Looking to explore accessibility best practices across team functions in your organizations? Find answers to all your questions about accessible digital products and more at Axe-con 2023.

Axe-con provides insights into the critical role key players across functions like legal, design, management, product, etc., play in building accessible digital experiences.

Talks at the conference will feature case studies from enterprise companies leading in large-scale accessibility efforts and best practices and updates from technology leaders worldwide.

Attendance at the conference is free, and you can use your attendance towards continuing education (CE) towards IAAP certification.

Talks we’re excited about

• Ageism in Interfaces with Alex Tait
• Redesigning for Cognitive Ease with Alyssa Panetta
• Accessibility Maturity Models with Jonathan Thurston and James Thurston

Full program schedule

Join the free virtual conference

Registration is free! Sign up to access the live sessions and on-demand recordings of 60 sessions.

Save your seat

Ready to make your digital products more accessible to your audience?

We provide inclusive website design solutions that welcome your audiences to engage with your content, products, and services. Bring the best of front-end development to your projects with our web standards-based, usable, accessible, and inclusive work.

Get in touch

The post Axe-con, March 15-16, 2023 event invite appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Are you looking to integrate inclusive design into your organization’s product design framework? Get the latest insights on product inclusion at Inclusive Design 24, a free, 24-hour, online event that will take place on September 22.

The event will feature talks on inclusive web design, building accessible user experiences, documenting accessibility requirements, and more.

Following the success of last year’s talk, “There is no average person”, Say Yeah CEO Lee Dale will be hosting the following conversations at this year’s conference:

• A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility with Stéphanie Walter at 20:00 UTC (4:00 pm EST)
• An Inclusive Design Workflow for Teams with Scott Vinkle at 21:00 UTC (5:00 pm EST)

Catch these other great talks

• Design on the Spectrum: Creating a More Inclusive Workplace with Lona Moore at 16:00 UTC (noon EST)
• Beyond the Water’s Edge with Malcom Glenn at 18:00 UTC (2:00 pm EST)
• Performative Equity & Inclusion with Zariah Cameron at 19:00 UTC (3:00 pm EST)
• Building UX research practices for inclusion with Josh Kim and Maureen Barrientos at 23:00 UTC (7:00 pm EST)

View the full schedule

Watch the conference

This event is free, with no registration required. Join the conversation live on the Inclusive 24 YouTube channel. 

Ready to adopt an inclusive design framework that helps grow product access and engagement? 

Learn about our approach to inclusive design and how we can help create delightful experiences for your audience.

Get in touch

The post Inclusive Design 24 Conference, September 22, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Talks we’re excited about at Remote Design Week 2021

• Designing for Cognitive Disabilities with Tolu Adegbite
• How to Deconstruct a User Interface with Bob Baxley
• Visualizing Design Tokens at Scale with Nahiyan Khan
• 70 Ways You Can Actually Measure Design Quality with Jessa Parette

Save your spot!

You won’t want to miss one of the biggest design conferences of the year. Grab a ticket for you and your team today. Team passes are available from $299-499, individual passes from $90.

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy and experience design practices to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post Remote Design Week 2021, October 18-22, 2021 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Excellence in digital transformation comes from marrying organizational objectives and capabilities with user needs, objectives, and jobs-to-be-done, while leveraging technology to accelerate all facets of product and service development.

This necessitates identifying and intimately understanding the diverse markets your organization serves, defining outcomes over features, and defining technologies and processes that optimize your organization toward improved decision-making.

In short, your organization risks profound disruption if technology isn’t a core competency.

The facets of digital maturity

Digital transformation is difficult because it covers so many factors, from research to systems architecture to continuous improvement. In total, there are 7 primary factors your organization needs to develop as core competencies:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice. Within each of these areas, there are a series of capabilities and requirements to consider, as detailed in our article, “Why digital excellence is so hard to achieve.”

If your technology decision-making and operational practice are not yet mature, you may find these common challenges familiar.

