“I think that everyone has been strained with this pandemic, and no matter who you are, it’s not been an easy time for anyone. And I think that we have an opportunity here to improve on existing (meeting) systems by making them more accessible to everybody.” – Regine Gilbert

Show Highlights

[01:10] Regine’s Career Journey
[07:37] Problems with Accessibility in Virtual Environments
[14:24] Necessity’s Role in Developing Creative Solutions
[16:53] How to Have Conversations Around Accessibility
[26:00] Designing for the Future, Now

Links | Resources

Regine’s LinkedIn
WebAim
EqualEntry

About the Guest

Regine Gilbert is a designer, educator, and author. In her work as an Industry Assistant Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, her pioneering vision challenges the status quo with empathy at the forefront of her motivations. The combination of her experience in UX and accessibility-focused work provides her with an unshakable belief in opening up the world in an effort to widen communities and reconcile connection.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I am with Regine Gilbert who works at New York University, where she is an industry assistant professor. She’s also the author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Welcome to the show, Regine.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, thank you. Happy to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. So, I’m really curious to hear just a little bit about how you got your start. I think working in accessibility and design is really important work, and I think if you’re anywhere similar to my age, there was certainly no degree in this. So, how did, how did you find yourself doing this work? How did you get there?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I first started in user experience design about seven years ago. So, I haven’t been in it as long as some others in the area. And when I got into user experience design, I didn’t really know much at all about accessibility. I believe the course that I took had one slide, from what I remember.

Regine Gilbert:

But I woke up one day and I said, “I want to make the world a more accessible place.” And of course I go to Google, and I’m like, “Accessibility. What does that mean?” And when I put in “accessibility in New York”, I found a meetup, and luckily the meetup was happening, I think, within a week of when I had Googled this. And I went to my very first A11yNYC meetup. So, a11y is a numeronym for accessibility. There’s 11 characters between the A and the Y.

Regine Gilbert:

And I went to this meetup and I met some people who are still my friends to this day, and I really just got into accessibility, and learning about it, and applying it to my work. And at the time, I was doing freelance UX research work, and I was looking at websites and doing information architecture stuff. And I was like, “You know, your website’s not accessible.” And they’re like, “What does that mean?” And it’s like, “Well, I mean, do you know people with disabilities can’t really access your site, and you’re excluding them.” And they were like, “We had no idea.”

Regine Gilbert:

And I just found that more and more people knew very little about it, and that led me to speaking about it. And then speaking about it led to me writing the book.

Douglas Ferguson:

I want to talk a little bit about just how that moment you had when you searched on accessibility. And it’s like, “How do I even define this?” And I think that awareness is the first step, right? And you even talk about these companies that didn’t even realize that they had a problem, or even that there was such a thing. So, I’m curious how your definition of accessibility has changed over the years and how it’s continuing to evolve.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I think that when I first got into it, I was really web focused. And then I started looking into other areas and looking into service and service design and building. Now I notice if I’m in a building and I’m like, “Well, somebody with a wheelchair couldn’t come in here. There’s no space, or they couldn’t use the bathroom here.” So, over the years, I’ve become a lot more aware of the inaccessibility of the world, and society, in a lot of ways. And yeah, that’s how it’s changed and evolved. I notice more.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, what have you been noticing since COVID, as we’ve all been thrust into these virtual environments?

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, that people with disabilities said, “You should have listened to us all along. See? People can work from home.” That’s one of the bigger lessons, is that all these companies who said, “Oh, no. We can’t have people working from home.” And all of a sudden you can. And Haben Girma, who’s deaf and blind, says people are disabled or non-disabled. And when a majority of non-disabled people need to work from home, all of a sudden there’s a way to make it work. Right?

Regine Gilbert:

So, that has been interesting. I think that a lot of people in the disability community are like, “Welcome to our world, because this is how we function a majority of the time. We can’t be around a lot of people, and that isolation you feel, that’s something we feel quite often.”

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that we have seen, it’s like the best of times and the worst of times in some ways, in that we’ve seen people really come together, form different groups, form different communities, but then we’ve seen the antithesis of that and people saying, “Oh, this isn’t real. We don’t care about other people.” And they’re being really silly and selfish about it all.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I think we’ve seen a duality of the best of times and the worst of times during this pandemic.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it’s interesting you pointed out how being forced into the situation kind of created empathy. You could argue that it’s artificial, but it’s there. The forcing functions manifest it.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it reminds me of the activity of “a day in the life”, or “in the shoes”, where I’ve even heard stories of designers walking around on their knees to think about the experience of children, right? And even people putting themselves in a wheelchair to like, “Let’s navigate the space,” or do these things trying to see through the lens of that experience. And so, I’m kind of curious. How do you take that a step further? I’m sure there’s some advanced techniques there that could be explored.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. There’s varying opinions on doing simulations. Some people in the disability community feel that they’re not accurate because you’re putting yourself in a wheelchair, but you’re not a wheelchair user. So, you may find it extremely difficult because it’s your first time doing it, and then you just make that assumption that it’s always difficult. And so, then, I think the best thing that you can do is actually get actual people with disabilities involved in whatever it is you’re creating, and have them be a part of the process, and hire them. Get them to give input, because there’s nothing better than getting it from the source.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love to hear that. That’s awesome. And so, let’s think about the virtual meeting space. As we’ve been kind of forced to spend our days on Zoom and use tools like Mural, et cetera, are there things that you are noticing, or that you’ve known, that are just being exacerbated now, that maybe more people should be paying attention to?

