OASIS Product Management Mantras, Chapter 5

Cater first to your users with the least ability … they will dictate an exceptional level of usability.

While I worked in the E-Comerce industry, there was a prevalent mantra which arose as a result of how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legislation impacted (and benefitted) all electronic commerce. Users with disabilities impact software decisions in an immensely favorable manner. A significant amount of planning went into ensuring that any software path or process was accessible by impaired users, who utilized browsers that included screen scraping applications, which translated text into a computerized voice. This literally means that entire features were planned, from their inception, to accommodate users who might only be able to “see” a screen as a robotic voice that reads it to them. This technology is incredible! These ADA requirements, which were often nonnegotiable, led to an absolutely fantastic end product for all customers. If an application is so accessible as to accommodate a digital-voiced narrator, it is certainly able to accommodate nearly every other user on the planet. Navigation paths, alternate text-based descriptions, user intefaces, buttons, and graphical decisions become so well thought out, that they can’t help but become successful for all users. Coremetrics clickstream analysis proved that if we could cater to a browser which was a screen readers (literally), there would never be a lack of related, successful user activity across the board. When I saw regions of an E-Commerce site that were highly tuned to accommodate ADA considerations, there was never a lack of traffic, use, and (I suspect) efficiency.