Typical challenges of achieving digital excellence

1. Having limited capability in any one of the 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly upfront or over time and diminish the value of products and services.
2. Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
3. Taking a technical or engineering-driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need instead of taking a human-centred design approach that identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes to align organizational goals and user needs.
4. Transitioning from research and strategy to product. Bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products requires a unique set of cross-functional capabilities.
5. Not aligning information architecture and interface design to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
6. Not effectively translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering- team capabilities are most robust at the architecture and back-end, instead of at layers where users interact.
7. Minimal continuous improvement. Using the knowledge gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis is essential to improve service and product.
8. Lacking effective, ongoing technology decision-making. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, learn from data and insights, and make the most effective decisions on spending ongoing resources to drive adoption and engineering improvements.

Ultimately, success in the connected age requires a breadth of expertise and a depth of digital maturity and capability to maintain market-leading product, service, and customer experience standards.

We’ll help you grow your digital maturity towards improved product, service, and organizational decision-making

Learn more about digital excellence and our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments service, or get in touch to discuss how we can help you optimize how you work towards reduced product and service development costs and improved customer experience.

Get in touch

The post The role of technology in building market leading organizations appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Don’t miss out on the second FITC Spotlight UX event of the year, taking place on December 8th, 2020.

A selection of fantastic UX designers will speak about topics like designing for cognitive bias, design ethics, accessibility, and many more relevant topics for UX designers and other digital professionals.

The half-day event will take place in a now-familiar all-digital format and is sure to be a fantastic opportunity to learn from some of the great UX minds from the comfort of your home.

We’ve attended FITC’s Spotlight events numerous times, and it’s always a great opportunity to connect with other UX professionals and stay on top of new developments in the field.

Talks we’re especially excited about include:

• Accessibility is hard, and other myths, with Devon Persing
• Design for cognitive bias: using mental shortcuts for good instead of evil, with David Dylan Thomas
• First, do no harm: ethics in digital product design, with Mariah Hay

Check out the full lineup

Grab your tickets today to take advantage of this chance to learn from these UX experts.

Get a 50% discount if you buy your ticket before Friday with code blackfriday

Buy tickets

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy and experience design methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post FITC Spotlight UX: December 8th, 2020 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The pros and cons of the persona

Getting through the user research phase of a design project can seem daunting, but in reality it’s just the beginning. When you and your team get to reviewing and synthesizing your research, you’re getting ever closer to bringing your concept to life. Usually, one of the first steps post-research is to create personas.

Personas give you and your team an overview of a user or a group of users. They also outline high-level assumptions about your user’s preferences and their behaviour patterns.

An example of a completed proto-persona highlighting motivators, behaviours, and needs for a single archetype. Leah Buhley, 2013, for Rosenfeld Media.

As a tool in a designer’s toolkit, personas nudge us to perceive a possible user’s situation with greater empathy. They also spark fresh thoughts about how a product or service could be used. For digital products, a focused, task-based persona can be crucial during these initial stages.

However, if your team’s aim is to understand what your users need, personas aren’t the most effective tool. Personas alone can’t reveal how users would behave, and the contexts where they might use your product or service.

Ideally, methodical user research results in many artifacts that inform your design team’s understanding of your users. Other research tools include: customer journey maps, service blueprints, empathy maps, emotional journeys, and user stories. A combination of these methods will often lead to the best results.

Personas are great for ‘humanizing’ users, and for painting a picture of individual experiences within an archetype. However, you shouldn’t rely on them to define what larger demographic or affinity groups—especially diverse ones—might want. In these cases, analyzing a larger dataset of behaviour patterns and contexts makes the most sense.

Understanding users on a behavioural and contextual level

The Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach is a framework that focuses on how users “hire” those products and services that help them complete a task or meet a goal. JTBD frames all design requirements around how users functionally use a product or services. So instead of referencing static, presumptive, and homogenized demographic or affinity group descriptions that come with personas, you’re focused on outcomes a user wishes to achieve.

