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Episode #162: Stéphanie Walter
143 Plays5 years ago
With a decade of experience as User eXperience Designer, Stéphanie Walter helps her clients in the banking, healthcare, automotive and financial industry deliver successful projects to their audience, all the way from strategy to the final products and services. She...
The post Episode #162: Stéphanie Walter appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting the Scene
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope you're well. I hope it's not too cold where you are. The weather's kind of up and down here in D.C., but we are home to the world champion Washington National. So, you know, we'll take that.
Who is Stephanie Walter?
00:00:26
Speaker
On this week's show, I'm excited to have Stephanie Walter join me. Stephanie had a post a while back a bit ago about making your visualizations and your designs color accessible to people who might have
00:00:39
Speaker
color vision issues or might have intellectual disabilities or might have other constraints that they need to interact with your website or with your tools or with your software or whatever it is. So I was really interested to hear what she's thinking about when it comes to accessibility because I'm of course thinking about it when it comes to data visualization. How do we make our scatter plots and how do we make our slope charts?
00:01:02
Speaker
and how do we make all of the visualization tools that we create and publish, how do we make them accessible to folks who need to use them and may have some other needs when it comes to working with a website. So we chatted for a while and I hope you'll enjoy the show. Before we get to that, don't forget that I do rely on the support of my listeners. So if you would like to share the show with other folks in your social networks or with your friends or even call your
00:01:30
Speaker
your folks up and tell them that this show is great. I'd love to do that, love to see that happening. And if you'd like to support the show financially, that'd be great. I've set up a couple of new tiers over at Patreon so you can go over and check out what goodies you can get if you'd just like to support the show with, you know, three or five bucks a month, something like that. Helps me cover all the costs associated with the show. So I'm really thankful for the folks that are my current patrons and would love to see some more so I can keep bringing this show to you every other week.
00:01:59
Speaker
So this is my conversation with Stephanie and I hope you'll enjoy it.
Stephanie's Work and Experience
00:02:08
Speaker
Hi, Stephanie. How are you? Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Hi. I've been following your Twitter feed now since this post you wrote a little while ago that we'll talk about. I'm amazed at all the great stuff that you have that comes out. It's like daily inspiration to watch your Twitter feed go by. Thanks. You read a lot of articles.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's like, you're becoming my like, my library of what to read for the day. Yeah, that's pretty nice. That's pretty nice to have. So I thought we would talk about design and we talked about accessibility and whatever else we just want to chat about. Do you want to maybe talk a little bit about yourself and your background and so people can get to know you?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I'm a designer, UX designer to group size. I'm French originally, but I currently work in Luxembourg. So I also like worked in Germany a little bit, in France and now in Luxembourg.
00:03:05
Speaker
At the moment, I'm a consultant, which is actually really cool because it means that I get to go to a company, help them solve some issues and try to put some process in places and everything regarding user experience, user research, also trying to bring a little bit more UX and design maturity to some of those companies.
00:03:30
Speaker
Interesting. So can you tell me a little bit about what would a typical job for you look like when a firm brings you in? How do you work with them to improve the usability of their websites?
00:03:42
Speaker
Whoa, this is really, there's no typical job. Really? Oh, that's cool. No, it's basically like you try to assess it. So you do some interview with users, you try to understand their needs.
00:04:00
Speaker
You can also do a lot of things like one of the companies I worked for was a US company and they hired me just like for two weeks to help them do usability review and I had access to something called full story which is basically you can actually see the users what they are doing.
00:04:18
Speaker
And it's super interesting because then you do your usability review. So you say, okay, this doesn't work from a usability perspective. But also like, I checked a lot of the users here into this funnel. And I've seen that half of them completely abandon the website at this point. So there's actually a point here, here is how we might solve it and everything.
Balancing User Needs and Business Requirements
00:04:40
Speaker
So yeah, it's really, really interesting. So sometimes you get direct contact with users. Sometimes it's through survey or you have some interview through Skype or whatever tool you use to call people. So yeah, you make a diagnosis of
00:04:59
Speaker
what's not working and then you try to iterate, discuss with the developers, discuss with the business also to try to understand, okay, this is the user need. What's your business need here? What's your also like technical requirements? You go to the developer, you try to understand. And then with all of this data, you will try to build a solution that will work for users. Also while trying to keep those company needs, because at some point, most of the company want to make money.
