Overview
This portfolio presents case studies of user interface and interaction design work I've done on a variety of software projects. My goal for each case study is to:
- explain and illustrate the design process,
- describe the unique issues that arose and how they were resolved,
- indicate the overall success and impact of the project.
AInspector for Firefox
AInspector is an open source add-on for the Firefox browser that evaluates web pages for compliance with widely accepted accessibility requirements defined by WCAG Levels A and AA, WAI-ARIA, and the HTML standard.
The design challenge for this project was to take an extremely large dataset and create a user interface design and information architecture that utilizes a multi-level approach of progressive disclosure, allowing the user to gently delve into lower levels of detail depending on their needs.
AInspector for Firefox is used by web developers to assess and improve the accessibility of their websites at the University of Illinois, Penn State, The Ohio State University, the University of Iowa and Indiana University.
Accessibility Bookmarklets
The Accessibility Bookmarklets make visible various accessibility features on a web page that are otherwise hidden, including heading levels, landmarks, form control/label relationships, list markup, and alternative text for images.
In collaboration with members of the local accessibility community, I designed and developed a set of five bookmarklets, which are freely available and easily installable in any browser.
The bookmarklets have become popular among campus web designers and developers. The visualizations they provide give users an approachable method for making an initial assessment of whether a web page meets the accessibility requirements within a given category of compliance.
A11yFirst Plugins
The A11yFirst Plugins for CKEditor are document editing enhancements that promote and encourage the creation of accessible content as you edit.
The design challenge for this project was making the user interface for each plugin comprehensible to users such that it was clear that choosing particular options that the interface proactively offered would significantly improve the accessibility of their document.
There have been more than 15,000 downloads of the A11yFirst plugins from the CKEditor website since late 2019.
Fidelity NetBenefits
When the retirement services division of Fidelity Investments determined that NetBenefits, their flagship web application for over one million institutional investors, needed to be updated, I was tasked with leading the redesign.
The resulting design was cited in a New York Times article, which stated that “57 percent of the contacts made by retirement-account customers have come online this year, compared with 16 percent [in the previous year].”