Here’s an example of framing a user need with JTBD for a digital task-management and note-taking product, like Notion or Evernote:

Job statement: The user’s key task, which they are hiring your product/service to accomplish
e.g. Keep my project notes organized when I’m on a tight deadline

Outcome statement: The user’s wants or expectations (outcomes) from using your product or service
e.g. Reduce the chances that I miss a deliverable for a project.

Since living, breathing humans are always changing their perceptions of their challenges, goals, and tools, it’s crucial to frame their needs in a fluid way, too.

Jobs-to-be-done is a perfect tool for this sort of framing, because it focuses on a user’s context and goals, rather than less-informative and generalized demographic or affinity group information.

Simply put: people are trying to solve a problem by using your product or service. Understanding what problem they’re trying to solve is far more effective than generalizing a non-task-centric group they may belong to. Knowing what they need to do is far more actionable information than assuming you know who they are by following a persona or archetype that can only hope to resemble who they may be.

Go deeper by mapping user stories, states, and contexts

Some other great frameworks to consider as you work to improve you and your team’s understanding of how people might want to use your product or service are user stories and user states and contexts.

A user states and contexts map visualizes all of the requirements and needs that users experience. Image from the Fluid project.

Moving from research to product and service refinement

Testing and refining all of the methodologies listed above will extend and deepen your understanding of your customers beyond the limitations of personas.

As you evolve your approach, patterns will emerge in your observations, and you will become adept at weaving them into design requirements.

Longer-term, you can expect to see significant benefits from this approach:

• more effective design requirements,
• better prototypes, and
• better-informed design teams operating with more empathy after understanding the needs and outcomes of real users.

The path to effective service models and products is to deeply understand your user’s contexts and needs and the outcomes you can provide to meet those objectives. The tools and frameworks we’ve outlined here can leverage your user research into JTBD and user context maps, which will seamlessly direct you into more efficient product and development strategies.

Need help getting started?

Get in touch

View article in uxmag.com

The post Understanding users by going beyond personas, demographics, and affinity groups, published in UX Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The week will include talks on everything from inclusive design to talks on getting better customer insights. You’ll also get to participate in great networking opportunities (virtually, of course!) with after-hours events, and a Slack workspace dedicated to the event for chatting with other attendees throughout the week.

Some talks we’re excited about at Remote Design Week 2020

• Lara Mendonca, Product Design Lead at Bumble will talk about inclusive design at Bumble, and designing for belonging
• Anna Niess, a designer at Slack, will be sharing her take on how customers shaped the future of Slack
• Gaining deeper insights into remote work at scale from one of the world’s largest all-remote design teams, with Christie Lenneville, UX Director at Gitlab

As a team that has a long history of working remotely, we can’t wait to spend the week with the DesignX community talking all things remote design and remote collaboration.

The post Remote Design Week 2020 takes place April 27th through May 1st appeared first on Say Yeah!.

History shows that organizations who invest in their future when the economy is struggling set themselves up to become market leaders during the ensuing economic growth period.

That’s why we’re thrilled today to be launching a new way to evaluate and improve your site’s usability, accessibility, and inclusion: The Inclusive Website Audit.

This audit guides your team to optimize your website for all audiences and to improve your use of accessibility standards like WCAG 2.1, all reviewed by our expert team.

Learn more about the Inclusive Website Audit

Why is this process so important?

These three factors (usability, accessibility, & inclusion) are key to reaching a wider audience, and retaining and embracing the diverse audience you already have. By improving these factors, your site can be used and loved by even more people, and you can avoid alienating or excluding potential customers.

No two users have the exact same needs and context for which they use your site. As a result, these three factors must be at the forefront of the design, development, and content of your website to be able to capture the widest breadth of your addressable market.

How the audit works

You can choose between an Essential, Starter, and Custom audit package, each providing actionable next steps you can take to improve your website.

No matter which one you choose, we’ll look at a range of factors for usability, accessibility, and inclusion, from mobile responsiveness, to screen-reader tagging, to the language used in your site’s content and the images you share throughout your site.

This range of criteria ensures that you’ll get a comprehensive overview of how your site is doing in these areas, and a more detailed breakdown of the issues on your site.

