Inclusive Design: Create a Realistic User Journey Map with Considering Accessibility

A user journey is the series of experiences a user has as they interact with your product. (User journeys build off the personas and stories) Before you start the user journey, you need a journey map. An illustration of what the user goes through to achieve their goals.

Benefits of user journey mapping:

• Helps UX designers create obstacle-free paths for users.?
• Reduces the impact of designer bias. Lets you thoroughly detail the user's interaction with your design. That way you can really focus on how a specific persona, not you, thinks and feels at every step.
• Incorporate accessibility and inclusive design when building the user journey map
• Highlights new pain points
• Identify improvement opportunities

How to map the user journey

1. Step 1: Add each action in the journey until the user reaches their goal. Identify tasks the user needs to complete. List all the things the user needs to do to reach their goal.
2. Step 2: Add description for each action. What tasks does the user have to do? describing all the smaller things the user must accomplish before graduating to the next main task.?
3. Step 3: Add how the user feels at each point. guesstimates are okay! identifying the user's likely emotion as they go from task to task.
4. Step 4: Add opportunities for improvement. This is where new ideas may come from! identify opportunities to improve his user experience.

Create a user journey map

• Include the first persona's name and goals.?
• Identify a business goal the user might like to achieve.
• Add each action your persona takes in their journey. Include info about finding, interacting with, and ultimately using the product or service you’re providing.
• Add 2-3 tasks for each action.
• Indicate how the user feels at each point. Be as specific as possible. What does the user feel as they experience each step in their journey? Try to empathize with the user's experience as much as possible.
• Add opportunities for improvement. These can be ideas that would help resolve the cause of a negative user experience or ones that take a positive part of the user’s experience and build upon it.
• Be proactive and include accessibility considerations.
• When you're finished, go back and check for biases in your assumptions and ideas.
• Think about some real-world examples to help you understand how a user uses a product or service like yours.
• Include both positive and negative experiences.
• Think of opportunities that will improve the negative experiences and build upon the positive ones.
• Check along the way for opportunities to consider accessibility and avoid bias.

Accessibility is not just designing to include a group of users with varying abilities. Instead, it extends to anyone who is experiencing a permanent, temporary, or situational disability.

Considering accessibility in design, especially during the creation of personas, user stories, and user journeys, extends its benefits to many people. Whether they are people experiencing permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities, it’s important to remember that people with and without disabilities share the same goal for any given user problem that a design is trying to solve.

Not addressing the needs of someone with a disability can have serious consequences. Consider if fire safety escape routes didn’t include routes for wheelchairs, or if grocery stores and medical practices didn’t include accessible entrances. It means all users have everything they need to stay happily on their user journeys. You want to design products that can be used by everyone.?

It's important to have conversations with people with disabilities and immerse yourself in the assistive technology that they might use. Learning more about assistive technologies might mean watching videos of experts using them.?

UX designers empathize with their potential users, which includes people with disabilities.

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. Designing for accessibility is about considering all users’ journeys, keeping their permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities in mind.?

Consider accessibility when conducting research

1. Touch: How would you design for users who have use of one arm, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

• Decide where to place buttons within your design based on several different hand sizes.
• Create a feature that allows double taps to avoid accidental icon clicks.
• Enable the one-handed keyboard feature and general keyboard compatibility.
• Allow button customization for easy access to information that the user finds most important.

2. See: How would you design for users who have limited vision, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

• Use a larger font to create a reader-friendly design of the app.
• Ensure the app and the images have alternate text that can be read by a screen reader.
• Detect whether the user is operating a motor vehicle.
• Design the app with high contrast colors.
• Don’t rely on text color to explain navigation or next steps. For example, don’t use red text alone as an indicator of a warning. Instead, your design should include explicit instructions.

3. Hear: How would you design for users who have limited hearing, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

• Don’t rely solely on sounds to provide app updates, like a new message notification. Instead, enable haptics, which are vibrations that engage a user’s sense of touch, and notification lights.
• Apply closed captioning to all videos.?
• Provide a text messaging system within the app to allow users to communicate through writing.

4. Speak: How would you design for users who cannot speak, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally??

• Provide written intros, descriptions, and instructions for users, in addition to video-based content.
• Provide Real-Time Texting during phone calls with users or with app support.
• Arrange alternatives for automated systems that rely on speech recognition.
• Provide an in-app messaging system that allows the use of emojis and image uploads.

The best way to learn about how to improve your designs is to conduct research and get feedback from people with disabilities directly.

Real-Time Texting, which lets users text during a phone call to improve communication.?

Alternative text. People who have low vision or are blind often rely on screen readers to read the content on their screens aloud. But, if your informational icons don’t have labels or alternative text, the screen reader can’t describe the functionality of that button to the user. Not every image or icon is informational, so only include descriptions when necessary.

Learning about assistive technology

• Discussing the value of disability technology: Disability Technology from TEDx Talks on YouTube
• How accessibility in technology changes lives: How the Blind Use Technology to See The World from TEDx Talks on YouTube
• An explanatory guide for phone accessibility: Smartphone accessibility: a comprehensive guide from Uswitch?
• Google’s accessibility information hub homepage?

To put inclusive design into practice, it’s important to immerse yourself in the assistive technology that people with disabilities might use and to have conversations with them about their experiences. The best way to design empathetically for the world around you is to engage with your users and ask them questions about the way your designs could help them succeed.

Inclusive Design

• Describing ways to design products inclusively: Inclusive Design: 12 Ways to Design for Everyone from Shopify?
• Google’s accessible approach to inclusive design: An Accessible Process for inclusive Design from Google I/O
• Breaking down important inclusive design principles: 6 Principles for Inclusive Design from UX Planet

A curb cut is the name for the slope of the sidewalk that creates a ramp with the adjoining street.?

The curb-cut effect is a phenomenon that describes how products and policies designed for people with disabilities often end up helping everyone.

The auditory signals even speed up to let people with vision disabilities know that their time to cross the street safely is ending.?

Tactile signal, like the bumpy blister paving on the sidewalk's curb. The physical sensation of the tactile paving indicates that they've safely made it to the next sidewalk.?

Create a user journey map

• Select your persona: Imagine your organization’s management team wants to better understand the user journey of one of the most common personas.
• Identify a business goal: Identify a business goal the management team would like to achieve.?
• Identify actions your persona takes: Add each action your persona takes on their journey. Include info about finding, interacting with, and ultimately using the product or service provided by your company.
• Identify tasks for each action: add 2-3 tasks your persona would need to take to complete each action.
• Identify how the persona feels at each point: add a word to represent how the persona feels as each action is completed. You may use one or more feelings depending on the experience the user has.?
• Identify opportunities for improvement: These can be ideas to help resolve the causes of a negative user experience. It can also include ideas that highlight a positive or highly successful part of the user’s experience, ideas that build upon or magnify the experience in some way.
• Proactively consider accessibility and check for bias in your assumptions and ideas: Think about the possible range of users with disabilities. Select one user group with disabilities such as people with visual impairment or people with a hearing impairment and then determine if your design is accessible to this user group.?

Accessibility improvements often enhance the design experience for all users. As a result, it's an essential part of the design process to be inclusive of users with disabilities. It has the additional benefit of creating a stronger overall experience for everyone.