Design for humans

Are we design­ing for search engines? Robots? Quick bucks? Have we for­got­ten how to design for people?

I’m in my mid-for­ties and, after twen­ty-plus years in a dig­i­tal prod­uct com­pa­ny, I, like many folk, have found myself ​“self-employed”. Unless you’ve been hid­ing under a rock for the last cou­ple of years, you’ll see that one thing has caused a major upset in my indus­try: AI.

It has­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly cre­at­ed a new prob­lem, but exac­er­bat­ed an issue with dig­i­tal prod­ucts that’s exist­ed for a long time. We’ve for­got­ten how to design for peo­ple. And, as use­ful as AI is as a tool, things aren’t much better.

There’s the famous ​“Iron Tri­an­gle”: you can have fast, good or cheap, but not all three. The chal­lenges fac­ing the indus­try have meant that ​“good” has tak­en a back seat, and we’re hop­ing, fin­gers crossed, that AI will sort out the ​“good” after the next prompt.

Mar­quee tags 

I’ve been work­ing with the web from what it seems like the ear­ly days. I remem­ber learn­ing HTML with all its weird­ness as it found its feet. <marquee> and <center> tags, any­one? And lay­ing web­sites out with tables. As crude as things were, under­stand­ing the struc­ture that holds every­thing togeth­er became a bit of an obses­sion. You see, I did­n’t train in IT; I came out of an engi­neer­ing degree. And with engi­neer­ing, struc­ture is every­thing. Sol­id foundations.

Through the years, ​“acces­si­bil­i­ty” has always been one of those aspects of web design, along with user expe­ri­ence, user inter­faces, respon­sive­ness and per­for­mance. But, it seems out of all of these, acces­si­bil­i­ty has been treat­ed like the ugly sister.

A web design­er can get away with a nice inter­face or hav­ing some­thing work on mobile. But, design­ing for peo­ple not like them… that’s an add-on. An option­al extra. Too expen­sive. Annoying.

Scratch­ing an engi­neer’s itch 

But the more I looked into how acces­si­bil­i­ty fits into the whole, I realised it scratched my engi­neer’s itch. It relies on good struc­ture: the thing that a good web­site should be built on. And the real­i­sa­tion that if we take acces­si­bil­i­ty seri­ous­ly, it does­n’t just help those who need assis­tance; it helps every­one! It’s foun­da­tion­al (not an option­al extra) to build­ing prod­ucts for humans!

Through my years of work­ing in web design, I’ve been slow­ly becom­ing a cham­pi­on of this kind of think­ing (Some might say, a nag­ging pain-in-the-butt). But it takes a lot of con­vinc­ing for it to be seen as a fun­da­men­tal part of our work. Engi­neers are just not taught it in uni­ver­si­ty, it seems. Man­agers don’t under­stand it enough to work it into their pric­ing. And design­ers see acces­si­bil­i­ty as some­thing that gets in the way of beau­ti­ful designs. And that’s the thing I want to challenge.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, for too long, acces­si­bil­i­ty has the rep­u­ta­tion of a legal doc­u­ment or red tape. It’s por­trayed as clin­i­cal, a list of ​“do’s and don’ts”. It comes across as the oppo­site of inter­est­ing or engag­ing. You see the problem?

Human prob­lems

I’m not old, but I do notice the effects of age­ing. My eye­sight in par­tic­u­lar. I used to laugh at my dad hold­ing a news­pa­per at arm’s length so he could focus on it. Guess who’s doing that now? My peers are using their phones with the text size at jum­bo. And I see and hear peo­ple con­stant­ly get­ting frus­trat­ed with tech­nol­o­gy. And not just tech­nol­o­gy: the world around them.

Recent­ly, a young per­son came up to me on a train ask­ing if this was going the way they want­ed to go. I said, ​“I hope so”. It was fun­ny, but for an able human being, the lack of sign­post­ing meant that she thought she could be whisked away to the oth­er end of the coun­try. Mak­ing things clear and acces­si­ble isn’t and should­n’t be bor­ing. It’s what inter­est­ing design builds on. It’s the foun­da­tion: the structure.

Here we go… 

In this blog, I’m going to dive into a range of top­ics. I’m a nerd, so there’s going to be a focus on new web fea­tures. I love CSS, and it excites me, so there’s going to be a lot of that. But all of it is to say that in this day and age of automa­tion that is only going to get more auto­mat­ed, design­ing for all humans has nev­er been more impor­tant. We’re going to explore acces­si­bil­i­ty, lan­guage, UI’s and real-world design. There may be a few oth­er self-indul­gent bits-and-pieces thrown in, but I’m sure you don’t mind. I’m human, after all.