00:05:29
Speaker
So this is also something really complex. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting because, well, I guess my question is, do you find that a lot of these companies are not doing the sort of qualitative survey driven interviews that you're doing? And it's driven more by hard quantitative metrics of we're looking for clicks and time on the page, but they're not actually talking to their users.
00:05:57
Speaker
It really, really depends on the maturity of the companies. Like I also like, I worked for companies where I worked on internal tools. So that's also something interesting because then there's no like real matrix like APA and we need to make money. Here is mostly about, okay, we have an internal tool, it's naturally efficient. How can we improve it so that the people in within the company who are using this tool,
00:06:24
Speaker
are more efficient. So the KPIs and the metrics really, really depend. Sometimes it's money. Sometimes it's also kind of user wellbeing. Like there's something quite trendy at the moment, which is like, so you have UX user experience design.
00:06:39
Speaker
You have CX, which is customer experience. I know I've seen something about EX, which is employee experience. And you have service design. So all of these kind of things, sometimes a little bit blend together. It's basically about trying to make people kind of happy about using something, whether it's a product or service or something within the company.
00:07:03
Speaker
Right. Right. Really interesting. Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about accessibility because you have this great post about color accessibility and I'm sure you're doing this in your consulting work too.
Color Accessibility and Design Challenges
00:07:17
Speaker
And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about
00:07:21
Speaker
I mean, color accessibility as well, but also at least according to the stuff I've seen on your website and your social media feeds, it looks like you spend a lot of time thinking about accessibility. And I think a lot of people in the data and data science and data visualization communities struggle with this because they're not exactly sure what are the parameters and what are the rules and what are the things they're supposed to look for. So maybe you could talk about some of these general issues and what people should be thinking about as they're putting stuff online. Yeah, sure.
00:07:51
Speaker
So yeah, accessibility is basically trying to make a website accessible to as many people as possible. So make sure that as many people as possible regarding disabilities they have are able to access, digest, understand your content. So that's kind of the basics. So as a designer, usually the main thing you can do is take
00:08:16
Speaker
care of the colors so this can be kind of a huge issue and this is also like a huge issue with database for instance is that some people don't receive the colors the same way as everyone else so you have colorblind people you might have contrast issue and other things like that
00:08:33
Speaker
So when you talk about data visualization, for instance, usually what I see on websites is like these really, really nice like pie charts or bars or every anything that have different kind of variation of the same gradient color. And the issue for some users is that they might not then kind of see the difference between some of those colors. So one of the main thing you can do is when you do data visualization, things like that is
00:09:02
Speaker
do not use only color to convey information. So it can be labels, it can be patterns, it can be a lot of things. If you think about form, for instance, some people who have difficulties perceiving red versus green, for example, if your error, you only like put to red border to tell users, okay, those fields are not working and no other information,
00:09:30
Speaker
then they might perceive this as just another shade of gray and so on. So they might not actually see that there's an error. So this is kind of the complex part. And also you can have contrast issue and that's something complex with accessibility because usually when you arrive in a company they have a visual identity.
00:09:51
Speaker
And sometimes this visual identity is really complicated to use, like yellow and orange. Those colors are quite complex. And also my website is actually yellow and purple. But that's the thing, for instance, for yellow, you basically, you can't write text in yellow on a white background because it's hard to read and almost impossible to read for other people.
00:10:18
Speaker
But
Accessibility Laws and Strategies
00:10:19
Speaker
still, if yellow is part of your visual identity,
00:10:23
Speaker
Some people might say, OK, I don't care. I want to write the text in yellow, you know. So then you start kind of fighting, arguing, entering into some of the dates. And it's really hard, to be honest, to be an advocate for accessibility in Europe. Because in the US, you have class actions and you have law. Like at the moment, Domino's Pizza, their website isn't accessible. And there's a class action against them. So a few.
00:10:49
Speaker
Users came together and said, okay, no, you are supposed to be accessible. This is a law. Please do something about it. So this is what you have in the US. In Europe, it's kind of government and institution websites have to be accessible by law. There's no real law for the moment, I think, about the private sector.
