 All right, we're off and rolling. Humans are interesting. We're inherently terrible at seeing from other people's perspective. I just took an ECFE, which is an early childhood family education class with my son. And one of the instructors there mentioned that as a part of the developmental process as we're growing up, until we get to at least five or six years old, we basically see the world entirely from our own perspective. So we've started out from seeing the whole world from our perspective, and we don't start learning how to empathize and see the world through other people's shoes until we start getting a little bit older. And I think this sticks with us. Speak up just a little bit. Does this see better here? OK, there we go. I'll hold it really close. All right, so it's kind of getting over this hurdle of what's inherently built into us as humans to see the world from our perspective, and how do we get into other shoes? So before we start jumping into the how to, I'm going to kind of confirm the assumption of how bad we are at seeing the world from other people's perspective. This is a true story that's happened. A guy walked into a bank and held up a gun and said, I need $2,600 right now before I start shooting. So most people dropped to the floor, didn't make eye contact, just tried to avoid him while they tried to find the money. But one manager noticed that he asked for a very specific amount. She noticed that there must be some reason why not $10,000. Why not a bigger number, a really even number? And so she asked them, why the specific amount? And he needed the money to be able to make a mortgage payment, otherwise his family was going to be evicted. And she goes, well, you don't need to rob a bank. You need a short-term loan. And so the guy literally went back, sat down with her, and filled out the paperwork. I mean, didn't stop him from being arrested. But true story, odd. But I think it's amazing that in all this chaos she was able to see from his perspective that he was trying to solve a problem that wasn't just I need money in general. He wanted for a very specific problem. Disney made this fan site for kids with all these characters on it. And they noticed they were having a very unusual problem. And there's mainly teenagers and younger, I imagine, that were using the site that 75% of the users were hitting the reset password every single time that they went to log into the site. And they're like, that is so bizarre. Like, why would people be resetting their passwords every single time? Yeah. So we assume from our perspective, we all know that six characters means simple. From their perspective, totally different. Again, having a hard time seeing the world from their shoes. One other thing too, this is just a really quick thing, is if somebody ever asked you to, if you're going to hold out your hand and draw a number six, it's just one last exercise. If you did this right now, you'd do it from your own perspective. If somebody else asked you to do it, they're wanting to see what the number six looks like. But I guarantee you, when you do that for somebody, even though they've seen the mirror of it, you're going to do it like this for yourself instead of, there we go, I had to think about that. So by this point, we've confirmed that we're not our audience. So who is our audience? I think before we can do anything about this as far as our project, our solution, we need to figure out who they are. And this starts with a very thorough discovery process. Dwayne McDaniel had an excellent talk on this yesterday from Pantheon, gets much deeper into this. He had a number of these same questions in his discovery process. And I think it's good to have a number of questions. And to dig deeper on these user interviews to try and figure out who they are, what they do. And I think one thing, one question I love more than any, and I've already heard two other speakers mention this, is what does success look like? And that is the major driving force, because if you can get them to achieve whatever that goal is, to find that solution, whatever their problem, more than anything, you know that you're going to have a successful project. So one site I'd worked on is a tourism one, and we did some user interviews with people that were visiting the area. And I think this is one reason why these questions are so important, is in this tourism bureau, there's only two people running it. And these are a lot of the different people that we found as far as the stuff that they really liked to do. Now, here's the thing that's interesting about it, is we're trying to create content for these people, we're trying to create experiences for these people, but you can't be experts in all of this. I love some of the stuff, like the go-kart thing is totally me, we have a little amusement park in our hometown, I love go-karts, whenever I go to other towns, I love to find a place where I can go race go-karts, but I know that the director of this bureau doesn't do go-karts ever. So what do you do when you figure out all these different, whether it be activities or who they are? So the problem is, this is my son, by the way, at my desk, before we, if we don't figure out what these, you know, these hobbies or who they are, these attributes that go along with these user roles, is a lot of times you see this, and I've done this myself, where you just assume that what they want to do, what they're trying to experience, you know, what their goals are trying to achieve, and you design a site, and users hate it, because that's who I ended up accidentally designing