ia play

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”!