Exploring Universal Design in 2B products
A blogpost by Shuang Fu
I attended this session at the 2021 Alibaba UCAN UX Design Forum. The session was held under the topic of “Experience & Interaction”, keynoted by Fu Ling who is responsible for “Xconsole” -the console platform to manage cloud products and services for Ali Cloud users around the world in Alibaba Design.
With the process of digitalization, we as UX designers are looking to help build a more inclusive and friendly environment through design, and encourage designers to take more social responsibilities and value proposition. To build a universal experience in products is an approach for being inclusive. To allow more users better benefit from technology in a wider range of scenarios. However, they meet with tough challenges when pioneering on this topic, especially in complex 2B scenarios and products, with the limitation of policy, targeted audience, cost and so on.
The session was about how they address this issue, how the approach is, and how to build a progressive, applicable universal design (barrier-free design) for cloud products.
Guidelines of accessibility
In business products, the topic of Accessibility is nothing new. Yet what’s rarely considered is that everyone could be incapable to access some features in products given specific environments. Imagine when you’re in travel without free hands, when you’re in multiple tasks with only one-hand performing, when your mouse is inaccessible…
So how to help every user to smoothly access the control is becoming critical. At the very beginning, they explored to learn the authoritative design guide of “W3C WCAG 2.1”( Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). With the thought that the content of the WCAG 2.1 Design Guide is comprehensive and highly summarized, which provides a very good direction for barrier-free design.
However, when they tried to apply it to the daily design of the console, they found the overall content of the guide is relatively abstract and general, and there is often a high cost of digestion and understanding in the actual viewing and use process. So based on the actual business scenarios Ali cloud console, they decided to write a straightforward, focused and practical significance of universal design guidelines, for their designers and engineers. They further refined the original resource and whole components according to different roles and different functions, sorted out from two aspects: design principles and front-end guidelines.
A practice-tailored evaluation system
While they finally upgraded such a universal guideline, they found it’s even harder to implement it into various cloud products of the Alibaba Cloud console.
With such a complex and huge system, how can participants in the process understand, participate, and advance gradually? The answer is an evaluation system, one that can help each product clarify the current level of universality, and the other can quantify the progress made in the process of landing universality. Currently, for accessibility evaluation, there’re two main methods adopted by the industry: item-by-item manual evaluation based on WCAG standards and plug-in evaluation. Considering the practical scenarios for a console platform, they found neither of the two methods were ideally applicable, so they need to tailor the console to a set of cost-controllable, efficient and practical evaluation systems.
They reorganized the universal design content and defined the three-level evaluation model of the customs clearance system: basic level, advanced level and premium level, considering the actual scenario of the controlled product, also the perspective of implementation and guidance. Then they summarized 94 subdivided evaluation items to meet with different business scenarios of the console, the importance of indicators, and the difficulty of operation.
The design controllability decreases layer by layer, the implementation cost increases layer by layer, and the degree of universal support is higher. Through such a hierarchical model, a product console can be gradually guided to implement universal design. It not only reduces the difficulty of landing in a single stage, but also gives each product space to determine universal goals on demand.
Conclusion
As UX designers, we are still in the exploration on the road of universal design, like many methods or methodology, it improves and benefits with the user’s continual use. There’s no concrete upper limit in the pursuit of a better product experience.
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Reference: Xconsole-Universal Design
Alibaba Design & AliCloud
Xconsole.cloud