it for. They have a lot of the same activities, you know, I just know that, like, both Shiner, my dog here, and my son Sullivan love to go to the park, but I didn't ask them the question, so why do you like going to the park? What activities do you do there at the park? Very different experience for both of them, so I didn't, if I didn't ask the questions, I'm gonna accidentally design it for the wrong one. I thought, just because they both like going to the park, I got the solve. So, I asked Sullivan about all these activities that he likes to do, you know, what would his, you know, if he had to describe a perfect day to me, what would that be, given that he can barely speak, but you know, and then what I can do, and this worked really well, is what we did is we created user guides that were tailored to these experiences on the website, so we had travel guides for each user role that we figured out that would go to this town, and for Sullivan, a perfect day to him would be something along these lines where we love biking, we'd go and we'd bike, we'd go to the playground, we'd go do some fishing, you know, love's going to, we have a restaurant in our town called The Depot that has trains all over, kid loves trains, any kid that grows up on Thomas, of course, and then, well kid doesn't love treats, so figuring out that tailored experience. So, I think this is the tricky part, though, is even if I know exactly what he likes, is how do I create this content, and how do I create these solutions for him, because I'm not an expert on everything, I'm not an expert on fishing, I know that you put bait on a hook and you drop it in the water, but I don't know where to go for the hotspots to find bass or walleye or northern, so we can create this through guest authors, we can curate content, we can do listicles, user experiences could be testimonials from clients themselves or them writing their own stories that we share on the site could be organic content, it could be stuff like feeds through hashtags that get curated in automatically, we're trying to find these people that are living these experiences, the people that are the subject matter experts and bringing them in to help us out. So, now we need to make sense to the user, we figured out we're not the audience, we figured out who our audience is and what they want, so now we're creating this content for them and we need to make sure it makes sense to them. Now, this is one thing I love using funny puns and stuff like that on sites, but it's much better to be clear than clever, always. And also speak the same language that the user is using, use the same words that they would use to describe what they're trying to find, what they're trying to do. A perfect way of doing this is using Google Suggest, just punching in keywords in Google and seeing how they auto-complete it, use the Google Keyword Planner. Obviously, the interviews pulling from those interviews see what language they actually use to describe some of the events that they're trying to do, the solutions that they're looking for. Just avoid the jargon. I see this all the time on real estate websites, they put on there the hot list or the hot sheet. It's just basically recently listed homes, so why not just say most recent homes listed? Because I asked a whole bunch of people when I was doing a website for a real estate agent, what is a hot sheet? I asked a bunch of their clients and I don't know, is it tips to find a home or is it, a lot of them did not know what it was, so just put on their recently listed homes or the most recent homes. Navigation, so this is interesting because people are inherently really bad at making decisions, it's really tough. It's actually a sales tactic that a lot of times people use is instead of saying, do you want product A, product B or none, they'll leave out C intentionally, so they'll ask you and say, hey, do you want product A or B? And as humans, we typically tend to pick one of the decisions that's in front of us. We have a really hard time seeing decisions that are not immediately in front of us, but knowing that people are bad at picking decisions, avoid what I call decision fatigue. We've all been to websites where it's got 20 different navigation items, tons of links all over the place, you get frustrated, so it's this fine line between empowering the user and decision fatigue. Typically you find the breaking point around five or six decisions. I would actually, I like it usually where it's two or three at the most, preferably, but for like a navigation, obviously it's not always realistic. If you can keep it around five or six at most, that's ideal from the studies that have been done. You know, at the bottom of a page, instead of just leaving it to the generic footer, you know, what would the next step be? You know, the call to action doesn't always have to be something to buy a product or contact us. It could be somebody just went and looked at our about page and at the bottom we say, you know, take a look at our work, because that would be a logical next step. They figured out who you are, now we want to show them what our work is and then at the bottom of that, we could show them, you know, case studies and then we can say, hey, interested, learn more, click here kind of thing. Don't use click here though, use something more descriptive, that's a terrible one. And it's always this balance between, you know, fewer choices versus fewer clicks. I know we always talk about things should be only like two clicks away, three clicks away. You know, people don't mind clicking multiple times to