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I spent a good chunk of this past work week developing a test to measure the usability of a website that I help manage. Yesterday, I observed people walking through the tasks I created and it’s always surprising how they react to our site very differently from how I would.
This experience got me thinking – what in your life would you like to be more usable? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a product – it could be anything from your DVR to dinner with your in-laws. What would have to change to make it more usable – perspectives, resources, social structures? Is it even possible to change?
All the things that happen on weekday evenings, and ONLY on weekday evenings, are not things I can participate in. Not things a lot of people can participate in. First shift might be the most common by far, but there’s no shortage of second- and third-shift workers. Just look at any place open twenty-four hours.
Total understanding on the weekday evenings issue. My husband works nights and weekends and people always wonder why he’s not at events. “He’s at work again?” they ask. It makes me tempted to say, “Yes, of course he is. Should I be surprised if you’re at work on Tuesday mornings?”
I would love it if our local public transit system was more usable. It’s pretty good on most weekdays, but they do repairs so often on weekends that it gets very frustrating to use. It’s the result of decades of neglect and lack of maintenance, so now that they’re finally catching up with it, they have to do it all at once. In addition, it’s a hub and spoke network, so moving from place to place in the suburbs is extremely difficult. There’s not too much they can do to change it at the moment, but keeping it good once they fix it and finally building part of the suburban circle line will require some serious public commitment. It will also require the city and two different states to work together, a major challenge in this political climate.
My camera is a fairly standard digital camera. Which means that it is intended to be used right handed. That’s fine, I can use my right hand, it’s the hand I was trained to write with after all, but the moment something might be easier to photograph with my left hand… good fracking god.
The same goes for video cameras. I once worked out that the only way to hold the video camera with my left hand was to stand pointing away from the thing I wanted to record, flip the LED screen (which uses power a lot faster than if you can use the viewfinder) 180 degrees, and record over my shoulder. As you might imagine, I held that camera right handed all the time.
Due to the side mounted screen a video camera is harder to make in a way that doesn’t favor one hand. But if we’re talking about still cameras, and we’re just talking about shooting (as opposed to fiddling with all the settings and reviewing pictures and such), all it would take would be one extra button. One on the left mirroring the one on the right so that you could hold the camera with your left hand and see what the camera is pointed at at the same time.
It’s not a big problem for me, for the longest time we thought I was the only right handed member of a left handed family, as time has gone on it’s looked more and more like (to the point that it’s as close to definitive as it will ever be likely to be) I’m actually left handed and just didn’t kick up a fuss when writing was demonstrated as a right handed thing, thus I’ve been trained to be right handed since then. That’s a lot of training.
That’s what pops into my head. Almost everything from elevator buttons, to my camera, to the difference between men’s and women’s buttons is predicated on the assumption that everyone will be right handed. Want more accessibility; make things more symmetrical.
I build websites, and am subscribed to a few newsletters about accessibility concerns in the technology industry. There are some actual legal requirements there now, with a bit of a bite to them (as Wells Fargo found out when they broke some of those laws).
TRiG.
I’d like people to stop asking for my sex when they don’t need it. Ask for my title, if you’re going to send me post, and allow me to prefer to use only my name; ask for my pronoun. Don’t use my sex as a proxy. Because if you ask my sex, I’m going to be torn for a moment, grit my teeth and tick F, on the grounds that I can’t legally declare otherwise. If you ask for my pronoun, I’m going to say “He or they, please,” without hesitation.
Someday I will, inevitably, run some kind of event which will require booking forms. “Sex” will be one of the fields on the form, and the tickyboxes will say “Yes,” “No,” and “Dinosaur”. This will not be very helpful, but it will make me feel better. And then I’ll ask about pronouns.
Want more accessibility; make things more symmetrical.
It’s weird, I’m left-handed but most of those things don’t bother me. I think it’s because in the case of the camera at least, having my right hand steady allows me to have my left hand free and doing something else. But then, I never needed left-handed scissors either.
There are some actual legal requirements there now, with a bit of a bite to them (as Wells Fargo found out when they broke some of those laws).
The site I help manage is a U.S. federal government website, which has very strict accessibility requirements. Part of our usability test was actually an accessibility review. I’m a content manager, not a coder, but I was still pleased to hear that our site did quite well on it except for a couple of tweaks.
