WORLD USABILITY DAY

World Usability Day: 3 Ways to Promote Inclusion through User Experience

November 9, 2017

While Excellis Interactive lives and breathes usability each and every day, today, November 9, the world honors it with World Usability Day. Celebrating successful user experience. Bringing awareness to holistic solutions to create a better world. And this year’s theme fully embraces that mission – inclusion through user experience.

Well-designed user experiences allow for the uniqueness of people’s different strengths and believe to co-exist in a place of similarity and common ground.

Focusing on only SOME users’ experiences? That SUX. To maintain a competitive advantage in the enterprise, companies can no longer pander to the lowest common denominator. Companies at the head of the S&P 500 index are leaders in user experience. Therefore, previous thriving organizations failing to adapt are now lagging behind.

user experience chartUsers expect highly-personalized solutions. Furthermore, they want those solutions to be intuitive and easily accessible. That doesn’t just mean providing a pretty user interface specific to an individual user (although that’s certainly a nice start). In order to create truly inclusive user experiences, our experience has shown you need to focus on three things.

Be Empathetic

At Excellis, our “day in the life” research allows us to find out who your users really are. What limitations they face. When they encounter pain points. How they interact with technology.

Because how one user views something can be very different from the next person, we never assume. By immersing ourselves into users’ roles, we see what they see, allowing us to create optimum user experiences. While those experiences may vary from user to user, there’s still a sense of solidarity, when each member of the team feels they are able to do their jobs easily and effectively.

Expand (or Limit) Your UI

To be inclusive, you must make your UI as accessible as possible. Is it fully-responsive? Is it accessible from anywhere?

How about user-based experiences? These allow your users to only be presented with the functionality specific to their roles, eliminating confusion and streamlining processes.

Embrace Technology

Technology makes it easier than ever before to create inclusive user experiences. For example, AI (artificial intelligence) like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant revolutionized the way users engage with technology, changing the way users shop, check the weather or locate information. It’s no surprise that SAP is embracing this with SAP Co-Pilot. Because enterprise users cannot see who they are talking to, it presents a brand new set of challenges for UX designers. As innovators, Excellis has welcomed those challenges with a smile. Wait til you see what we’ve been creating in our UX lab!

Obviously, not every company has the budget to incorporate AI into their enterprise solutions. However, you’re remiss if you don’t see the value in embracing your existing technology, providing enhanced user experiences through customized UI, and having empathy for your users. Inclusive user experience fosters positivity, greater productivity and so much more. World Usability Day is the perfect time to start or reexamine your user experience strategy. But many don’t know where to begin. Excellis can examine your existing enterprise stack, from your UI to architecture and subsequently, create a custom roadmap to get you on your way to providing the best user experiences. Contact us to set-up a free consultation.

About World Usability Day

World Usability Day brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for our common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. It is about:

  • Celebrating the strides we have made in creating usable products and educating the masses about how usability impacts our daily lives.
  • Making our world work better.
  • Reaching out to the common citizen and spreading the message: We don’t have to put up with products and services that don’t work well and that human error is a misnomer.

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