Accessibility

At OpenHack I was asked for some usability advice. The interface at issue was a confirmation pop-up that appeared when a shopper tried to empty their entire cart. The author of the UI was concerned with the accessibility issues with pop-up interfaces, and was wondering how to improve the interface.

I started by questioning why the interface had a pop-up at all: echoing my Ph.D supervisor I asked “what is the user's task?”

― Maybe there is an item in the cart that the user does not want…

― So the way to get rid of a single item is to dump everything from the cart?

― Not ideal…

So we sat down and designed an interface for dropping a single item from a cart. No confirmation dialog was required — because the problem caused by a mistake is small, as the item would appear in the Recently viewed list and could easy be added back to the cart. The shopper had to carry out multiple actions to empty a cart, so we can be fairly confident that the cart should be empty. By designing a better interface the accessibility issue then went away.

Good design makes better interfaces for everyone. Thinking about specific accessibility requirements is a great way of testing a design, to see where there are problems and how  things can be improved.