What is DevOps? It’s a buzz word, to be sure. It’s a practice. It’s a process. It’s a culture. It’s a tool set. It’s all of those things, and more. Sometimes, its definition will change depending on who you ask and what problems their organization faces.
In this final post of my 3-part series on Digital Accessibility, I close by contending that the future of accessibility is here – and it’s time to get on board. In Part 1, I asserted that digital access was a human right requiring our protection. I laid out a strong business case in Part 2 that studied the economic benefits of accessibility. Here, I conclude with one final argument and declare that the future of accessibility is now.
In this second of our 3-part blog series on Digital Accessibility, we present the business case in favor of digital accessibility. In Part 1, we argued the moral imperative and studied the legal consequences for infringing this basic human right. Here, we argue in support of accessible design by examining the economic benefits for businesses in service to vast, underserved market segments.
In this first of a 3-part blog series, learn why digital accessibility is usability, and consider the compelling case for protecting digital access as a fundamental human right.
Adobe ColdFusion is a robust and reliable development platform for many businesses. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll stay on ColdFusion forever. Even if you’ve been using the platform for years, there are many reasons you might want to make the switch to a platform like NodeJS, Rails, or Java. Perhaps you’re ready to scale …
When it comes to maintaining robust web applications, Adobe ColdFusion is a tried-and-true development platform. However, general ColdFusion adoption is in decline, and Adobe is retiring old versions of the software. In 2022, successfully running ColdFusion web applications requires more external support than ever. If you’re developing, managing, and troubleshooting your web applications in house, you could be overlooking some serious …
Demystifying Task Analysis of the JTBD Strategy
When I first waded into the JTBD pool a decade ago, I found myself conflicted. I was enamored with this theoretical approach to making disruptive strategies into executable roadmaps to solve customers’ needs, but I was simultaneously confused by the cottage industry terms that cropped up around the JTBD community.
The ancestry of the JTBD theory can be directly traced back at least 25 years to Tony Ulwick’s book, Business Strategy Formulation, and later codified in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution. Before these, dozens of marketing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) works reference many forms of Task Analysis, which closely resemble Jobs processes.
Embedding inclusive design and user accessibility into our everyday ways of working starts with us designers. At ITX, we walk the talk and take our commitments seriously. So when we learned about the 2021 Design + Diversity Conference, we made a point to show up – in force.
The 3-day, virtual event featured a diverse set of speakers and attendees. Conference keynotes addressed the following topics, each fundamental to the growth and acceptance of inclusive design…
Whether you’re building products for hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals, design that provides as many points of access as you have users is no longer a nice-to-have. For reasons based not only in social responsibility but in sound business management, inclusive design is a must. And embedding it into our everyday ways of working begins with the designers and design teams whose duty it is to carry the banner forward.
Over the past few years, the UX design team at ITX started thinking about adopting a more inclusive lens in our work and soon came to realize why it was so important to us as designers, but also as human beings.
If the mission of User Experience is to design experiences that improve the lives of others, how can we allow the process we use to conceive these experiences, and ultimately the product or service themselves, to exclude whole segments of people? That is precisely what happens when we allow irresponsible design practices to deliver harm through the experiences we’ve helped create.
To begin to address these flaws, designers need education around inclusion, awareness of what inclusive design looks like, and a pathway to action that embeds inclusive practices into the design and development process.