best practices in accessible ux design for mobile

Accessible UX DesignFor MobileuxWaterloo P2P SeriesDecember 10, 2013Greg Fields, BlackBerry

Session Topics

• About Greg

• About Accessibility at BlackBerry

• Top 10 Best Practices

• Q&A

About Greg

• Married (Heather), 1 son (Treye)

• Product Management @ BlackBerry

• Accessibility ‘Expert’

• Care sincerely about great user experiences

Accessibility at BlackBerry

• Team initiated in 2003.

• Distributed, yet Accessibility focused.

• Active participants internally within the company, and externally within the disability community.

Top 10Best Practices

#. Heuristic

• Pearl of wisdom

• Nugget of truth

Screenshots

1. Love Thy Native OS

• Align with platform conventions.

• Inherit system settings.

• Avoid custom controls.

✖ ✔

Clipchat (iPhone) Facebook (Android)

2. Colour & Contrast

• Use colour to inform.

• Don’t communicate info by means of color alone.

• Design for background, foreground, adjacent. Aeoroportos de Portugal

(iPhone)

✔✔

KakaoTalk (Android)

3. Forgiving Touch Targets

• Design for sequential and discreet tasks.

• Maximize hit region.

• Test with winter gloves.

Tumblr (iPhone) Skim (iPhone)

✔✔

4. Embrace Multimodal

• Design for redundant visual + haptic input and output.

• Accelerate frequent and/or complex tasks.

• It’s cool.

5. Simplify to the Core

• Peel away excess until just before it hurts the user experience.

• Reduce Cognitive Load

• Reduce Critical Reasoning

✔

Square Cash (iPhone) Clique (iPhone)

✔

6. Logical Order of Things

• Chunking still matters.

• Align visual and actual information layout.

• Guide and assist.

✖ ✔

CircleMe (iPhone)

Twitterrific (iPhone)

7. Be Consistent

• Don’t make me think.

• Avoid fighting with existing mental models.

• Challenging when multi-platform.

✖ ✔

MS Outlook (Android) Clique (iPhone)

8. Manage Empty Data (or Errors)

• Use active voice.

• Be specific + obvious.

• Prompt an accelerated resolution.

✖ ✔

Spotify (Android)

BlackBerry Messenger (Android)

9. Test with Humans

• Choose right method(s).

• Get in the wild!

• Include Assistive Technologies and user needs in study plan.

10. Plan for Success

• Understand user needs.

• Assume failure at first.

• Allow for iterations.

• Universal Design (initially) takes longer.

Questions?