Regine Gilbert:

I think we’ve discovered the limitations of things like Zoom that are not really necessarily welcoming to people who are deaf, because there’s no captions that are provided through Zoom. You have to have a third party. Whereas with, let’s say, Google Meet, for example, you can actually see who’s talking because they use machine learning for captions. And even if you’re doing a presentation on Google Slides, you can also use captions so that someone can read along.

Regine Gilbert:

And there are other different artificial intelligence plug-in things that you can use for Zoom, but I think we see that these tools that we’re using are not as accessible as we wish. I mean, sometimes it’s not even about a person being disabled, but they might be in an environment that’s super loud, and they would love to have captions because their three kids are having their Zoom classes behind them. And even though they have their headphones on, it’s really hard to focus. So, I think that we’ve seen a bit of limitation with the tools themselves as we’ve gone through this process of being pretty much online, and it looks like we’re not getting out of this anytime soon.

Douglas Ferguson:

It also makes me think of some things we’ve run into with some of our workshops where there’s socio-economic imbalances as well. There’s accessibility issues where people maybe don’t have good internet, or they don’t have a powerful laptop or computer because there are requirements to run these things.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And in the United States, more than half of the country does not have high-speed internet. And so, a lot of people are like, “We’ll do Zoom, and I want everybody to keep their cameras on.” I was like, “Not everybody can keep their cameras on. It really will just shut down.” And I think we need to be mindful of that, not everyone has what we have.

Regine Gilbert:

If you’re in a bigger city, you really need to be mindful of where people might be coming from and what might be best for them to communicate. Maybe it’s just better for them to call in, and that should be fine.

Regine Gilbert:

And at the end of the day, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Gus Chalkias. He’s an adjunct professor at NYU, and he’s also blind, and he and I teach a class called Looking Forward for Assistive Tech. He says that accessibility is options, right? At the end of the day, that’s what it is. You’re giving options. And I think about that all the time. Why aren’t there more options here?

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. So, when we’re thinking about the options we need to create, what are some things we should be considering? I imagine there’s some categories that might be… I mean, to your point, nothing’s going to replace talking to people. I think having some categories to at least explore can help maybe even expose who we should be talking to.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I think about things lately in terms of senses. We think of our five senses, and if we take away a sense, can we still experience that thing? And that’s how I like to look at things now.

Regine Gilbert:

If I take away the sense of touch, how different is this? If I take away my sense of sight, how different is that? If I take away my sense of smell, how different is this thing? And I think that when we start to think about, maybe, exclusion from the start, then we can look at things differently. It’s all perspective, right, and again, providing those options.

Douglas Ferguson:

It also makes me think, too, that it’s not just binary. And even if we don’t have blind people in our meeting, they might be colorblind, or they might be limited in some capacity.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Or someone might have low vision. Or how many people are feeling comfortable going to get their eyes checked, and they know they need to? I just got a notification saying, “You haven’t had your eyes checked in a while.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely.

Regine Gilbert:

And I said, “I need to go because things are…” I could tell things are changing for me. So, yeah, it is really thinking about someone who’s not us.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it’s interesting. You talked about not getting your eyes checked. I mean, how many people haven’t bought blue-blocking glasses, or have they been staring at a screen too long and they’re getting dizzy, and maybe they need a break. It makes me think our design, if we’re throwing too much stuff at people, we might be creating disabilities that they didn’t even start with.

Regine Gilbert:

Well, with this pandemic, I decided I’m going to buy a Nintendo Switch. And I bought the Switch, and I’m very excited because everybody talked about Animal Crossing, and I was like, “I can’t wait to play.” And “I can’t wait to play Mario Kart.” And so, I got my Switch, and years ago I had carpal tunnel issues in my right hand, and so I started doing a lot of things with my left hand.

Regine Gilbert:

And when I use this controller, after a while my hand starts to hurt. And I just think, “There’s no accessible controller for the Switch.” There is for Xbox, but I did actually just find an accessible controller that can lay flat, but it’s only available in Japan at the moment for the Switch. I was like, “Why isn’t this available in America?” I mean, so, give me the options, right? Just give me the options to do things different.

Douglas Ferguson:

The irony was not lost on me that the accessibility device was not accessible in the US.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Yeah. It’s not accessible in the US, so I was hoping I can figure out a way to get it from Japan.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, are there companies that specialize in aftermarket accessibility devices?

Regine Gilbert:

I’m not aware of any, but now you’re making me curious to look.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was wondering. So, was this a device made by Nintendo and they just haven’t brought it to the US yet?

Regine Gilbert:

I think I want to say the company is Hero? I’m not sure of the name,

Douglas Ferguson:

What a noble mission that would be. Hey, there’s tons of products out here. They’re not all necessarily accessible. We’re going to provide aftermarket add-ons for everyone that’s in need. I love that.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. In the US, there’s an organization called the Able Gamers charity, and they do a lot of work to make gaming accessible. I need to look into it more, but they might have some stuff.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s cool.

Regine Gilbert:

Because people end up building it themselves if they can’t make it.

