Mark W.rites

I don’t know that I have ever told this story to anyone, other than my wife, but there are a handful of people around my age who may remember it well.

If you have a debit card and around $35 you can purchase an extraterrestrial acre of land. Online. Deeds are available for plots on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Lo, and Titan. If you want something a little closer, lunar plots are also available.

UI design takes on an entirely different meaning when the UX doesn’t include a screen. That’s a lot of what automotive UX/UI design is all about.

In the early years of my career, every user experience I was designing comprised a single modality and a single visual UI. As my career progressed, I was able to work on an ever-expansive ecosystem of modalities, including products with smaller UIs, and even without UIs at all.

Good design is holistic. It considers the journey your audience is on well before they ever interact with your product. It guides them from start to finish, even if your product only touches the center of that path. It also means understanding their emotional state, which in turn impacts their mental state. And their level of tolerance for whatever UX you’re about to put in front of them.

To-do lists can be as overwhelming as they are helpful. But it feels so good to check something off. Always. If I accomplish a task that isn’t on my list, I will literally add it only to immediately cross it off. Why? Because it helps me feel a sense of accomplishment. And because it’s an accommodation for my OCD.

I’ve been designing and using digital interfaces for well over two decades. In that time I’ve seen a handful of mistakes that we keep making, over and over again. They’re the UX faux pas that I love to hate. 5 of them, in particular, are especially egregious. Let’s avoid all of these at all times.

Well-intended product design can turn into a usability/accessibility nightmare. Something as simple as a button can be marked up with HTML/CSS in myriad ways. We can make sure it’s done properly with a sensible markup.

Two weeks ago a small publisher sent me an email about the book I'm writing. They asked what it was about. I responded with a synopsis and a link to the talk I've been giving which is the foundation for it. It’s about exclusivity and biases in design.

While there are many reasons to make a product accessible, the most important is simply because it’s the right thing to do. But you may have a client, team, or boss who doesn’t see the value. It’s absurd that we even have to sell accessibility, but often we do. If this is your world, I got you (complete with resources, below).