a window and glaring off a screen, making it hard to read and colors difficult to differentiate. Read More