Eriol is a Design Lead who has worked in-house for 9+ years. Eriol is Design lead at Open Food Network, runs Humanitarian.design human rights-focused and humanitarian design project and is part of the core team at Open Source Design. Before that, they worked at Ushahidi, a non-profit developing open-source, digital tools to help people with democratic processes, human rights, and crises like typhoons, earthquakes and terrorism.
Eriol is a non-binary, queer person who uses they/them pronouns and an LGBTQIA+ advocate. They are deeply passionate about intersectional inclusion and promoting healthy attitudes towards mental health in the tech sector.
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A tricky question without a simple answer...but in an ideal situation: I would have done user/audience testing on what was created and validated the product. I find that clients find it harder to argue with users feedback (though some find a way! sighhh) but most will understand and appreciate that you went and made sure it worked for those that intended to use it. After all, our clients might not know everything about their audience and that's what product experts are hired for 👏
Depends on the kind of project and stage of the project but daily I use these a lot: Adobe XD Github (for conversations on issues) Notion for research and documentation I've used lots of tools before, illustrator, balsamiq, figma, sketch etc. but the best design tool doesn't have to be techy, paper and a pen to sketch, a team for conversation/collaboration is very, very useful :D
+1 to all the tools mentioned by my peers on the AMA here but what I'm reeeeeeeeeeeeeally excited for is https://uxbox.io/ an open source design tool that is aiming for feature parity with Figma!!!! YES! I can finally host my own design software :D
I miss meeting folks irl :( it's certainly made it an odd time in history! I mostly get mad about how online conferences are great in theory, but rarely account for folks with unstable internet or limitations to access. The good parts are that conferences are embracing pre-recording talks which means that lots of people can present ideas and talks. So there is a lot of content out there now! I do miss the human connection of in-person events and I hope that we're all safe to attend soon but I see the biggest change is that conferences in-person will likely have better facilities for people who can't travel or would risk their health to travel. So more meet-ups and conferences that are 50% in person 50% livestreamed/pre-recorded.
1 - Make sure it passes colour contrast test! Especially for buttons! https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ 2 - Colours and branding are close to each other. I'd recommend starting to explore what colours mean to different communities and why. For example, original McDonalds chose red for much of their colour palette because there's some evidence that the colour red makes humans feel hungry and they eat more! There's a great book for a very in-depth look at this! https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Kassia-St-Clair/The-Secret-Lives-of-Colour--RADIO-4s-BOOK-OF-THE-WEEK/19381320 3 - Always make sure you consider neutral light colours like white, light blues, beige etc. and for dark mode, the opposites of those :)
Do user testing and do it in a way that doesn't confirm bias! There's a lot of 'fashionable' or 'trends' in design and UI and some of that is because big companies have found that it helps certain tools and actions. A simple example is, having AA+ accessible contrast colours on buttons, it helps mostly everyone because now people can see buttons clearly. Sometimes trends are good but sometimes they are bad, for example, the trend of using lots of gradients, or carousels on webpages/apps might seem like its a good thing to have because...well...other do it! but the best way to find out if your users can use it is to do testing. The conclusion is something that 'looks good/cool' might be completely un-useable. So focusing on what works first and build from there :)
Working as a designer in the humanitarian and non-profit space we find accessibility and inclusion especially hard. Mostly because tech grants don't explicitly fund accessibility improvements unless that's a specific audience that the grant is funding. I think having a specialist in accessibility is amazing and would love that on every team, but I strongly believe everyone across the team should care about accessibility and inclusion.