Modern technology doesn’t automatically make life easier for everyone. Computer software and apps can present unique challenges to people living with disabilities. Vision impairment, hearing difficulties, mobility impairment, or cognitive disabilities all make navigating today’s digital apps difficult, or impossible. As a technological innovator, you shouldn’t be willing to leave anyone in the dust. The nature of technology is not to power ahead for those who can use it and forget those who can’t, but to adapt and invent ways to allow all people to benefit from digital advancements. The job of a good UI/UX developer is to create a product that makes the user’s experience easier – that goes for all types of users. A touch of clear design can go a long way. Is It Worthwhile to Design for Accessibility? The short answer is, if you don’t design for accessibility, you’re stunting your app’s ability to grow. The World Bank estimates that 15% of the world’s population lives with a disability. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that number is closer to 20% in the US. That’s a huge segment of the market that could benefit from improved accessibility. The government is increasingly recognizing this, and encouraging action to accommodate it. Congress has introduced legislation in a range of areas aimed at improving accessibility to products and services for people living with disabilities, and some of that includes computer software and apps. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and its 2008 amendments specifies that public programs and services — including information technology — have to be accessible to people living with disabilities, and provide “effective communication” of their content and information. As the population ages, accessibility will only become more important. If you stay ahead of the curve and build this into your app from the start, you’ll have a more ethical product with more lasting power. Ways to Improve Your App’s Accessibility Improving accessibility doesn’t have to be hard. There are plenty of guides out there like these ones by Android and Salesforce that can help you get a full understanding of what your app design must include to be successful. For visual impairments, increased size or contrast text can go a long way in making content easier to read. If you’re targeting an older demographic especially, making the text in your app easy to read should be a goal. Using bolding or italics, instead of just color, to highlight important phrases ensures someone with a vision impairment doesn’t miss important content. Adding captions to audio or video allows people with hearing impairments to access and understand all content. More complex solutions can include formatting web and app content so that programs like Android’s Text-to-Speech can easily read the content aloud to users. Truly stellar accessibility will take more detailed design, such as ensuring your online forms are properly identified so that keyboard-only and voice-only computer users can still use them. Or, it can mean relocating menu items to places where they can be easily found for these users. If you have to hover the mouse over an item to see the actionable items, visual-only users might not even realize it’s there. This is where an experienced app developer can be a great resource to help you address potential user roadblocks you hadn’t even considered. Testing your product often and thoroughly can help identify where your accessibility issues lie, and allow your development team to innovate strong solutions. The Payoff When you make your product more accessible, it will reach more people. You can start to access some of the 20% of the American population living with a disability, who might not otherwise interact with your app. As more technologies are developed for people living with disabilities to navigate computers and apps, there will be more opportunities to develop strong, accessible app design. The field is only growing. When you design software to be more accessible, it’s useful for other purposes as well. Take, for example, captioning video content for people with hearing difficulties has became useful even for people without hearing impairments. Thanks to captioning, video can be watched by people who need to watch sound-free, or for those who don’t understand the video’s native language very well. Similarly, voice control features can be extremely useful for someone with mobility issues, but have the added side effect of assisting someone who’s got his hands full trying to cook dinner. Ultimately, constraint breeds creativity. When you’re required to work within stricter guidelines, you’re forced to adapt your design to fit – and often, you end up with something better than you had originally planned. At Barefoot Solutions, we embrace the creative challenges of accessible design; each challenge is a new opportunity to make your app even better for your users.

Shopping cart abandonment is an all too familiar term for owners of ecommerce websites.  Someone clicks on your website, likes what they see, puts an item into their online shopping cart but, somewhere during the checkout process, clicks off the website without buying the item.  We have been developing ecommerce websites on different shopping cart platforms in San Diego for more than 10 years and, in our experience, the best ways to avoid shopping cart abandonment are: The main goal for having an ecommerce site is to sell the products offered on your site, so be sure that your website's design encourages this goal.  Are the shopping cart and checkout directions clear to your customers?  Buttons should be easily visible and labelled with appropriate names.  Payment and shipping forms should be simple, clear, and concise.  The more streamlined the checkout process is, the less likely you are to lose a sale. Be upfront with your customers about any other costs, like shipping, that they will have to pay for.  A lot of websites do not display the shipping charge until all of the payment forms have been filled out.  At that point, your customer expects to pay $40 for a purchase and then finds that, with shipping and tax, it is going to cost them $60.  This hidden cost does not encourage consumer confidence, so let them know about any additional charges before they start checking out. It's always a good idea to display payment options and credit cards accepted on the shopping cart so customers will already have the right credit card in hand when they begin the checkout process. Make yourself available to answer questions that may come up during the checkout process.  A lot of last-minute questions may come up that could derail the sale, such as return policies and shipping dates.  If you have an email address and phone listed on your website's shopping cart, customers can call with questions and give you the opportunity to encourage that final sale. Do your online industry research.  Make sure the pricing for the products offered on your website is competitive.  One of the consumer benefits of Web 2.0 is that customers have the opportunity to shop the Internet for the best deals.  You won't see too many sales unless you've got a comparable price. Test regularly and refine your site.  Track your customer's progress through the website and shopping cart forms to figure out where customers are getting stuck or abandoning their shopping cart.  Based on these results, modify your ecommerce's site design to encourage more customers to complete their purchases.

