This past week I had the opportunity to take part in an Accessibility Workshop that centered around an activity called the User Interface United Nations (UIUN) summit. In this activity, I and other participants each were responsible for representing and fighting for the interests of a “nation,” which was a population that had accessibility interests for a hypothetical redesign of this website. These “nations” included populations like the blind community, the rural community, people with learning disabilities or hand tremors, etc. The intention of the activity was to get young designers (like myself) thinking about UI accessibility in a new light, as well as highlighting how many different accessibility concerns exist and what designers can do to be as accommodating as possible. I’ll detail some of the interactions, but in short, this is a tough goal with a lot of compromising if design time or budget is at all short. Let’s take a quick dive into my research in preparation for the conference.
My Population
I personally was responsible for representing the Baby Boomer generation. This generation of people are those consisting primarily of people born from 1946 to 1964 in the aftermath of World War II. Baby Boomers greatly value human rights, individual freedoms, and community. A multitude of stigmas and stereotypes float around on the internet about their lack of ability to navigate technology–this statement is generally untrue, though it is common that Baby Boomers are generally slower at adapting to new technologies compared to other younger generations.
A large portion of research and studies on the internet about Baby Boomers compares their technological prowess to Millennials since the latter is the most recent generation to be wholly ingrained in the Western workforce. These studies compare commercial technology use between Baby Boomers and Millennials and usually show that Baby Boomers utilize online shopping services more often than Millennials. This might have to do with the fact that Baby Boomers have generally more spending power than Millennials, but the fact remains that Baby Boomers have adopted well to the digital age from their upbringings in which many of the demographic cohort were among the first to have household televisions become a commonplace.
Baby Boomers, in addition to being wholly capable of adapting to new technologies, have officially hit the point where, according to most surveys, they use more mobile devices than any other device for using the internet.
For these points, it can be concluded that Baby Boomers need simple and straightforward user experiences that don’t get too far away from the current status quo of website design. Additionally, since they are more likely to access help channels than Millennials, they prefer to have easily accessible support channels. Their values of human rights and individual freedoms lead them to need product transparency and limited amounts of information collection, and their increased usage of mobile devices lead them to require mobile-friendly interfaces.
The Negotiations
Each person in the workshop had their own nation and each person presented before the summit began in full. Once the summit began, as a workshop, we came together and listed out all of the requirements that each demographic needed to have full accessibility on the website. This process was the real meat of the workshop, since we needed to resolve conflicts among different requirements, and we needed to collectively rank the requirements for each part of the website (the parts being things like Page Header, Buttons/Hyperlinks, Media, Navigation, etc.) in an order with a requirement listed at rank 1 being the most important requirement for the part of the website. Naturally, since each nation had its own set of requirements and each person was responsible for representing the interests of a nation, there were a multitude of conflicts with trying to determine whose requirement was the most important when all requirements are important.
My requirements I fought for were simple. I wanted straightforward navigation, concise/easy-to-find support channels, and mobile-friendly forms. These requirements fill the basic needs of Baby Boomers I highlighted earlier and were surprisingly easy to mesh with requirements of other demographics. I found a lot of success in allying with the interests of Rural Communities in regards to mobile-friendly forms, Anxiety and PTSD interests with support channels, and younger demographics’ interests with straightforward navigation. Each of my interests was placed as one of the top two requirements in their individual page components, so I feel like my requirements were met and given justice.
Because my requirements were so easy to mesh into the lists, I found myself fighting for the causes of others in their negotiations with one another. A personality quirk of mine is to act as mediator in situations if I can, so my behavior was expected in this endeavor as well. The entire workshop spent a lot of time at the end debating whether it was more important to make sure that copy was readable versus making sure copy was clear and concise. I spent a lot of time arguing that it was higher priority to guarantee the readability of copy over its conciseness, but the opposing side eventually convinced me and my cohorts by arguing that there are demographics of people (namely the blind community) that care about the conciseness over the readability, whereas there are no demographics that care about readability over conciseness.
I found myself surprised to be as emotionally invested in this theoretical redesign as I was. I assumed I would be mostly concerned with where my own interests lay in the grand scheme of things, but my attachment to other issues and gravitation toward becoming a mediator quickly led me into fighting for causes that were not my own.
Wrap Up
At the end of the day, I found this exercise to be extremely valuable in highlighting how many different accessibility concerns there are in designing interfaces. The blind community’s needs are different from people with PTSD, whose needs differ from demographics defined by their age/generation. There are lots of people to consider in designing, and when budget or time is limited, decisions to prioritize certain accessibility features are rarely easy decisions to make. Further, the exercise extends largely into any space in which conflicts arise and compromises are necessary, and it’s always intriguing to be put into a scenario where the stakes aren’t high (due to the hypothetical nature) but people are still invested in what they are fighting for.