Douglas Ferguson:

I don’t know. That’s amazing through just open-source software and YouTube and online communities of all sorts, there’s this amazing stuff that’s been happening. And in fact, I’m diabetic, and there’s diabetics that have taken it on themselves to reverse-engineer the hardware and build in more capabilities that the device manufacturers haven’t been doing. And they’ve now got two different devices that we depend on talking to each other.

Regine Gilbert:

Wow.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because that would require FDA clearance, and the companies getting partnerships built and working together. And so instead, their hashtag is, #werenotgoingtowait. And I love this idea of the consumers standing up for themselves and coming together and just making amazing stuff to better their lives.

Regine Gilbert:

I mean, this is where things come from. I think a lot of times people will wait, and “I wish somebody would really come up with this thing.” And even for me, when I got asked to do the book, I was like, “Who wants me to write a book? What do I know?”

Regine Gilbert:

And I learned, actually, a lot as I wrote the book, and I wrote the book because I got a lot of questions from students. I had questions, and I answered those questions in the book. And sometimes when those things don’t exist, you have to make them yourself.

Regine Gilbert:

And the disability community, they are the most innovative group because they’ve had to make things work when they haven’t been given that option. And that’s what I put in the book. There’s so much innovation that comes out of the disability community.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, necessity, right? I mean, follow the old quote. So, I want to talk a little bit about your point that you made around how important it is to talk to the people. And I know that there are some folks… Again, I would be willing to wager that there’s a large portion of the population that are afraid of those conversations because they don’t know how to approach them.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, if you’re going to invite someone with a handicap to the conversation and be curious about their needs, do you have any advice on how to approach that conversation with, I don’t know, generosity, maybe?

Regine Gilbert:

I think going into it being open, and not assuming anything. We all come with our own bias, and I think we have to kind of put that to the side and be open to what people have to say, and listen. And this is something, especially in this country as of late, listening has been something that’s really hard to come by.

Regine Gilbert:

And I heard this, and I can’t remember where, but it said, “If you’re questioning things, then you’re open, and if you’re saying statements, then you’re closed minded.” And I think that a lot of statements are made, and not enough questions.

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that asking questions, and asking questions that are appropriate, and not insulting to people. And listening to people’s experience and having them tell their stories. I think that our stories we all have are so important and need to be heard, and people need to listen to them. So, that’s what I would say, is be open.

Douglas Ferguson:

And do you have any advice on the types of questions that are just really good? Because you said you want to ask questions that aren’t offensive.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think maybe that’s where people get stuck, even if they… I’m sure there’s plenty of people that just aren’t even trying. But the people that are trying, I think when they get stuck, it’s probably because they’re worried about offending, and it’s easier just to clam up and not say anything. Right?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, I think you can ask someone, how do they go about doing XYZ thing? Right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So classic ethnography type stuff.

Regine Gilbert:

Like, “How do you go about your day to day functions of work? How do you use Zoom? Are there any difficulties that you face?” And ask why to things.

Regine Gilbert:

If you really want to understand, you have to ask the question “why”.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Regine Gilbert:

And I’ll give an example. This past spring, I was talking with Gus. And Gus, who is blind, was saying… I don’t know, somehow we started talking about augmented reality because I have real interest in it. And we got on the subject of Pokemon Go. And he’s like, “I wish I could play Pokemon Go.” And I thought to myself, “Why can’t he play Pokemon Go?”

Regine Gilbert:

And because it’s a very visual game, right? And it’s not exactly easy to use with a screen reader. So, we started a discussion about this, and what would it mean for an augmented reality experience to be accessible for someone who’s blind?

Regine Gilbert:

And ultimately, this led to a decision where Gus became my students’ client, and my students worked on creating a concept for an augmented reality experience for Gus. And a lot of them came up with different games, games that use audio-spatial sound and haptic feedback. And it was really great for the students to think outside the box because a few of them were asking me, “How do we make augmented reality, which is a digital overlay over a physical space, into… How do we do that? How do we make it, and it’s not going to be visual?”

Regine Gilbert:

And I said, “Sound. Touch. Feedback. Inputs and outputs.” And they all came up with really cool stuff this past summer. And so, there’s opportunity there, but you have to be open to having the discussions and asking the questions and listening, and working with people.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The spatial audio is really interesting to me, especially as a facilitator who really loved working the room, has now been confined to his digital compartments that we whisk people to and fro. And with the spatial audio, the idea of people clustering, that’s a breakout group. But certainly, folks that are vision impaired wouldn’t know where to go.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, having the haptic feedback to have some indication of where they are in the space, that’s really fascinating.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, I’m curious more about just how we think about, as we’re designing experiences for teams to meet and come together, what do you think the best way is? I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is maybe just actually taking the step to be aware that there might be some attendees in the meeting that may need special attention. We might need to design for their needs. But are there any things that folks should be considering, just in general, as they design meetings to be more accessible?

Regine Gilbert:

I think that looking at people, looking at the four areas from the web content accessibility guidelines is a start, right?

Regine Gilbert:

So, you’re looking for cognitive, mobility, hearing, and vision, and having an understanding if someone on your team has any disabilities. And a lot of disabilities are not even visible, right?

