a11yTOConf2019

Adding Task-Oriented Walkthroughs to your toolkit

Speakers: Sarah Pulis & Andrew Arch
Twitter: @sarahtp
@amja
@intopia

Australian Retail eCommerce company - Findings during audit

Undisclosed Name as request from the speakers.

Keyboard Navigation

IMPORTANT: 81 TABS before you get to the menu!!
Even so, it doesn’t violate any WCAG rules.

• WCAG doesn’t focus on user experience
• As an experience auditor, I was thinking about a user’s path but in an ad hoc way
• Even with the best intentions, this issue slipped through the cracks during design and development

Task Oriented walkthrough

A person looks at the usability of the product by walking through tasks in the “shoes” of a user and ask questions from that users point of view.

Steps

• 1. Prepare your personas
• 1. Identify key tasks a user might perform
• 1. Identify the steps a user might take to achieve the tasks
• 1. Perform the walkthrough with different personas and for different tasks
• 1. Address any possible barriers.

Step 1 Personas

Option 1: use accessibility-specific personas Option 2: use existing personas but add different abilities

Persona cards

• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/understanding-disabilities-and-impairments-user-profiles
  Adapted from GOV.UK
• https://xtensio.com/how-to-create-a-persona/

Step 2 Key tasks

Example tasks for the supermarket website

• Create account
• Choose delivery method/time

Step 3 : steps for key tasks

Buy groceries:

• Add groceries by searching
• Add groceries by browsing
• Add groceries from saved list
• Add groceries from recently bouth

Add groceries by searching:

• Enter butter into search and click on search
• Navigate to “flora butter”
• View detailed description
• Add to cart
• Checkout

Step 4: conduct the walkthrough

1. Adopt a persona
2. Choose a task
3. walk through the steps for that task as if you were the adapted persona Do this for all tasks with each persona

Questions to asks?

• Is there an obvious path the user will take to complete the task?
• How easy is it for the user to identify what actions are available an which is the correct one?
• If the correct step is taken, will the user realize and understand that this is progress towards the desired objective?
• Was the user able to complete the tasks? (with ease)

Step 5 Address possible barriers:

What needs to happen to address possible barriers? It Depends (TM)

• Design change
• A11y requirements / annotation change
• Content change
• Code change (if in dev or live)

Task oriented approach testing

• Task-oriented rather than page-oriented
• Can be done in the early stages of design as well as on exiting websites
• Can identify requirements gaps
• Might be cheaper & faster compared with usability testing

Caution: it can be time consuming