Becoming a UX designer

I read Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards” when I designing my first website. Cascading Styles Sheets, while not new, was coming into its own. With CSS, I coded that website without using a single table. CSS in principle was nothing new to me. I had a print background. I laid out ads, magazines and books using styles in layout programs like Quark and InDesign. It was, and still is, a powerful publishing tool, print or digital. But there was a more important idea, I believe, in Zeldman’s book.

Zeldman argued that the web had fundamentally failed at its biggest promise: accessibility. The personal computer didn’t (and still hasn’t) ushered in a paperless society. And the web didn’t come close to offering people with vision or mobility problems a tool that they could use. Of course, on occasion we’d see some innovative device or program, but from website to website if one was hard of seeing there was little relief. My mother was hard of seeing – legally blind, actually. She had vision but it was restricted with a limited range, so to speak. She could walk from one room to the next and suddenly be unable to see because of lighting conditions. Glossy paper in magazines were also a big problem. Some soup cans she could read, some she couldn’t. And though she had a personal computer, she seldom used it. It was just too difficult to use. Ever seen an entire website break simply because you made the type bigger?

My first website was built with her in mind. It was as accessible as it could be. It was fluid and scaled beautifully, having been tested on the major browsers of that time. Most importantly, it was tested on Lynx, a text-based web browser with a text-to-speech interface. While the website was aimed specifically at my mother, who was to say that someone in my intended target group didn’t have accessibility issues?

I consider that website my first exploration into UX. As a designer, I am offering more than the provided content. As this article from the UX Collective website states:

Digital accessibility refers to the practice of building digital content and applications that can be used by a wide range of people, including individuals who have visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities.

As a graphic designer I always considered the what of content; as a UX designer I always consider the how and why of that content.