Regine Gilbert:

You can not see if someone is dyslexic or colorblind. And I think it’s making sure that the meetings themselves are as accessible as can be by providing captions when available, or a transcript if it’s something after the fact, because certain plugins can capture transcripts, and then any sort of documentation, and making sure the documentation is accessible, making sure that PDFs are accessible for a screen reader.

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that having an understanding and having an awareness of the needs of accessibility for meetings, because I think that everyone has been strained with this pandemic, and no matter who you are, it’s not been an easy time for anyone. And I think that we have an opportunity here to improve on existing systems by making them more accessible to everybody.

Regine Gilbert:

So, just having that understanding of awareness, that not everybody’s experiencing the thing as you do, and that you need to provide options for people when they need them. You need to allow people to keep their cameras off if that’s the case because they might have five kids running around, right? You need to provide captions when you can, and on and on.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, are there good resources out there to learn about the standards, or are how things are evolving, so that we can stay in tune with new ideas and new ways to be more accessible?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I always like the website webaim.org as a go-to resource because all this stuff can be extremely overwhelming, but I think they lay it out in a very good format.

Regine Gilbert:

I would also recommend equalentry.com. They have a lot of great blog posts related to accessibility that are short little reads. And I’m trying to think what else for anybody new to it. But those are the two that I would recommend.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. So good. And I guess considering where the world is, and what could be possible if we were willing to be more bold and take more risks, where do you think the opportunity is? Where do you see things going?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, part of my research now is looking into accessible XR, and XR stands for extended reality, which is augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and other immersive-type experiences.

Regine Gilbert:

And personally, I’m just going to be real. I think about myself and getting older, and the fact that I still want to experience stuff. So, I think when we make things accessible, it can be used throughout our lifetime.

Regine Gilbert:

In the past, I’ve done this workshop, Designing for Your Future Self, where I have people think about themselves as a 70-plus-year-old. And what does life look like? People go, “This is depressing. I never thought about this.” And I said, “But why aren’t we thinking about it? And why aren’t we thinking about it with more hope and excitement?”

Regine Gilbert:

Because we have an opportunity now to make things for our older selves, and in turn, we’re making things more accessible for people now. So, part of why I love what I do as an educator is that my students give me extreme hope for the future, and what we can do, and how we can apply what we know now, and make things better for the future.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. I just got goosebumps. This concept of designing for your future self and the ripple effects it makes, and the target that we set when we do that. That’s amazing.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And I like that you said ripples, because I think about everything as a ripple.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. So, I want to talk a little bit, too, about just the notion of XR, and how that, in itself, can create accessibility in itself.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh. Well, I mean, there’s a lot of work being done around XR and accessibility by my friend Thomas Logan. He is the owner of Equal Entry. And their XR, extended reality, is being used in therapy for folks. It’s being used to help people with Alzheimer’s or dementia by using iPads and having them direct them back to their rooms, if they’re living in a facility.

Regine Gilbert:

There’s so many potential applications for this type of technology, and I think especially around augmented reality. And I look at MacRumors and things like this, that Apple is putting a lot of money into spatial audio. And I think about that, but I also think, “Well, what if someone’s deaf? What are they experiencing then?” Right?

Regine Gilbert:

And so, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to improve on our current lives, but not all of it is going to be technical or technological.

Douglas Ferguson:

I guess the thing that comes to mind, it’s something I saw recently where Amazon was doing these little… I forget what they called it, but it’s these little micro-vacations that were virtual.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I thought, “Wow, that’s really…” I mean, I shared it with a few people, and they were kind of like, “Oh, that seems silly,” because they’re avid travelers. And I’m like, “Well, A, in this time of COVID I’m not getting on the plane. And then B, it would be kind of cool to go there before you visit so you can kind of understand a little bit, and you kind of experienced it.”

Douglas Ferguson:

I didn’t actually dive too deeply into it, but my vision of how cool it could be is if you had a tour guide that was just slightly customizing it for you and answering your questions, and you kind of see it virtually.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then, as you were talking about XR for accessibility, I began to think about physical therapy could be… Maybe you need to go in periodically, but you can almost do it daily if it was just a 15-minute check-in to make sure, “Are you doing the thing you’re supposed to do?”

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so it becomes more accessible by convenience, or by the fact that it’s there and available, versus having to be tuned for their need, if that makes sense.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And I forgot to mention, this semester, actually, my undergrad students are working with a nonprofit out of Seattle called Home Again VR. Which, when people think about virtual reality, they tend to think, “Oh, I have to put on a headset.” That’s not necessarily the case.

Regine Gilbert:

You can actually do WebVR, which is more like a 360 type of experience. But this organization Home Again VR services folks who are elderly, or children in hospitals, and it’s the participant and a tour guide. And the tour guide will choose a location. Let’s say, Tokyo, Japan. And the two people will be in separate locations, but they’ll see the same things. And the tour guide will take them, and point out things, and they’ll start to have a conversation.