00:11:12
Speaker
So when you arrive in a company, you say, yeah, okay, but you know, like this call to actions, the button, they're not accessible. Also, you can't navigate using the keyboard and you have this and this accessibility issue. They're like, yeah, okay, but what's the risk? What's what might happen? Like, well, first,
00:11:32
Speaker
some of the users can use it. Yeah, but how many percentage of the population? You're like, yeah, that's at least 15%, maybe 20%, depending if you are like a new disability, things like that. And they're like, yeah, sure, but legal departments said we don't risk anything. So yeah, we're just not going to do it because we don't have time, we don't have budgets. And they're like,
00:12:00
Speaker
okay so it's usually like you try different approaches you you try to go step by step like okay maybe at the moment the website isn't accessible but we are going to build new components so you try to go to the developers say hey by the way did you test your component with a keyboard or did you test them
00:12:20
Speaker
with a screen reader. So you're starting kind of really slowly building it from bottom to top instead of top to bottom. So yeah. Do you think that a lot of, I mean, I have seen this in the past where places have, you know, they have their branding colors, but their branding colors
00:12:40
Speaker
don't work so well for the data visualization because it looks nice in the logo and on the, on the letterhead. But when you try to make a graph, it looks really dark or the colors are too similar. So is that something that firms should be thinking of a little bit more broadly or a little bit, you know, I guess a little more detailed that the colors might look nice in your logo and on your letterhead, but you know, it's not great for database. It's not, maybe it's not great for accessibility. Like, is that something that designers
00:13:09
Speaker
should be thinking more about? Yes, I think that usually when people create bronze, they might not think about digital products. So many bronze were created by marketing and design agency who were thinking about the print. I usually get visual identity where I have the pant and color. I'm like, yeah, okay, that's nice.
00:13:33
Speaker
on the web, I can use Pantan, I need the hexadecimal color for that. Sometimes when you convert directly the Pantan, which looks really, really great on paper, into hexadecimal, it doesn't work, so you kind of have to adapt at some point.
00:13:49
Speaker
so yeah that's something people who do brand identity should try to think about like okay this is the color of the logo but could we have some other different colors that we can actually use with the brand together but i think that also does a lot of company have something interesting like i think there was a website i can't remember what it was but who basically like
00:14:14
Speaker
picked up all of the colors used by a brand and then you see that they're using more colors than on their website for instance and actually the colors of their logos. So yeah this is something like as a design exercise that people should do like okay main color secondary colors but what if in a if any data visualization or what if at some point I want to have a variant of that because I don't know an intranet or something.
00:14:44
Speaker
So for people who are thinking beyond an addition to their color, so in terms of accessibility, especially for images, this is a thing that we work on a lot here at work because you have in the United States, you have this 508 compliance issue of
00:15:02
Speaker
People with vision difficulties have to be able to read or at least use a screen reader to read the content on the website. What are some of the things that you think about or that you're working on clients to think about when it comes to helping people have accessible content on their websites?
The Role of Semantic HTML in Accessibility
00:15:24
Speaker
That's a big question. I know, it's like a huge topic and that's why I'm so curious about it. It's a very big topic.
00:15:31
Speaker
I would say first, semantic HTML is the basics. You know, by default, we already have a lot of accessibility built in the HTML that is provided and that you are supposed to use in the browser. For instance, like, yeah, for images, you have an alt attribute.
00:15:51
Speaker
SVG, you can also have descriptions, things like that. There's a figure. No, I don't remember which attribute, but there's one for like longer descriptions. It's the same for forms. For instance, you can link a label to a field using some things in HTML to do that. So...
00:16:13
Speaker
The basic HTML elements we have are already accessible. So use them. It's the same for buttons. I had so many discussions with developers. I was working on a project and I don't know why I checked the HTML of the project I shouldn't have.