find content as long as it's really clear and quick. You know, it can be quick with five or six, with five or six clicks and maybe all those clicks are within the viewport. So maybe we, instead of having it only one or two clicks away in a long page scroll, maybe it's right there immediately in the viewport and you have to click a few more times, but because it's right in the viewport, they can get there faster. So don't think that fewer clicks always equals getting to the solution faster. And one thing that can help a ton with trying to figure out what makes sense to your user as far as navigation, this is a tool from Optimal Workshop, it's free. You can basically, and actually I was just reading through this because I just took this from their website, there's some really odd articles up there, but I'll let you guys read through them. It lets them drag and drop and throw things into the buckets for you so you can see exactly how they view the categorization and you can do the free one that allows you up to 10 users to go through this testing for you, this research, this discovery process. Accessibility, this is a really hot topic. I know at a number of the word camps I've been to word camp Seattle. They just had a big accessibility talk there. I know there's some talks at word camp US. It's gonna be a really big thing, especially in the years coming. Let's move beyond some of these fails that we've had problems with in the past. It looks silly when you see it like this, but we do the same things with our websites constantly. 20% of the population has some sort of disability that inhibits them from being able to interpret your site, whether it be colorblindness, hearing perception. 20% of the population is a lot of people. That's a lot of people that can be potential clients, potential customers. Make sure that they're accepted within your site. I'm not gonna go really deep into accessibility here, but I am gonna hit on some of the high points. Media's a big one. 85% of Facebook users, and I know this is true for me, I don't listen with the sound on. Make sure you have captions there. Make sure that people can read along with it. Plus search engines, they can't interpret what's in your video either, so this helps them understand what your content's about. I've heard a lot of studies of search engines within YouTube giving preference to videos that do caption. It makes a lot of sense, because if they can interpret it better. Alt tags, again, takes two seconds to throw in a description in the alt tag. Helps them to understand what that image is. WordPress obviously makes it really easy to add alt tags for images, so there's really no excuse not to. Adaptable, so this has become a lot trickier with responsive design. Does it change when you change your viewport? Does your text that's overlapping an image go from a dark part of that image to a white part and all of a sudden it's barely visible or very difficult to read? You're just kind of trying to think of it again from your user's perspective. This is a really great tool to use. I mean, the nice thing is there are a lot of standards out there, so you don't have to guess. Contrast ratio should be at least 4.5. This is actually a standard set by WayCag. That's WCAG if you wanna look into it a little bit more. And so you can see, I mean, clearly below the limit, much easier, and you can see it's much softer on the eyes to be able to read. You don't have to strain nearly as much, so right here. And it does depend as well. It's not just contrast ratio. It also depends on the size of your text. So there are more finer points to this within accessibility, operable. So we actually will do this within our office if we're designing a site where accessibility is a requirement. Now, we try to design our sites with accessibility in mind, and when you start getting in the habit of it, it's actually not too bad, but if there's one that does have like a level AA WayCag compliance standard, we have to make sure we hit certain levels, and one of them, way to test this. There's ways of going through all these sheets as far as the checklist, but actually try and do it. We'll put on a blindfold, and we'll try three or four goals of try and get this into your shopping cart, try and buy this item, try and use this contact form, try and find where the contact form is. It's kind of funny to watch as we do this, but it's a really eye-opening experience to operate a site when you can't see it. And one thing I should mention too, there's a lot of little things in here too that you wouldn't expect that you hung up. It's not just a matter of clicking links, like one thing is scroll lock that I ran into where you're scrolling down on a phone and you hit a map, and all of a sudden the scroll gets taken over by the map and you're scrolling the map instead of the page. So somebody who's blind doesn't realize they've just been locked into a map and they're not scrolling the website and they can't figure out why is it not working. I shouldn't say blind, but usually it's somebody who has vision perceptions, because somebody who's blind is most likely gonna be using a screen reader who's gonna skip over that. But it's little things like that. These are a lot of great tools, a lot of great resources. My favorite is the totally Chrome extension. I use this constantly with every project, even if it isn't accessibility standard. You can click on it and it'll tell you are your headings properly nested? You know, does it go H1, H2, H3, or are they out of order? It'll check all the contrast ratios. It'll check and see do you