Regine Gilbert:

It’s a really cool thing. So, my students are working on giving some ideas on how to improve on the tool. And I think there’s a lot of… Not everybody can leave the house, right? So there’s a lot of opportunity there as well. And I personally have been using, in virtual reality, an app called Wander, and I have been able to kind of see the world in that way, even though I can’t leave my house.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s cool. It’s amazing. Right? Just this notion that these things are being brought to us and it kind of reminds me of all the science fiction where people just tap into the second life or the simulation.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. I mean, the smallest thing can just take you to a new place.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Yeah. It’s fascinating to think about all the levels of technology. Right? Because I’m sure there’s focus on making existing stuff more accessible, or creating systems that are just by nature solving an accessibility problem.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. There’s a lot of work being done in different universities. There’s an organization that I am part of called XR Access, which is, I think Verizon’s part of it. Cornell Tech is part of it. And they focus on different areas of extended reality accessibility, from the hardware, to looking at policies, to education in different areas.

Regine Gilbert:

There’s students in VR and educators in VR that are exploring those worlds, and the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium just last year had an event on inclusive design in this field, and they’ve created some guidelines around XR and accessibility. So, there is some progress, but we still have a ways to go.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So, when you think about the difference between accessibility and inclusive design, how would you differentiate those?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I would call inclusive design the big umbrella, and accessibility falls under that umbrella. Because we don’t really… When people ask, “How do you define inclusive design?” I was like, “Well, you can look it up. I mean, you’ll find different things for it.”

Regine Gilbert:

But I like to refer to Kat Holmes, who wrote the book Mismatch Design, who says, “We don’t really know what inclusion is, but we know what exclusion is.” And so, when we make things inclusive, typically will include accessibility in that. But inclusive is looking at things from a cultural perspective, from a language perspective. It involves a little bit more than accessibility.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think a lot of times, when we think about designing meetings, it’s the inclusivity piece that’s so, so critical. Whereas, we don’t always run into the accessibility stuff because I don’t think that really… Well, when you’re thinking about products that are going to have massive scale, the likelihood that you’re going to run into users that you never even meet, right, you don’t even know, you’re having to address and support.

Douglas Ferguson:

Whereas the inclusivity stuff is definitely a challenge that I think we face all the time, and whether we notice it or not. Even moreso in this new global environment we’re finding ourselves in.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

I mean, I’ve been noticing things where the English speakers have an advantage because they can read the material faster, and then they’re getting impatient while the other people are trying to catch up. Or, there’s lots of things.

Douglas Ferguson:

In fact, one that’s really fascinating that I’ve run into recently, and just been noticing this a lot. So, different cultures have different lengths of pause. That’s, I would say, their natural pause to indicate that there are no questions, or no one has anything to add.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, if you mix two cultures, one that has a really fast pause, they don’t have to wait very long to make sure no one has anything to add, and the culture that has a long pause, as a facilitator, you have your work cut out for you because the people from that short-pause culture are going to run over those other folks.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Yeah. I think that’s something to account for. Even time, right, and time differences, and understanding that if you’re having a meeting early, it might be late for people, and people may not be their sharpest when it’s midnight, and it’s earlier for you. So, there’s so many considerations when it comes to inclusive design that we need to consider.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So, do you think there’s any, just kind of switching back to the accessibility piece, are there things that you would encourage folks just to keep top of mind more than anything, as they think about their meetings?

Douglas Ferguson:

Are there any blind spots that are just kind of easy to… Easy is a difficult word to grapple sometimes, but what are some things that people could just have on their checklist?

Regine Gilbert:

What is a checklist? I think being mindful of people’s situations, their time zones, how people communicate, as you alluded to, when it comes to how people pause or don’t pause.

Regine Gilbert:

I think making sure that documentation is available, providing a meeting agenda so people know what to expect, are things that are just considerate. And I think being considerate in the space where we are all a little bit struggling, I think, from time to time.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I think for sure coming to the meeting with a clear agenda, and making sure that you are mindful of people’s time, because our time is so different now with being home, and if people have families, that really needs to be taken into consideration.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. And I think, too, there’s a big opportunity to, as a facilitator, be vulnerable yourself.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because if we don’t model that behavior, how can we expect those in the audience to speak up if they’re not being supported. And so, we need to work hard to support them, but then also, maybe not come off so polished that people are afraid to disrupt things.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, it’s been a super pleasure chatting with you, and the work you’re doing is super important. And really, I would say, hopeful to think about. And especially, I’m going to be thinking about this “planning your future self” and designing for that. It’s really provocative. So, I want to just give you an opportunity to leave the listeners with a final message.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. I want folks to think about… One of the things that I ask first in my book is, “Have you ever wanted to go somewhere and you couldn’t get in? And how did that make you feel? Or, did you really want something and you couldn’t get it? How did that make you feel?”

Regine Gilbert:

And most folks will say, “I didn’t feel very good.” And at the end of the day, a friend of mine said, “We are an experience as human beings.” Right? And we create experiences.

Regine Gilbert:

And what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to leave people out. We don’t want to have people feel like they’re not wanted, and we want to be more inclusive in that way. Right? We want people to feel included.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I would say, don’t leave people with the feeling that you’ve probably experienced yourself, and be more inclusive and accessible in yourself and what you do in your work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. It was such a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks again.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, thank you.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 35: Accessibility in the User Experience appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Laura Klein once worked with someone who “missed” the internet. During our conversation, she shared this humorous anecdote from her first job. In the mid-1990s, she worked at a think tank that was doing future-casting: “One of the younger UX designers went to the [head of the company] and said, ‘I really think we should be looking at this internet thing.’ And he replied, ‘No, I don’t really think it’s going anywhere.’ I was in a think tank about the future of technology where the guy in charge managed to miss the internet.”

