Rod Motta - User Experience Visual Designer » customer

Web Accessibility no longer an afterthought

Rod Motta — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:36:36 +0000

Yesterday I came across this interesting web accessibility article at CNN.com, talking about how big internet companies such as Yahoo and Google are embracing it.

We should all start an accessibility push in our organizations, here’s why:

There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.

With a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older

In order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

Performance, internationalization, and accessibility are not a feature, they should all be standard.

Reactions to the imaginary threat of extinction

Rod Motta — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:05:03 +0000

Build every feature any customer would ever want: Apparently, by having all the features anyone can ever imagine, “eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy a competitors’ product”. That’s a wrong conclusion and a really bad idea. Software that tries to be everything to everyone generally sucks. It becomes bloated, hard to use, and in need of big up-front training, which is probably a good definition of enterprise software right there.

Become a sales force-driven company: Hire a bunch of sales people and make them convince people to buy your software. Side step the actual users, the developers, and go straight to management. The sales people will invariably promise more than you have and drive you even deeper into “build everything for everyone”.

Stop and take time to find the direction.

Rod Motta — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:29:19 +0000

A Good Experience blog post by Mark Hurst has an amusing and insightful post on strategy as opposed to tactics:

Why is finding direction (or strategy) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution.

You have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can’t run while you’re reading the map.

And this is the potential problem with popular methods such as:

• iterative design
• rapid prototyping
• agile development

…which are great and all, except when there’s no well-thought-out direction to go in.

So be forewarned – it’s hard to be a strategist. People prefer action. “Ready-fire-aim” sounds so much more exciting and appealing. “Do something!” they say – and it can be hard to sit down and say hey, let’s take at least a couple of days to think about who our customers are and talk to them about what they need.

Speaking with the customers refines and narrows the direction. After all you are fulfilling their needs.

The pleasing paradox phenomenon

Rod Motta — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:32:18 +0000

We try so hard to please our client(s) that we fail to do what would be truly pleasing. That includes also giving our client critical feedback.

The challenge is to be of service without becoming servile. We shouldn’t elevate any customer to the role of superior being, but treat each with human respect.

The key to becoming a stellar service provider lies in making only responsible commitments. This requires not simply being knowledgeable about what must be done but “no-legible” about how preferences resolve into satisfying results. We must know how and when to say, “No,” because no one can know what will finally emerge as best. Client and designer will have to discover what constitutes best, and this always means stumbling through some uncomfortable territory together.

It’s crazy how much more satisfying to it is when you are able to present an even better solution to the problem they were really hoping for when they were offering suggestions or ideas.

Of course you’ve heard this Henry Ford quote a hundred times:
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Or Tom Kelley’s (IDEO’s general manager) translation of that:
“Customers don’t envision the future, they inform the present.”