Someday I will, inevitably, run some kind of event which will require booking forms. “Sex” will be one of the fields on the form, and the tickyboxes will say “Yes,” “No,” and “Dinosaur”.
That reminds me of the joke in Austin Powers when he’s filling out forms. “Sex? Yes, please!” But I like the option of dinosaur.
My dad was chef*, he had a way of teaching right handed people what it was like to be left handed. He show them how to do something with some cooking tool, and then tell them to try. Inevitably they’d have great difficulty. He’d take the tool back and show, “No, this is really simple,” then give the tool back and have them try again. It would still be very difficult for them.
At this point he’d hand them a different tool, same type of tool but designed to be used by right handed people instead of left handed ones. They’d find that it was in fact really simple.
And he’d explain that being stuck with the first tool was what being left handed was like. If you were lucky, and could afford to pay extra, then maybe -maybe- you could get the second tool, but inevitably everything around you was designed on the assumption you were right handed which meant that you’d usually be stuck with the first tool.
Of course, my dad grew up at a time when you weren’t left handed unless you were very left handed. It was after they stopped tying people’s left hands behind their backs to force them to write with their right (at least they had stopped in this area), but you still had to fight for, “No, this is my good hand God Damn It!” At which point you were thrown into a class for people with crappy penmanship because clearly all left handed people have crappy penmanship.
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*So that no one misinterprets “My dad was…”, my dad is still alive, but he’s older now and the stress of being a chef got to be too much for him so now he’s just a cook. It’s a job he’s overqualified for, but it is much less stressful.
I would like way more stuff to be made adjustable for people of various heights. Kitchen counters are always the same height. That’s okay for women of average height and short men, but it’s not great for short women and it’s terrible for very tall women and tall men.
Desks are always in the same very limited height range, which is about three to six inches (7.6 to 15 cm) higher than I, at exactly five feet (152.4 cm) tall, need. Since they’re designed for the prototypical businessman–probably around six feet tall, maybe a little less–they’re fine for most men, but really problematic for shorter than average women. They’re problematic for kids, too, and I can never figure out why desks are always either preschooler-size or businessman-size, with nothing in between. It seems like a great way to wreck kids’ backs by the time they finish middle school, if they spend lots of time on the computer or do lots of homework.
Most chairs are too high for me too. Again, chairs are only designed for adults (unless they’re for preschoolers), usually with the assumption that all adults are men of average height. Therefore, my feet dangle, which is pretty hard on my back after an hour or so. I have developed the habit of sitting cross-legged at tables because it’s the only way I can be comfortable. Ikea’s desk chairs, even though they are adjustable in height, do not go low enough for me to plant my feet firmly on the ground. This is in spite of the fact that in the U.S., 1 in 25 women are shorter than me, and the proportion would probably be much higher in most of Asia.
I have hung on to an ancient chair from my late grandmother, which has been reupholstered before, and which badly needs the wooden arms and base refinished. My parents (who are of average height) don’t understand why I keep it, especially since even the current colour and fabric are dated. I keep it because it is COMFORTABLE. The seat height and seat depth (a major issue with armchairs and couches for me) are actually suitable for a petite woman. This is really, really rare, even though there are a lot of petite women.
This isn’t just an issue of physical comfort. Being constantly confronted with the reality that most seats and tables are unsuitable for me makes me feel ignored and invalidated. Even car airbags are designed for a minimum height very close to mine. (I think it’s 4’11″.) What are shorter adults supposed to do–not drive? (I don’t, but for unrelated reasons, and I would like to learn someday.) It’s like the world doesn’t recognize that I and people like me (let alone most children between the ages of 5 and 13) exist. After a while, that lack of recognition really hurts.
A proper nationwide US mass transit system and accompanying sidewalks would be fantastic. Travel would theoretically be cheaper for everyone, urban planning would have to take into account that people might not have cars, there would be more space for bikes and other foot-powered traffic, and we could probably reduce that usage of carbon fuels some, too. Practically, it means more buses and trains and more in taxes to pay, but it would be really great.
Being able to hop a bullet train on Friday and see family for the weekend, despite being halfway across the United States, would be really good, too. Could presumably cover the same ground as the airplane in about the same time, and holding just as many people without cramming us in like sardines.
I like having my car, but I’d rather have an EV for commuting. A robot-driven EV would be even better.