You’ve designed a spectacular user interface, but you might have also just made it inaccessible for some users. To avoid this problem altogether, you need to be sure your site is accessible.
Making your site accessible has several benefits: your site is more likely to be robust and rank well on search engines, and it’s more likely to generate business through user purchases.
While you certainly want your brand’s digital experience to remain engaging, there are several ways you can improve your page’s accessibility without sacrificing design.
1. Develop Your Information Architecture
A site’s information architecture dictates how the content is arranged and how people interact. This is the site’s underlying structure, how its information is arranged, the content hierarchy, and how it is navigated.
Information architecture often dramatically impacts how people use a site, so it’s likely that when you develop your digital product strategy, you’ll spend a lot of time discussing your content.
Information architecture and user experience design often work together in digital product development. The user experience designer handles the visual design, while the information architect determines how the content should be arranged and how people navigate it.
While this article is a primer on the basics of information architecture, please look at the resources section, where I’ve listed several great resources on information architecture.
2. Identify the Different Types of Users
If you’re building an application or a content-driven site, you need to ensure your interface accommodates different types of users. Here are some of the different types of users you need to accommodate:
- Users with disabilities: These include visually impaired, hearing impaired, and have other disabilities that might impact their ability to use your application.
- Users who speak a different language: This could be someone from a foreign country or region.
- Users who may access your site from mobile devices: If your site is only accessible from mobile devices, you need to consider and accommodate a specific set of challenges.
All of these user groups are important. For example, if you’re designing a web application, you’ll want to make sure your designers understand how visually impaired people might use the app.
This involves things like designing for high-contrast contrast and optimising for screen readers.
3. Improve User Experience: Use Color Contrast and Readability
If you’re designing a user interface that’s supposed to be used on a Windows computer, then you might assume that your user interface will be OK for both PC and Mac users. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.
One key difference is essential to consider: the colour contrast. Windows uses a high-contrast colour scheme with different colour contrasts than Mac. If you’re designing an interface that’s supposed to be used on both platforms, then you need to be sure your design is legible and readable in both colour schemes.
Improve User Experience: Wrapping Up
One of the challenges with designing user interfaces is building something that will appeal to people from different cultures, languages, and countries. The interface also needs to be legible for users with disabilities and users who may access your site from a mobile device.
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