Laura herself hasn’t missed much in her career. In fact, she’s worn many hats. She’s worked as an engineer, user experience designer, and product manager for companies of all sizes. She’s also written two books — Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Currently, she’s the VP, Product at Business Talent Group and Principal at Users Know, which helps startups learn more about their users and potential customers.

Avoid Innovation Theater

In my interviews with innovation experts, I often start by digging into what they see as wrong-headed or misguided in today’s organizational innovation programs. Laura talked about the importance of being open to new ideas, as well fostering existing ones. “[Innovation programs] tend to be very focused on creating ‘Big Ideas’ and making huge changes. But, the most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”

“The most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”

Innovation must extend beyond the idea stage. Furthermore, the innovation groups responsible for generating these ideas may not be helping when they simply pass along their ideas to other teams to execute. “What that team probably needed wasn’t more great product ideas. They needed more talking to users and understanding their actual needs so that they could come up with good solutions on their own.”

Similarly, Laura warned against companies focusing too much on what she called “innovation theater” — sticky notes, open workspaces, whiteboards — the sometimes clichéd trappings of a creative work. “[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”

“[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”

This concept of follow-through was an important thread throughout our conversation. She talked about how there are few “overnight successes” in innovation or the startup world. For those who appear like they had a meteoric rise, she says: “I guarantee that they had 73 bad ideas that they tried before they came across this huge overnight success, with a few exceptions. Even the ones that did stick to the initial great idea, they tried a bunch of other stuff along the way that didn’t last for very long.”

What Needs to Change

For new and innovative ways of working to stick inside an organization, Laura talked about the need for coaching and organizational change, in addition to education. She’s seen what happens when companies solely focus on the education piece: “You get everybody together for forced training and you spend a bunch of money on workshops. Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching. All of their incentives remain the same, so they have no reason to do anything differently.”

“Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching.”

She talked more about how funding can also stand in the way of corporate innovation: “Big company structure isn’t necessarily the right one to take a little tiny idea and nurture and grow it. All the things in the company are setup to not pay attention to any of that, right? Funding is based on ‘How much money is it going to make me in the next quarter?’ Suddenly they have to do something that’s not going to make any money for six months, a year, or ever. They don’t know how to do that.”

Beyond budgets, there are other significant organizational changes that she recommends to support new ways of working: “You have to change a tremendous number of things, like your HR department, your procurement department, how you rate your employees, and how you fund projects. You have to change all of that for some of these things to work.”

Not Just the Fun Stuff

Let’s return to the concept of follow-through and the importance of execution. “Sometimes you’ll see labs come up with a prototype and…the problem is that they give it to the organization and expect somebody else to ‘raise’ their product and understand why to do it.”

She cautioned against scenarios where innovation teams do the “fun stuff” (i.e. idea generation and prototyping) and then pass off the hard work to the rest of the organization: “Who wants to build somebody else’s idea? Even if they do, what if it doesn’t work out? Who’s fault was that? Was it a bad idea or was it bad implementation?”

“You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”

Nothing should be pitched over the “wall” to another part of the company. Ideally, there shouldn’t be a chasm between the innovation group and the people that execute. According to Laura: “You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”

Measuring Value

We also discussed how companies can and should measure innovation. Laura’s answer illustrates her dedicated focus on the end user. “I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people — both within the organization and for the users of whatever that organization produces.”

“I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people.”

She went on to say: “Ideally, we would also be thinking about the impact on the world at large and the rest of society because we should care about those things, because we all have to live in it. But, those things are often harder to quantify.”

The Potential of Machine Learning

We closed our conversation by talking about what Laura is most excited about right now and she brought up machine learning: “I think it has a ton of useful possible applications, but there’s also a tremendous potential to screw it up. It is both exciting and terrifying. I think it has a lot of potential to help people make better decisions. I think it’s terrifying because it also has the potential to help people make really awful decisions…”

She explained some of her concerns: “There are a lot of ethical questions around how we train data models, how we give the right information to people to make good decisions, and how could we automate away some of the really boring, awful parts of people’s lives, but not just give them worse things to do.”

But in the end, Laura has healthy skepticism about any “hot” topics like machine learning based in her time in the industry: “I’ve seen virtual reality be the next big thing three times so nothing’s that exciting to me right now.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post No Overnight Success in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’ve coached countless startups on how to conduct better prototype interviews. Many of my tips and tricks were highlighted in my post Mastering the 5 Act User Interview. There, I underscored the importance of a moderator guide. Now, I’m sharing the official Voltage Control Moderator Guide along with instructions on how to use it. I’ve found that startup founders and other novice researchers benefit greatly from having this guide printed out and with them as they facilitate interviews.

Download the template here, but please read on for detailed instructions of how and why to use it!

Let me start by giving a big THANK YOU to Michael Margolis. Michael is a UX Research Partner at Google Ventures. I had the honor of working with him when Google Ventures lead my startup’s series A. I had worked with many researchers in the past; however, it was immediately clear that there was something special about Michael. Not only was he an amazing researcher and highly skilled at teasing out the most important insights from users, but he was also adept at teaching others how to do it.

