Listening to people
How we worked with the Django Software Foundation - and the community! - to make their website more usable and accessible.
UX, inclusion, and diversity
Improving the Django website with community input
What are your plans for 2024?
UX, inclusion, and diversity
“[User experience] is used by people to say, ‘I’m a user experience designer, I design websites,’ or ‘I design apps.’ […] and they think the experience is that simple device, the website, or the app, or who knows what. No! It’s everything — it’s the way you experience the world, it’s the way you experience your life, it’s the way you experience the service. Or, yeah, an app or a computer system. But it’s a system that’s everything.”
These words were spoken by the first UX designer in history, Donald Norman.
Norman began his career in cognitive psychology, but his product experience made him a leader in a growing field. He was involved in what was called human interface research at Apple in the early 1990s, and coined the term user experience because he felt the traditional nomenclature was too limited.
So what do we mean when we talk about user experience?
User experience→, or UX for short, is about designing the user experience of a product, trying to understand users' needs and expectations, and creating solutions that meet those needs. It studies the emotions and perceptions a user experiences while interacting with a product, such as satisfaction, frustration, confusion, and how they use a product.
Designing a good user experience of a digital product, both functional and aesthetic, must take into account some important aspects such as:
the identification of user needs, through a series of surveys;
usability, which measures the degree of ease and satisfaction with which users relate to the interface of a website or application;
accessibility, which is the ability of a product, service, or environment to be easily used by any user who happens to use it, or at least by most users;
information architecture, which is the semantic and logical organization of information environments, both physical and digital, to make everything easier to find, understand, and use.
So the first step in doing the best UX work is to listen to users. This is a key issue for users who can then make the best use of the product, but it is even more important today, when issues of inclusion and diversity are fortunately becoming central to ethical debate and product development.
Indeed, a product should be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. A user interface should be designed to be usable by a wide range of users.
For example, an accessible product must be usable by blind or visually impaired users, understandable by users with reading or language difficulties, or other disabilities.
We can do this by following official guidelines and considering aspects such as:
color contrast to make all content readable
the size of text
adding captions to videos
using assistive technology.
The tendency to have a great care and attention to these aspects from the insiders and the great interest also from the technicians who work side by side with the designers themselves is confirmed by the work we have done as 20tab on the Django website.
Disclosure is packed with interesting resources and insights for anyone who works in, or cares about, innovating and creating digital products.
Improving the Django website thanks to the community
It is in 20tab's DNA to be committed to the open source world→ and to actively participate in the communities associated with it. Just during DjangoCon US 2022, we accepted the Django Software Foundation's invitation to work on analyzing and improving the UX of the project's website: a platform that is routinely visited by community members (even several times a day), the nerve center of developer contributions and activity.
In 2023, we worked on this and planned a long user research work structured around 3 main moments.
In the first phase, we analyzed the portal currently in use, using Nielsen heuristics and focusing on some aspects related to accessibility and information architecture. Through this work, we were able to point out critical issues regarding the use of colors or the clarity and findability of some resources.
In the second phase, we developed a survey, which was also distributed to the community during the conferences, to gather the opinions, needs and desires of users, those who use the site regularly and who have ideas and suggestions for improving it. Exactly 545 people filled out the survey, providing us with interesting observations and confirming some of the main problems already identified.
Finally, after defining the selection criteria and identifying the perfect candidates among these 545 people, we conducted semi-structured interviews that allowed us to further explore the issues that emerged from the survey phase and led us to emphasize how important the issue of inclusion and accessibility is to the community.
The year 2023 ended with the release of a Report to the Django Software Foundation, summarizing all the lessons learned, the points that emerged, and the opportunities that presented themselves, along with a set of recommended activities to continue the work.
In the dedicated case study, we have detailed the whole process that led us to the final Report, which is public and accessible.
What are your plans for 2024?
We’ve just released the new 🟢Knowledge Share platform, officially launched a few days ago, so we’ve been working on UX and development (soon you’ll learn more in a dedicated case study!).
Our plan is to continue to develop digital products with our expertise in key technologies and with our product approach.
If you have a product to improve or develop, you know where to find us!