00:16:28
Speaker
But there were divs, divs, divs, divs everywhere. And the developer just recreate the pattern out of this. And I asked him, why did you do that? Because now I can't go through the interface using a keyboard. And he said, yeah, because in summer,
00:16:44
Speaker
one of the user clicked on the button, he dragged the mouse out of the button and then the button kept the active state and he said it was an issue. I was like, no, this is not an issue. This is how a button is supposed to work. So yeah, also it's complex to style in CSS. Like again, no, it's not really complex to say.
00:17:04
Speaker
a button in CSS. So what he ended up doing was trying to recreate all of the different state of a button using JavaScript. But he forgot about one of the main things about the button is that you can trigger it using a keyboard, for instance, also like screen readers are going to read it properly. So he put so much effort into recreating something that already exists in the browser. And then it wasn't accessible. So
00:17:33
Speaker
Right, right. Do you have screen readers that you like? Are there good screen readers that people should use at least when they're testing their own work?
00:17:43
Speaker
I'm not blind, so I don't have like, you know, preferences. So this is kind of a complex question. There's a few screen readers on the market. From what I've discussed with accessibility expert with blind people on Mac, a lot of people use the default voiceover.
00:18:04
Speaker
which is integrated into the US. On Microsoft, there's like Joe, but you have to pay. There's NDDA, I think something like that, which is free. There's a few other ones, but the complex part about that is like a lot of people use different screen readers. They can also change the settings a little bit.
00:18:24
Speaker
So this is screen readers is, you need I think a whole podcast just about screen readers. If you really want to go super deep into that. So yeah, it's a complex question. Usually when I test accessibility, I test with like, what's my keyboard? I try voiceover, but I'm not quite used to navigate like people using screen readers.
00:18:51
Speaker
They have shortcut, there's something called Rotor where they can actually kind of have a list of the element of the page and go through this really, really quickly. So they don't need to read the whole page. So there's a lot of different ways one can navigate on a website. Yeah. I mean, you're presumably working a lot of different languages.
Cultural and Linguistic Impacts on Usability
00:19:11
Speaker
I mean, you're from France, working in Luxembourg, also working in Germany. German, English and French, you know, for most of my clients.
00:19:20
Speaker
Are there big differences in the languages and the way people use websites in those three different languages, three different cultures and countries? Or is it pretty similar the way I guess humans use content on the internet? From what I've seen, we don't have like really different things for the three languages. Especially in Luxembourg, a lot of people speak English.
00:19:45
Speaker
But it's more like feature-wise or even like target audience. For instance, so I work for an airline company and they provide, they also provide tours so you can book either only the tickets for the flight or you can also book like tickets for a flight plus the hotel.
00:20:06
Speaker
And what they discovered is that actually most of the people who do that speak French because they like to have the whole package where they will know that someone who speaks French will be able to help them in the hotel and everything.
00:20:21
Speaker
while the German people, most of the time they speak English really well. So it's kind of okay for them if they don't have like a French translator or something. So this is not really about how people use the websites. It's also about like our target audience, which in this case might be a lot more people speaking French than German and English, actually.
00:20:43
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah, really. I mean, I always wonder whether when you go to other cultures like in Asia, for example, where the kanji or the letters are going vertically instead of horizontally or in cultures where the writing is going right to left instead of left to right. Like, are all the toggles different? Are they vertical instead of horizontal? Or is it or that's just like a universal we've built this universal understanding of how buttons and toggles are supposed to work or change.
00:21:14
Speaker
That's what localization is a lot about. It's not only about translating the website, it's also about really making sure that it actually works for the specific culture. It's quite interesting to work in Luxembourg because we have a lot of different people, different cultures.
00:21:30
Speaker
We have a huge Portuguese immigration and also Italian immigration so it's quite a lot of different languages and mix and it's really really funny because like France is really close and Germany also but you have those kind of small differences like we wanted to do a barbecue with my colleagues and the Luxembourgish guy said okay I'm going to bring one baguette so you know what the baguette is?
00:21:55
Speaker
it's like bread and it's like yeah but we are eight people one baguette is not going to be enough we need at least three or four and the guys are like what how much bread do you people eat and the thing is like in France when you do barbecue you have the sausage and this is going to be a real conversation so you have the sausage and the baguette needs to be the exact size of the sausage
00:22:18
Speaker
while in Luxembourg the baguette is just like kind of a way to hold the sausage so yeah you need quite a small little amount of baguette in Luxembourg compared to the one we have in France and you know this this is really really silly small stuff but like France is quite close to Luxembourg so you might think that it's not that different but there's like this really small little nuggets of culture
00:22:46
Speaker
then make it super fun to kind of have discussions with colleagues and everything.