Michael distilled his method into a repeatable process called the Google Ventures Research Sprint, which like the Design Sprint, culminates in a 5 Act Interview with real users. If you are looking for extra inspiration, check out Micheal’s advice on how to write good context questions and tips on how to build out your prototype section.

Our moderator guide

The Voltage Control Moderator Guide is a Google doc that we use for every Design Sprint we run. Even our most seasoned interviewers find it useful because it forces them to outline their interview in a consistent manner and gives them a map to come back to if the conversation starts to meander. I personally find it helpful to make sure I don’t run out of time. I rely heavily on the timing of each section and use that to stay aware of my overall timing.

Project Details

The guide starts with a few details on the project to help us remember when we are looking back at old guides.

Questions

We rewrite our Sprint Questions and Prototype Questions as Yes/No questions and place them at the top of our guides. We do this so that we keep these top of mind as we are writing our guide and also as we moderate the interview to remind us how the team will be scoring the interview. Check out our official scorecard for more details on how to rewrite the questions and interview scoring.

Setup

Setup is about logistics and making sure your environment is configured properly. Setup will vary based on your style, tools used, and whether your interviews are in-person or remote. We recommend that you tweak this section to suit your needs.

Links

Copy over your meeting link (Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, etc) and your prototype link (Invision, XD, Keynote, etc) so you’ll have it at your fingertips.

Reminders

These reminders are especially helpful if you are new to interviewing or don’t do it often. Even if you are a seasoned pro, I recommend leaving them. It never hurts to be reminded and you never know when someone else might have to step in!

Reset Meeting

Because this guide is used for interviewing five users in one day, the reset meeting section includes tasks that need to be done prior to each interview session. It includes things like muting yourself, stopping your video, and stopping the recording.

Testers

The testers table is a quick reference for names/times as well as relevant details about the testers. Look through your context questions and see what you already know about the testers from your screener. Put these details in this table for a handy reference.

Hello & Welcome

A simple script to greet and put the tester at ease. Feel free to edit to match your voice and style.

Background and build rapport

Here we capture the context questions which help build rapport and also provide more context into how the user thinks about your problem space. These questions also help the tester transition from whatever they were previously dealing with or thinking about and into role-playing the scenario you are testing.

Introduce Prototype

A simple script to help transition the user into the prototype. Feel free to edit to match your voice and style.

Prototype

The prototype section documents the click flow of your prototype. While we recommend memorizing the prototype prior to the interview, this simple map is a life-saver if you get stuck. Also, it can serve as a checklist if the user is clicking around and you want to make sure that you cover the important pieces.

Debrief

The debrief is always my favorite part of the interview. It’s an opportunity for the tester to reflect on what they saw and get an understanding of the impression it made and how they might think about it after the interview. This section includes some of my favorite debrief questions. Feel free to add, remove, or change them!

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Cool Down

A simple script to wrap up and thank the participant. Feel free to edit to match your voice and style.

How to Use The Voltage Control Sprint Mod Guide

The official Voltage Control Sprint Moderator Guide will help you get the most out of your 5-Act user interviews. When testing with 5 users, it’s critical that you run the interviews properly. Our guide helps you stick to important details. The template is simple to use: once you open it, simply make a copy and rename it. Then follow the steps below to set it up for your interview.

Setting Up Your Moderator Guide

1. Click File/Make a copy to create your own version of the guide.
2. Enter the project name and date of interviews.
3. Paste in your Sprint questions and Prototype questions. The template has room for five of each, but simply edit to your needs. Note: I like to keep the S: and P: prefixes for Sprint and Prototype questions, so that I can copy and paste them directly into the scorecard. Learn more about questions and the scorecard here.
4. Paste in your meeting link.
5. Paste in your prototype link.
6. Add a description of your test.
7. Craft about 10 context questions. It’s helpful to have more than you need for the quick talkers or when some of the questions just don’t relate to a particular tester.
8. Edit the prototype section to include a click flow map of each prototype. Sometime we test multiple solutions or include a few competitors. In that case it’s important to include them all in this section. If you are only testing one prototype, just delete the extra click maps. To make a click flow map, first add names of each screen in the prototype. Under each name type in each active link followed by an arrow and the name of the page the link goes to. Review your sprint and prototype questions and make sure to make a note on pages that need extra attention.
9. Review all sections and adjust times as needed. You’ll want to make sure that you can complete the entire interview within 45 minutes to an hour depending on how you book your interviews. Adjust each section to ensure you can finish on time! Remember to do a trial run to see how long it takes to get through your prototype(s).
10. Review all sections and remove or change anything that may not apply to you or add things you think are missing. You’ll adapt and grow this list overtime until it tailor fits you.

PROTIP: Did you email your testers to remind them of their timeslot and share the meeting link?

Using the Moderator Guide

Day Before

1. Open your Moderator guide.
2. Print the guide.
3. Review setup and make sure everything is on track.
4. Re-read your questions.
5. Do a trial run through all steps; it’s especially important to walk through your prototype(s).
6. Setup the interview and observation rooms to address any potential connectively and AV issues.

PROTIP: If you are a doodler like me, have some scratch paper handy or print a copy of the guide per tester.

Day Of

1. Review setup and make sure everything is on track.
2. Re-read your questions & reminders.
3. Reset the meeting.
4. Start the interview.
5. Check off the tester in the tester table.
6. Follow each step of the interview.
7. Repeat steps 9 to 12.

