Overview
A research piece into how the website product could support those with vision impairments who want to self-serve.
Service NSW is a New South Wales Government agency within the Department of Customer Service that provides one-stop access to government services and other partner agencies via online, phone or in-person at its service centres.
The primary goal of this project was to investigate what accessibility issues customers were facing daily and turn those learnings into an implemented solution.
Problem statement
One of the core values of Service NSW and our product team was to strive to create inclusive website experiences. The aim was to always provide equal access to information for all customers, regardless of their ability or environment, especially during the pandemic.
With that being said, New South Wales was constantly in and out of lockdowns due to COVID-19 with the vulnerable and less older demographic isolated from state-based services.
This demographic is quite dependent on in-person assistance at service centres as they tend to be less digitally literate in combination with cognitive, degenerative issues and we needed to make improvements to our website product to assist in self-service wherever possible due to isolation.
Roles & responsibilities
The website product team at Service NSW is relatively large with a small number of Product Designers, Two Senior Product Designers and one Principal Product Designer. Due to the content management demand, our team was largely content designers. Each designer focused on their initiative priority – my focus at this time was accessibility improvements.
As the sole product designer working on this initiative, I initially conducted staff interviews, desk research, technical feasibility study, design and customer user testing.
Throughout this project, I paired with two front-end developers (one internal, the other external partner) and a content designer.
This initiative was in part remote and in-person due to the nature of lockdowns, however, was able to conduct interviews in person during low COVID-19 transmission numbers.
Processes
The research included interviews with staff and customers was essential to delivering a proven solution.
Staff interviews
To begin with, it made sense to hear from those who interact directly with the user demographic every day at the service centres, digital and customer service representatives. I wanted to hear what questions they usually receive from our older customers, what issues they face and identify any recurring themes. These interviews were conducted remotely in group sessions with staff from the metro and regional service centres. It turned out a lot of our older demographic customers had quite a lot of difficulty reading due to visual disabilities.
Desk research
As a part of the research, I compared the reasons for browser zoom settings with on-site font size functionality.
Reasons for browser zoom settings:
Most (if not all) modern browsers let the user zoom in and out through in-built functionality. There’s less code to maintain as the user’s zoom preference is stored within the browser and 68% of respondents used 2 or more types of assistive technology, with 23% using 4 or more different types. In the survey comments, many respondents indicated using the Reader settings in their browser to present a more readable version of content.
Reasons for on-site font resize options:
W3: “Many people with low vision do not use magnifying software, and they may not be familiar with their browser’s text size adjustments. This may be particularly true of older people who are learning about computers late in life and who may be experiencing age-related vision loss. It may also be true of some people with cognitive disabilities who require increasing font size.”
NNGroup: “Changing browser font size is now more difficult for those with lower digital literacy skills. As of IE5, toggle browser font size is no longer available on the toolbar by default and requires the user to customize, which is advanced for the aging demographic.”
WebAIM: “Changing font size is by far the most common type of custom style applied. 24% of respondents utilise more than one of these style types, with some users reporting all of them. Paragraph, line, letter, and word spacing are used rather infrequently – of note because of the new WCAG 2.1 success criterion now requires pages to support user customisation of these styles.”
Desirability assessment
Before progressing any further with the project, I met with designers from MyAccount and the RMS Transactions team. I wanted to get an idea of any constraints or difficulties we may face with other platforms as well as desirability.
I was able to gather relevant insights:
There may be technical constraints that limit the feasibility of this feature
Change language functionality does not work on MyAccount products – Global navigation bug
Both MyAccount and RMS Transaction designers see the value in this feature and think it would directly benefit customers
MyAccount uses JavaScript for the global navigation component which means that there is no connection
There are different environments for different product teams and we could potentially run into implementation issues if made global
Consideration of the placement in the global navigation would create content bloat
Technical feasibility study
Once I finished evaluating the insights from the designers from the two other teams, I wanted to get a better understanding of the constraints from a product perspective. I met with the respective product managers from both teams.
Some of the relevant insights:
There are multiple transactions available within the RMS product
Both products were about to migrate from Salesforce to a new React stack
3 transactions were a month away from migrating to the new stack
They want to avoid anything being adopted on the Salesforce stack due to the phase-out
There was a desire to have the feature integrated once the platform migration was completed
Design
Before conducting user testing, I designed and developed 3 prototype variations.
Option 1: This variation was adopted from the ‘change language’ functionality to ensure consistency with the mental modelling. View prototype
Option 2: A similar approach to UnitingCare but removes the additional interaction of a dropdown to toggle the font sizes. View prototype
Option 3: In-page font size controls, similar to The Sydney Morning Herald’s approach. This is more contextual but also eliminates the platform-to-platform concern that the RMS Transactions and MyAccount teams held. View prototype
User testing
After analysing customer demographic data I was able to identify that the Engadine Service Centre was an ideal location to recruit customers for user testing with the assistance of digital service representatives, as they had a relationship with the regular customers. Engadine was one of the latest upgraded service centres that had a digital kiosk focus which was a bonus.
On the day there was me and one of our Content Designer’s to assist in note-taking. We were able to interview 15 customers who we believed fell within the 45+ age criteria.
Our goal was to understand how customers from the late mid to senior age demographic or those with vision impairments prefer to control the size of text on the website. The sessions were also used to validate the website font size control feature or if there’s a preference for browser zoom controls.
Outcomes & lessons
Three recurring customer insights were revealed from user testing.
Results
Based on the results from usability testing and also due to platform implementation constraints, it was made clear to implement the in-page variation. This can be viewed live on the Service NSW website.