Highlights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2024

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?

Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way?

Presentation

Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need. In this presentation we share best practices for designing menus.

Presentation

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

MuseumNext (virtual)

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Design for Context have developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library, historic home collections and exhibitions. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.

Our insights

Article

Business as (Un)Usual: How a UX Audit Can Help

May 22, 2020

Michael Owens

It may be the understatement of the century to say that 2020 is not going the way any of us had planned. In the best of times, it can be difficult to justify the allocation of resources to assess and redesign your UX. And in tough times, like now, it can be especially hard to make needed progress, which is where a UX audit can really make a difference.

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Presentation

Accessibility 101

Baltimore UX Meetup, Baltimore, MD – May 9, 2017

Michael Owens, Lesley Humphreys

In this Baltimore UX Meetup presentation, Michael Owens and Lesley Humphreys explore recent standards, assistive technologies, and the types of deliverables that can be used to specify accessibility compliant interactions.

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Presentation

Red Alert! Communicating Status Through Great UX, Graphics and Accessibility

User Experience Professional Association (UXPA) Conference, London, England – July 24, 2014

Lisa Battle, Jennifer Chaffee, Marguerite Bergel

Effective visual design is essential for communicating system and workflow status, alerts, notifications, categories, and prioritization that often must be understood at a glance. Some people believe they can’t use graphics or color for important cues because of accessibility, which is not true. At UXPA’s 2014 conference, we discuss how to create great, visually appealing UX designs that optimize communication of status information for all users.

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Publication

Emerging issues, solutions & challenges from the top 20 issues affecting web application accessibility

Poster presented at ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, Baltimore, MD – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

We describe emerging accessible design issues, based on a second in-depth analysis of hundreds of accessibility issues documented in real projects, and a comparison of those results to a prior study of 1000+ accessibility issues. This poster demonstrates recent trends in the top 20 UI design situations that are likely to pose problems for users with disabilities; highlights several creative design solutions; and identifies several challenges that lack adequate solutions.

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Presentation

Top 20 Design Recommendations for Accessible (and Usable) Web Applications

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 14th Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

This paper describes common challenges and solutions for accessible design, based on an in-depth analysis of 1000+ accessibility issues documented in real projects.
Presentation

Supporting Aging Citizens and Employees at the Social Security Administration

Aging by Design II Conference, Bentley College, Boston, MA – 2005

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler, Sean Wheeler

Both to meet the needs of an aging public and to ensure that staff members nearing retirement age can continue to work productively, information technology must be usable for older adults. Usability specialists have been at the heart of analysis, design and testing activities that help the agency respond, both internally and externally.
Publication

Designing Software Architectures to Facilitate Accessible Web Applications

IBM Systems Journal – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman, Eric Grivel

The web application is increasingly a platform of choice for complex business software, as well as for Internet online services. We are beginning to identify guidelines for web application architectures that support accessibility. This paper describes common accessibility problems encountered in web applications and explains how architecture can help address these problems through reusable accessible objects; supplementing information in links, buttons and labels; providing comparable access to signposting; handling errors; and providing time-out notification and recovery. It also discusses the critical role of architecture in supporting what we believe is the best way of meeting the needs of diverse user groups: multiple dynamic views of the user interface.

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Presentation

Design Patterns and Guidelines for Usable and Accessible Web Applications

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 13th Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN – 2004

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

Because we are committed to achieving ease of use for all users, we have encountered challenges on real projects that have led us to question the common belief that accessibility benefits all users. Although the user experience goals of accessibility and usability often complement each other, sometimes they are incompatible—the best solution for one user group compromises the needs of another group. This presentation introduces design patterns that specifically address accessibility, and identifies design tradeoffs that suggest the need for alternate views of the user interface.