have labels for buttons, navigation, items like that. So more reasons to follow accessibility. Mention this a little bit. Search engines use a lot of the same tools that accessibility features use. Now try and strike a balance between, we all know like alt tags can be used for search engines, but try to keep in mind that people that do have screen readers are gonna be using that too. So don't try and just punch in, best website designer, Phoenix, Arizona, if it's not that the photo is of. So try to think of, you know, that somebody will be using the screen reader to see what this text is to and try to interpret this photo. This one's gonna be an interesting one and I wish I had more details on it, but I know that there's been a lot of talk about the Department of Justice making mandated accessibility compliance in the US. Europe already has a lot of rules on accessibility so if you do have any clients that are in Europe or another country, a lot of them do have laws in place already as far as certain levels of accessibility. So one thing I think just kind of show the power of when we start to see from other people's perspective, getting their shoes, this is an awesome video. I actually just tweeted it out, a link to this YouTube video. If you wanna check it out, it's posted it like a couple hours ago. So we've all seen this scene before. You walk by, somebody got a sign, says I'm blind, please help. You know, and you'll see in this video most people are walking by, a few people donate, but it doesn't really resonate with them. And this girl picks up his sign, flips it over, writes something down, and all of a sudden people start giving like crazy. And the guy can't figure out why it's so dramatically different. So this is how she changed the sign and it's perfect as far as, you know, it's really short. It puts us in his world in one sentence. We can all clearly interpret and see how beautiful the day is, but he can't, so it put us in his shoes with one simple sentence. My name's Tyler Goldberg, I'm a strategist at Cybersprout up in Minnesota. I love writing, not the best writer. Lost my Minnesota accent from traveling around. People always ask me like, you don't sound like the people from Fargo, but great TV series, by the way. Any questions? Yeah. So that's the question is, the question is with alt tags, making sure you kind of stay within the scope. And that's what I was trying to touch on with when you put in those alt tags for those images, keep in mind that it's gonna be interpreted by search engines, it's gonna be interpreted by screen readers. So just keep in mind the different functionality or the different users of those alt tags. Yeah, you were just saying keep it short, yeah. And I think that's just, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Keeping alt tags short, I definitely think single sentence, shorter is better while being descriptive, definitely. Any other questions? Yeah, so the question is what screen reader do I use when I'm testing? There's a Chrome extension, I can't remember the name of it off the top of my hand that's off my head, it's free. It works pretty well, there are some other ones out there that are paid that are better. You know, I think you just have to, I've tried two or three of them and I just found the one that I like best, the one that's quicker, the one that's easiest with our process. But the Chrome extension one does work really nicely. I know that MacBooks also have screen reader capabilities built into them. So, yep, yeah, it's interesting. So the comment was made, you know, that a dad had bought a camera and he's blind for a daughter. So I think that's good to keep in mind that don't make an assumption that just because somebody has a visual impairment that they're not gonna be buying a certain product. I think that's an excellent point. And, you know, talking about the PHP developer that, you know, has a perception, disability, there's an interesting company out there, Accessibility Oz. They're the ones that gave the talk up at WordCamp Seattle. I think everybody on their team has some accessibility issues so it makes it really easy for them to test this all out. And I think it's nice when you can scratch your own itch as well. So it's cool to get a different perspective. I know one thing is the, so the question was, how do you design for visitors, users that have low literacy? I know the Fletch score is an excellent way to go. It's built into Yoast. So if anybody uses Yoast, you'll see now they have two different targets. You have your SEO optimization for your keyword, as well as the readability. And one of the things that goes in there is, you know, the level at what you write for. As far as getting more granular than that, on like specifically like, you know, lower levels of reading or no capability to read, I think it, you know, it helps to have, you know, visuals that go along with the story you're trying to tell. You know, use images that make sense. Use icons that make sense that can help tell your story. Video can be a very powerful thing. I think, you know, if there's a big concern about people being able to read, use some video. I think a lot of people love video anyways, so it's just another good reason to do that. Yeah, I know that they've translated it to, at least Dutch, because they're from Holland, but I know that they have, I don't know if the Fletch score itself, I haven't done it for a multilingual site, but that would be an interesting thing to look into is if that readability score works for all languages that it's been translated into. Thank you very much.