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these differences are, yeah, these are interesting. I mean, you also have, I think you've also written about accessibility with accents and emojis, right? Emojis not that much, but mostly like about accents. It wasn't really about accessibility. It was more about user experience for like special characters, which is basically like, I'm Stephanie and I have an E-acute, so I've got this weird character.
00:23:22
Speaker
special character. I have so many examples of websites who wouldn't allow to have my special character. So I need to kind of change or misspell my name and everything, which makes funny stories. For instance, like I used to work for a French company, really, really famous
00:23:43
Speaker
a French forum who was all about teaching HTML, CSS, so development stuff. And I was poorly encoded in the database and no one was able to know what was going on. So it kind of became a private joke with the people on the forum, which is fine. But then I had stories from some people who were almost denied boarding a flight
00:24:10
Speaker
because the special character wasn't printed on the boarding pass, and then the boarding pass didn't match exactly their passport. For instance, Amelie, then on the boarding and her passport, it was Amelie, but if you read it, the E was missing, so it was Amelie. And yeah, of course, this was in the US. Like those people really, they don't joke with boarding passes.
00:24:35
Speaker
No, we're pretty serious about it. You had like, they had to wait like 30 minutes or something, maybe hoping that they would actually be able to sort to board the flights. And this is just because like somewhere in one of those systems,
00:24:53
Speaker
He wasn't able to print the ERQ tour. So it seems like some trivial issues. But at some point, when you have developers, people who need to remain to the developers, that the name of the CEO of the company is Lee. So L-E.
00:25:12
Speaker
to make them understand that no, names can have less than two characters. So you can't like put a reject or something to validate the names because a name can be a lot of different characters and a lot of...
00:25:27
Speaker
This is kind of, yeah, I know in the US, the US postal service website, you can go in and you can set up your customs form if you want to send something internationally. And if there are accents on the name or on the address, when you put them into the, to the form boxes and you click submit, it gives you an error and you're not allowed to submit it. And for the first few times I was doing it, I could not figure out what the problem was. And it turns out that if anything that has an accent on it, it doesn't, it doesn't recognize that, that field anymore.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, so that's kind of crappy experience. Yeah, yeah, no, it really is. And it's, and it's not even that it's my name or my address, it's someone else's address. So it's not even like that personal experience to me. Like, it's not my name, right? It's someone else's name, but just as the as the user, it's really issues with parcels, I was lucky enough to send them to my company. So I was able to get it. But
00:26:24
Speaker
It was so poorly encoded that in the end my name and last name ended up merging with a string of completely amazing special characters in the middle. And I'm like, yeah, if I didn't send this to my company, but to my personal address, the people from the post office, they wouldn't, they wouldn't have guessed what was my first name and last name.
00:26:47
Speaker
At some point, you can do all the efforts you want on the website if you have those kind of things that looks like really little glitches, but at some point they can really damage the whole experience.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
00:26:59
Speaker
That's really interesting. Well, I'll try to get it right when I post this episode. Make sure I get all the action on it. No, I'm fine with it. Well, I'll link to your posts and your website and hopefully people will start to follow you and learn about all these different things that they should consider when they're building their websites and their visualizations.
00:27:17
Speaker
Like you said, it's a complex issue and really interesting. So thanks so much for coming on and chatting about it. Thanks for having me. It's been great chatting with you. I hope so. Yes, it is. That's the whole idea. Thanks a lot.
00:27:37
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed that show. I hope you enjoyed that interview. And I hope you'll think a little bit more about how your visualizations and how your websites can be made accessible to different groups and different populations. So again, if you'd like to support the show, please drop me a line on the show notes page. Please share it with your friends and your social media networks and also consider supporting the show on Patreon.
00:28:01
Speaker
If you'd like to become a patron, you can get some policy of his swag over there just by sending over a couple bucks a month. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.