Learn more about our comprehensive audit process.

Your path to a more inclusive website begins here

Get started today with improving your website to be usable, accessible, and inclusive for all of your potential customers. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

The post Introducing the Inclusive Website Audit from Say Yeah! appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Getting through the user research phase of a design project can seem daunting, but in reality it’s just the beginning. When you and your team get to reviewing and synthesizing your research, you’re getting ever closer to bringing your concept to life. Usually, one of the first steps post-research is to create personas.

Personas give you and your team an overview of a user or a group of users. They also outline high-level assumptions about your user’s preferences and their behaviour patterns.

An example of a completed proto-persona highlighting motivators, behaviours, and needs for a single archetype. Leah Buhley, 2013, for Rosenfeld Media.

As a tool in a designer’s toolkit, personas nudge us to perceive a possible user’s situation with greater empathy. They also spark fresh thoughts about how a product or service could be used. For digital products, a focused, task-based persona can be crucial during these initial stages.

However, if your team’s aim is to understand what your users need, personas aren’t the most effective tool. Personas alone can’t reveal how users would behave, and the contexts where they might use your product or service.

Ideally, methodical user research results in many artifacts that inform your design team’s understanding of your users. Other research tools include: customer journey maps, service blueprints, empathy maps, emotional journeys, and user stories. A combination of these methods will often lead to the best results.

Personas are great for ‘humanizing’ users, and for painting a picture of individual experiences within an archetype. However, you shouldn’t rely on them to define what larger demographic or affinity groups—especially diverse ones—might want. In these cases, analyzing a larger dataset of behaviour patterns and contexts makes the most sense.

Understanding users on a behavioural and contextual level

The Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach is a framework that focuses on how users “hire” those products and services that help them complete a task or meet a goal. JTBD frames all design requirements around how users functionally use a product or services. So instead of referencing static, presumptive, and homogenized demographic or affinity group descriptions that come with personas, you’re focused on outcomes a user wishes to achieve.

Here’s an example of framing a user need with JTBD for a digital task-management and note-taking product, like Notion or Evernote:

Job statement: The user’s key task, which they are hiring your product/service to accomplish
e.g. Keep my project notes organized when I’m on a tight deadline

Outcome statement: The user’s wants or expectations (outcomes) from using your product or service
e.g. Reduce the chances that I miss a deliverable for a project.

Since living, breathing humans are always changing their perceptions of their challenges, goals, and tools, it’s crucial to frame their needs in a fluid way, too.

Jobs-to-be-done is a perfect tool for this sort of framing, because it focuses on a user’s context and goals, rather than less-informative and generalized demographic or affinity group information.

Simply put: people are trying to solve a problem by using your product or service. Understanding what problem they’re trying to solve is far more effective than generalizing a non-task-centric group they may belong to. Knowing what they need to do is far more actionable information than assuming you know who they are by following a persona or archetype that can only hope to resemble who they may be.

Go deeper by mapping user stories, states, and contexts

Some other great frameworks to consider as you work to improve you and your team’s understanding of how people might want to use your product or service are user stories and user states and contexts.

A user states and contexts map visualizes all of the requirements and needs that users experience. Image from the Fluid project.

Moving from research to product and service refinement

Testing and refining all of the methodologies listed above will extend and deepen your understanding of your customers beyond the limitations of personas.

As you evolve your approach, patterns will emerge in your observations, and you will become adept at weaving them into design requirements.

Longer-term, you can expect to see significant benefits from this approach:

• more effective design requirements,
• better prototypes, and
• better-informed design teams operating with more empathy after understanding the needs and outcomes of real users.

The path to effective service models and products is to deeply understand your user’s contexts and needs and the outcomes you can provide to meet those objectives. The tools and frameworks we’ve outlined here can leverage your user research into JTBD and user context maps, which will seamlessly direct you into more efficient product and development strategies.

Need help getting started?

Get in touch

The post Understanding users by going beyond personas, demographics, and affinity groups appeared first on Say Yeah!.