I hope that our interview guide helps you as much as it has helped us. We no longer have worry about interviews going too long or not teasing out the most critical insights. Instead, we have a repeatable process that is focused and streamlined.

The post The Voltage Control Sprint Moderator Guide appeared first on Voltage Control.

The traditional design sprint doesn’t work for all teams for all problems. As a former Google UX researcher, I worked with several variations of the 5-day sprint. The effectiveness of a design sprint depends on many factors, such as the complexity of the project, stakeholder availability, and how difficult the user research participants would be to involve.

This article shares several ways we adapted the 5-day sprint model based on team project goals and timelines. I’ll share insights on how to modify away from the textbook sprint model. Before we get started, if you’re wondering what a design sprint is, head over to this design sprint primer before reading more on how to adapt it for your team.

5-Day Sprint

Good for: Well-understood and defined problems, teams co-located and with calendars cleared.

The 5-day design sprint is the right place to start. It’s most effective when you have a well-defined problem and know a lot about the audience you are solving the problem for. Your whole team needs to be available and unplugged from other distractions. The sprint participants also need to be committed to sharing their time and ideas toward creating the best solution. Often having team members on equal footing allows all ideas to be heard equally and for trust to be established more rapidly.

Within a 5-day sprint model, there are often modifications made to when and how the user research is done. We’d often move the research to the week prior or after the designated design sprint week. This allowed for more flexibility when participants inevitably canceled or if more user types were uncovered during the design sprint week. When moving the research outside of the 5-day sprint week, make sure to share the results in a live format that allows for discussion and brainstorming. Emailing a report won’t cut it, since people tend to skim instead of absorb the data.

Iterative Sprints

Good for: Difficult or complex problems and solutions, problems with diverse audience needs

My personal favorite variation is the continuous or iterative sprints. While I was at Google, I played with multiple formats of this sprint across several teams. In some ways it’s a fusion of agile and design sprint methodology. It allows teams to tackle challenging problems, which often require multiple attempts and angles to truly understand and solve them.

Another benefit of this longer form sprint is that it provides the opportunity for research with multiple audiences. Often times, a more complex product will have multiple user types that will have different goals, use cases, and requirements for the product. By spreading out a design sprint over multiple weeks or months, your team can be allowed more space to thoroughly explore each of these user types and their needs.

On one team, we scheduled a weekly ongoing sprint. We scheduled 5 participants each Wednesday, for 8–12 weeks in a row. From Thursday to Tuesday, we’d rapidly build up a new idea, to then tear down and refine it with new participants the following Wednesday. We moved in leaps and bounds by forcing regular research sessions. We could also potentially scrap the entire design approach if new insights drove us to a stronger solution. Over the 8–12 weeks, we found a consistent direction and ultimately developed a deeper understanding of the problem we were solving.

A second team that I was the researcher on at Google used the iterative sprint model in a different way. In a single week, we’d run through several iterations of design and research. This team was limited in researcher capacity, so it was essential to get the most out of the time available. We would run 2–3 research sessions each morning and then spend the afternoon tweaking and iterating based on those sessions. By the end of the week, we really understood how our solution would work or not work for different types of companies and different types of users. The other components of a traditional design sprint would occur in several meetings ahead of this design and research intense week.

Short Form Sprints

Good for: Companies with “meeting” cultures, building consensus with a wide range of stakeholders.

One of the most common formats I encounter are short form sprints. In practice, it’s very difficult to get all the stakeholders in a room at the same time. It’s even more challenging to get them to stay in the room, focused, for 5 days. Companies with meeting-centered cultures make it hard for full teams to block off their calendars without interruption.

However, if the design team runs off to do a design sprint in isolation, their solutions are likely to be discounted by other teams. One of the best benefits of using a design sprint framework is to build consensus among a broad set of teams, across engineering, product management, and sales. Teams are more bought into a solution when they were part of the ideation.

By trimming down the 5-day sprint to a workshop format, you can still get many of the same consensus-building benefits. Typically I find that 2–4 hours is optimal for this highly condensed version of a sprint.

Before the session, data is collected through discovery research and synthesized for the team. The workshop begins with reviewing the known data about the problem. I find that people get excited when the meeting begins with data and insights, then quickly moves into opportunities for them to contribute their ideas. The final solution should be open-ended, so that the design team will have the flexibility to evolve the solution as they delve into understanding the nuances of how to solve it.

Using the short form sprint, you allow the team to participate in design thinking and to feel a part of the ultimate solution. When people are part of the brain storm, they are more likely to take ownership and pride in the final solution, even if they’re not part of every single detail.

How would these different models work for you team? Have you tried the 5-day sprint? What adaptations have you made? We hope this guide inspires new approaches for making design sprints work best for you and your team.

The post Adapting Design Sprints appeared first on Voltage Control.

At Twyla I had the opportunity to facilitate Design Sprints with the masters at Google Ventures. This experience was transformational for me and the Twyla team so I’ve created a meetup to share this experience with the Austin product community.

If you are planning to have a design sprint, have conducted one in the past, or are just simply intrigued by the process, join us at the next Design Sprint Austin meetup!

Please reach out directly to me, if you are interested in sharing your experiences with the group.

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