As a custom app development shop, our answer to client questions is almost always yes. Can you build social login? Yes. Can we add @mentions? Yes. Private Messages? Yes. Camera effects? Yes. Yes. Yes. Software development in 2018 is more powerful than ever, and so is the temptation to add all sorts of bells and whistles to your app. But should you? No. Because what you don’t build is just as important as what you do. The concept of oppositional forces is pretty common in other design disciplines, but much less so in UI/UX design. For example note the deliberate use of negative space in these popular logos, including FedEx’s famous arrow. Music is another example, where the silence is every bit as important as the sound itself. In the world of UX design “negative space” takes the form of functional constraints, or all the things you can’t do.  Perhaps the best illustration of this is Twitter, which famously decided to limit messages to just 140 characters. Over time this seemingly arbitrary constraint became the critical seed for a massively popular communication platform. Because make no mistake, we all WANT to write longer messages. But Twitter’s UX forced us to play by their rules, and in doing so created something unique. Facebook offers another great example of leveraging UX constraints. We all know the story- Facebook began as a small shrub living in the shadow of the social networking juggernaut MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 Million in 2005. But Myspace is now essentially worthless while Facebook is valued at $500 Billion. What’s fascinating from a UX standpoint is that Facebook didn’t beat MySpace by doing more, they won by doing less. Specifically, there were two critical UX decisions generally accepted as the reasons why they won the social network war: • Facebook did NOT allow everyone to sign up. At the start they limited accounts to college students only, which gave it a critical sheen of exclusivity and maturity just as MySpace was being overrun with younger kids and spammy content. • Facebook did NOT allow the ability to customize profile pages, allowing for a consistent and clean UI that stood in stark contrast to MySpace’s abrasive user-generated layouts. Instagram offers a more contemporary example; at first I found it frustrating that when re-opening the app, it ditches what you were previously looking at and auto-refreshes to more recent content. For example if you scroll down 20 pictures, when re-opening the app it will jump back to the top of those 20. But over time I came to realize that NOT saving my location and refreshing the content was causing me to compulsively check the app by feeding my “seeker” brain with new content every time. Another fascinating Instagram constraint is the inability to create web links. Hyperlinks are a fundamental currency of the internet, and yet when commenting on Instagram, their UX team has made a very deliberate decision to prevent users from including linked URLs in comments. The only hyperlinks you can create are #hashtags and @mentions. And consider the consequence of that decision: it prevents users from leaving the app and forces the social engagement to remain very basic, both of which work towards supporting Instagram’s primary identity as a lightweight picture based experience. And that’s an important point, because the key to leveraging constraints in UX design is to do so in a manner that strengthens the focus on your app's core identity.  Constraints that work against your core value proposition will be damaging, but constraints that pull users back into your sweet spot are invaluable to your success. A great example of this two-sided UX coin is Snapchat, which became the hottest new app in town by introducing a wonderfully simple constraint: disappearing messages. In a world of oppressively persistent social media, where mistakes we made 10 years ago float into our job interviews, Snapchat offered an oasis of consequence free pictures and video. It was brilliant, and the platform took off like a rocket. But over time temptation crept in, and Snapchat couldn’t resist adding new features that directly contradict the temporary messages which defined their identity. Take for example the “Memories” section which saves your old Snaps so you can repost them again. On the surface this may seem like a neat new tool, but if we dig a little deeper, what is the Memories section doing to their core value proposition of not saving messages? It obliterates it. I could elaborate further (public stories!) but the bottom line is that over time Snapchat added new functionality that undermined the key ephemerality constraint that defined their platform. If you go find a millennial and ask them why they like Snapchat, most likely they will mention Snapchat's awesome face filters, because the mental model of disappearing messages has been almost entirely eroded. Certainly they won't know why the logo is a ghost. And not coincidentally, Snapchat is currently in crisis- numbers have leaked showing adoption has started to flatline. The easy explanation is to blame Instagram for brazenly ripping off Snapchat’s stories, but that view overlooks the many ways in which Snapchat removed its own key constraints and evolved itself into basically the same service as Instagram. Instagram could never have competed with Snapchat if the playing field was privacy and disappearing content. There are many more examples of this, including Twitter's recent decision to double their character limit to 280, but I'll take my own advice now and wrap this up. The key takeaway for UX designers and product developers is to ask yourself: What are my key constraints? And do I offer any functionality that could be removed to improve focus on my product's core value?