IBM Accessible Design Thinking
Company: IBM
Role: Lead Designer
Type: Service Design with Website Support
Status: Delivered
Project Description
As the lead designer for IBM Accessibility, it was my responsibility to integrate accessibility into the IBM Design Thinking Framework to enable product teams to create accessible products without technical debt.
Summary
The IBM Design Thinking Framework provides a workflow for designers to understand users and deliver valuable products along with their teams. Every product at IBM must be accessible according to the WCAG AA standards but the process of creating accessible apps was wrought with difficulties and often, if not always, resulted in a great deal of technical debt to fix before release.
Research
Product Teams
Along with the Product Owner for accessibility, we interviewed product teams with high-priority products to understand the difficulties they were experiencing integrating accessibility into their development process. We also sent out a company-wide survey to team members to understand them better.
Designers
I had direct access to the IBM Design Operations team and the IBM Design Camp mentors and participants. I interviewed designers to understand their previous knowledge of accessibility and examined the design thinking process they were being taught in order to find the best times to focus on accessibility.
Design Camp Projects
Each cohort of designers that was hired would do a six-week project for an actual product team in IBM. Those products needed to be accessible so we ran experiments with training the designers about accessibility and then observing their work over time. We tried several methods over the course of a year with three different design camps of 6 teams. For example, one method was to assign each team with a different disability to be aware of during their project.
Research Findings
Product Teams
We found that product teams were frustrated with accessibility and that it was being addressed much too late in the process. Debt piled up and then the developers had to work with an accessibility expert, often for several months, to fix unexpected accessibility issues. This caused severe friction with business executives that had promised strict delivery dates. If the teams could understand the necessary outcomes and address them along the way it would eliminate the excessive debt and lead to on-time deliveries.
Designers
I found that a majority of designers had a very cursory knowledge of accessibility but didn't know when and how to address it in the design thinking process. Some had experience working on products that were required to be accessible while many others had no experience at all. Nearly all designers showed empathy for people with disabilities and a desire to create products that worked for everyone.
Design Camp Projects
We found overwhelmingly that the type of disability the teams focused on wasn't as important as simply forcing the team to focus on accessibility during each exercise. We also quickly understood that a designer would not be able to retain all of the technical information required to do accessible design and that they would need guidance and assistance on an ongoing basis.
Solutions
From our research, we understood that focusing on accessibility from the outset of a project was the key to eliminating accessibility debt and designers became the key focus. At the same time, product teams needed tools that were easy to use when testing their applications so we focused on redesigning them to be intuitive and easy to use. We took a three-pronged approach to solve the issue.
1. Design Education
After trying very in-depth training programs for designers (and losing many of them to sleep along the way) we understood that we really needed to plant empathy for people with disabilities and then give a guided approach that could be followed. We created a one-hour accessibility presentation for designers so they would understand who accessibility was for and to give a brief outline of how to do it.
2. Design Framework
We created a website itemizing all the steps necessary and when to do them in the design thinking process. The guide was not only for designers but also product managers and developers. This allowed product teams to check back often during the process to make sure debt was not being created.
