Peter Morville has published a list of UX deliverables, complete with cute icons.
It is a nice list but the pre-amble rang warning bells for me with lots of enthusiasm for visual thinking. I’m increasingly unable to benefit from discussions about IA deliverables in the IA community because I have to produce deliverables that are accessible to blind and partially sighted people.
The list started well in terms of accessibility with stories and proverbs, hardly typical on a list of UX deliverables. I’ve reviewed Peter’s list and compared to my early thoughts on accessbile deliverables to see if I’ve progressed at all.
- stories – fine
- proverbs – great, potentially even more memorable than stories and consequently repeatedly accessible
- personas – works, but without the poster
- scenarios – ok without the illustrations
- content inventories – fine, but needs careful layout of excel
- analytics – presentation can be tricky. collection software often inaccessible
- surveys – much the same as analytics
- concept maps – love them but very tricky
- system maps – tricky – we tend to cobble something together in Excel/Word and use outlining to create a hierarchy
- process flows – also tricky
- wireframes – largely doomed, if being used for a partially sighted audience then you need to think very carefully about descriptive text and the positioning of annotations
- storyboards - definitely doomed
- concept designs – ditto
- prototypes – paper no, xHtml could be good, not sure about tools like Axure
- narrative reports – fine, although any illustrations will be a problem
- presentations – forget the powerpoint, just talk
- plans – don’t know if MS Project works for screenreaders? could probably do something that sort of works in Excel
- specifications – as for narrative reports
- style guides – depends how it is produced, some elements will be inaccessible but acceptably so
- design patterns – ok, if not reliant on images. Interactive examples might help (if screenreader friendly)
Looking at all those deliverables that are essentially flows or concept maps, makes me think a screenreader friendly mapping technique would be a big win. Even if you still won’t be able to “see it all at once”!
Jamie | 03-Feb-09 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
Hi hope you’re well Karen. Have you thought about recording audio files for some of these? Obviously it would work well for any sort of narrative… but I would also imagine it could work very well for logic flows / decision trees – thinking here of something akin to the customer phone line audio menu systems. perhaps file size would be a problem?
Karen | 26-Feb-09 at 10:08 pm | Permalink
Our preference is for a format that can be consumed by both blind and sighted users according to their preferences. So a document that can be seen but also read by a screenreader is best.
The audio would need to have structure and controls – much in the way of the DAISY format for accessible audio books. Actually I should probably investigate DAISY more.
Or perhaps tactile graphics is the way to go!