September 11, 2020

Friday Accessibility 5 - Week 2!

This week was focused on two books, Well Designed by John Kolko, and Building for Everyone by Annie Jean-Baptise; here are a few of thought-provoking things I read:

“The thing that would have made me a better, more effective product manager would have been to be a more active participant in the community I was designing for.”
- Well Designed, pg. 109 (from an interview with Gary Chou)
- Takeaway: we can’t expect to build inclusive and accessible products without trying to be involved in the communities of our target audience
Chapter 3 of Well Designed focuses on gathering behavioral insights - at it’s lowest level, how do people do things, but trying to find out why and how it makes them feel
- Chapter 4 of Building for Everyone focuses on building an argument to get buy-in for inclusion efforts - with one focus being on the “human case”, which goes hand-in-hand with the above point
Another point made repeatedly in Building for Everyone is that psychological safety is a must-have for getting honest feedback
- It’s challenging enough to build this within a team/company
- How do you do this with your users (or target users)?
Chapter 3 of Building for Everyone stresses the importance of having a champion for D/I efforts on a team
- At first I dismissed this as something I probably could not do well, as I was afraid of being “that guy”
- Then I realized that’s a bunch of BS because I’ve easily been “that guy” for other things like, say, data security (another area that most product teams would say is important, but not actively think about while building)

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