DEV Community: Eduardo Ramos

What is the importance of Global Accessibility Awareness Day?

Eduardo Ramos — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 19:49:49 +0000

The UN estimates that more than 1 billion people around the world live with some form of disability and as populations age over the coming years, that number is expected to rise rapidly.

Add to that the 10 percent of people who suffer from color blindness, and you start to get an idea of why accessibility is so important—not just for moral and legal reasons, but also so that your products can reach their full potential. You need to design for accessibility!

I think that’s an excellent reason to have a Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).

The GAAD is celebrated on the third Thursday of May each year and is aimed to raise awareness among developers, designers, and other creators to put a greater focus on digital accessibility and inclusion for the billion people across the world who have disabilities and impairments.

How to support the GAAD?

The best way to find out how you can get involved in GAAD is from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day website itself. They list various ways you can support, including:

In-person events
Virtual events
Webinars
Game Jams
BBC access all areas live stream

There are online courses you can enroll to increase your accessibility awareness throughout this week and beyond, like this one Accessibility: How to Design for All.

There are plenty of obvious ethical reasons that accessibility matters but ultimately, people with disabilities should have the same rights as the wider population—and that includes their ability to engage with, learn from and communicate via the digital world.

When we take it upon ourselves to design for accessibility, we create more chances for disabled people to use digital technology and, at the same time, expand our market share and support diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

If you neglect accessible designs for financial reasons, it means you’re not only acting illegally in most cases but are also being short-sighted in terms of the business value you can gain from accessible designs.

While all creators have their own design and development backlogs to contend with, it’s fair to say at this point there’s no real excuse why you shouldn’t do everything possible to design for accessibility.

Designers have the responsibility—not only to their profession but also to the users and society—to design accessible digital solutions. And Global Accessibility Awareness Day does a great job of promoting that.

What is usability?

Eduardo Ramos — Fri, 31 May 2019 14:16:55 +0000

I’ll start with a clarification: (just in case!) usability and user experience (UX) are not the same thing: the usability of a product is a crucial part that shapes its UX, and hence falls under the umbrella of UX.

While many might think that usability is solely about the “ease of use” of a product, it actually involves a great deal more than that.
The ISO 9421–11 standard on usability describes it as:

“The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals, with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. ”

– ISO 9421 Ergonomics of Human System Interaction.

Utility + Usability = Usefulness
When you’re designing for usability, it’s important to think about utility, too. While usability is concerned with making functions easy and pleasant to use, the utility is about providing functions that users *need *in the first place.

Author/Copyright holder: GNU FDL Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Only when usability is combined with utility do products become useful to their users. A mobile payment app could provide the most usable feature of adding the people around you on Facebook, but because most users of that app wouldn’t need that feature, it’s going to be useless to them.

All your effort towards building the most user-friendly feature could go to waste if that feature isn’t needed.

Read more on this topic here: What is Usability?

Common Usability Myths for Developers - Human-Computer Interaction.

Eduardo Ramos — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 21:34:51 +0000

I’d like to share two myths that I always bring up when discussing usability.

Most of the usability myths are born due to design trends becoming rules, spreading the misinterpretation of research, or the dehumanization of users.

For a developer it's more than tempting to follow what others or the majority do, and sometimes, of course, that's not the best thing to do.

It's with time and experience that a developer gains enough confidence and empirical knowledge (after suffering!) to recognize good usability patterns and how to apply it to the software.

However, it's best for the team to know this early in every project and have usability as one of the goals to be achieved in the final product. Your users will be thankful.

When it comes to usability, I liked this article: Usability A part of the User Experience because of the simplicity used to explain broadly the term and it’s applications. It reads:

“Usability” refers to the ease of access and/or use of a product or website. It’s a sub-discipline of user experience design. Although user experience design (UX Design) and usability were once used interchangeably, we must now understand that usability provides an important contribution to UX; however, it’s not the whole of the experience. We can accurately measure usability.

If you're not in a big team, or you're making your first product, you'll probably be by yourself when it comes to design. If you don't have a designer in your team, you'll be saving a lot of time if you consider usability from the beginning.

With this in mind, and taking into account the importance and rise of the term in the past decades, I believe the following myths were born out of that widespread phenomena:

The first myth is:
You could/should copy what works. Whenever someone disrupts the market with a new product that has a great UX and/or usability, many will start to copy the formula as a “one size fits all” solution. They’ll probably copy the UI layout, visual elements and, overall, “what it looks like”.

Inevitably, the user flows will be copied and implemented in a huge variety of sites and products that will most likely not be suited. If no one has done proper -or any user research- to implement this design, it will very much fail.

The second myth:
Don’t listen to users. Jakob Nielsen posted in 2001 an article titled: First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users. This was controversial at the time, of course, and in spite of what many interpreted from it, it has never meant that usability specialists shouldn’t listen to people at all.

He DID say in that article that it was better to watch users work, and then Nielsen explained When and How to Listen. The thing is that you should listen to users AFTER they’re done with the tasks.

There are many more but, in my opinion, these two are the most widespread among the communities. One on the side of developers/designers and the other on the hand of the usability experts.

What Makes a Good Interaction Design?

Eduardo Ramos — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:47:17 +0000

Good interaction is made of many areas which overlap because: "interactions are moments of contextual gestalt and one element has a direct impact on the others".

In the same way, to create a good interaction, a designer has to consider five dimensions: words (1D), visual representations (2D), physical objects/space (3D), time (4D), and behavior (5D).

These five dimensions were first defined by a professor at London’s Royal College of Art, Gillian Crampton Smith, and a senior interaction designer, Kevin Silver.

The dimensions represent the features an interaction designer considers when they create interactions. Here’s a bit more information about each of them:

(1D) words:
Encompasses text—such as button labels—which help convey the right amount of information to users.
(2D) visual representations:
The graphical elements which aid in user interaction, such as images, typography and icons.
(3D) physical objects/space:
Involves the medium through which users interact with the product or service—for instance, a laptop via a mouse, or a mobile phone via fingers.
(4D) time:
This relates to media that changes with time, such as animations, videos, and sounds.
(5D) behavior:
Concerned with how the previous four dimensions define the interactions a product affords—for instance, how users can perform actions on a website, or how users can operate a car. Behavior also refers to how the product reacts to the users’ inputs and provides feedback.

If you as a designer account for the five dimensions stated above, you can rest assured you'll hit all the characteristics of good interaction design.