Design and User Research

Contact us

Digital Access
P: 1300 367 055
E: [email protected]

Discovery Research

We can help you understand the needs, expectations and behaviours of your customers early in your projects by conducting 1-on-1 interviews with people with disabilities.

This will ensure accessibility and inclusivity is factored in from the start of your design process and save you money down the track on expensive development changes.
It will highlight key considerations for designing accessibly and inclusively which will improve the user experience for all your customers.

Image of Grant talking about his experience living with Low Vision in an online research session — Grant, talking about his experience living with Low Vision in an online research session

Inclusive Usability testing

We can recruit people with different disabilities to test your prototype, or live products and services, and provide recommendations that will improve the user experience for all your customer groups.

Inclusive Usability testing to be done remotely or in-person in a Vision Australia office.
Verify the solution meets the needs and requirements of people with disability.
Gain insights into how the product or service can be improved for people with disability.
Develop awareness of disability by observing sessions.
Usability testing during the prototyping phase is an investment that will save you money on costly development changes in the future.

"I've learned a lot, we never get exposed to people with disability in our day to day"
- Digital Access client that observed user testing sessions

Image of Jordie using a screen reader — Jordie, a Blind participant using a screen reader to test a website

Low vision participant Grant Is looking at his mobile phone and smiling while sitting at a desk next to the Digital Access User Experience consultant Hee-Won who is holding paper with notes and smiling at Grant during a usability testing session. Grant has grey short hair, glasses, light skin, blue business shirt and grey pants. Hee-Won has black long hair, light skin and black long sleeve top wearing a lanyard. There are lots of electronic equipment in front of them on the desk including different computers and cables — Low vision participant testing a mobile app during a usability testing session with our User Experience consultant Hee-Won guiding the session.

Design review

We can complete an expert review of screen designs, design systems, prototypes, templates, and components to identify accessibility and/or usability issues. All our feedback and advice is supported by disability standards and guidelines or evidence-based research.

This is a quick cost-effective way to get meaningful accessibility and usability feedback so you can adjust your designs before they go into development or go live.
We can identify issues where the design does not mee the requirements of WCAG and other standards.
During the review we will explain the reason behind our recommendations which will help you and your team learn practical accessibility skills you can then take away into day-to-day operations.

"Our designers are really getting a lot out of the design reviews, they are saying things like 'i can start doing that with everything' and are really embedding accessibility in their practice"
- Digital Access Design review client

Focus groups

We can run focus groups with people with different disabilities and provide recommendations on features and designs that will improve the experience for all your customer groups:

Focus groups are a fantastic way to hear what your customers want early on to save you money on costly development and design changes down the track.
Focus groups can also be a terrific way to co-design solutions with your customers and produce tailored ideas and features that suit their needs.

4 people sitting at an L shaped table against a grey wall, 3 of the people have their head turned towards the person in the middle while they listen to them speaking and are smiling. — Blind and low vision focus group providing feedback on a client product

Frequently asked questions

User research should be done as soon as possible in your design and development processes because prevention is proven to be less expensive than correction or failure.

The 1,10,100 rule states:

If preventing an issue costs you $1
Correcting an issue will cost you $10
Failure will cost you $100

Here is a step-by-step guide to reducing costs in your design and development process:

Discovery research: Do a round of discovery research before prototyping anything. This will help you understand which features you should design and prototype.
Inclusive Usability testing and/or design review: Do a round of usability testing or book a design review during your Prototyping stage. This will help you correct any accessibility and usability issues before you spend time and money on developing them.
Accessibility Audit: Have an accessibility audit completed on your developed product / service so that you can correct any accessibility bugs before going live.
Usability testing: Conduct a round of usability testing before going live to ensure the user experience is good for your customers, our users tell us that first impressions really matter and could mean the difference between a loyal customer or a lost customer.

Never rely on accessibility audits alone, we always find a significant amount of usability issues on websites that are ‘fully WCAG conformant’.

Always book in a round of usability testing after you have rectified all the issues in the audit. This is to make sure your customers can actually use your product and ensure you don’t lose their business from having a bad user experience.

Wire framing and initial prototyping phase

If you only have wireframes (e.g. figma prototypes) you do not need an audit. You only need an audit if you have any coded HTML. This is the perfect time to do a round of usability testing or a design review.

Development phase

If you have a coded HTML prototype or live product get an audit completed before you run a round of usability testing, this will ensure only usability issues are being tested and will not waste your money on collecting findings that could have been easily fixed through an audit.

Make sure you have at least 3x participants from each disability group you want to test with (e.g. 3x Blind, 3x Low vision, 3x Cognitive & learning).

We can help you decide which disability groups you should prioritise testing with because it can change depending on the type of content you have.
Do not recruit only 1x person with a disability or just 1x person from each disability group (e.g. don’t recruit with 1x Blind, 1x Low vision, 1x Cognitive & learning This is because relying on feedback from 1x person within 1x user group will not provide accurate data and will be biased. We follow the ‘qualitative research’ methodology backed by academic research and leading practitioners.

Prioritise testing with majority of people with disabilities (and supplement with people without disabilities).

This is because you are getting more value from prioritising testing with people with disabilities as they experience both general usability issues as well as accessibility issues.
Anything you change to make your content more accessible for people with disability will benefit everyone. For example, making language simpler for people with cognitive and disabilities will also make your website easier to understand for all your users.

It is always best to separate mobile and desktop into different rounds of usability testing. E.g. do a round of testing with mobile only and then conduct a second round of testing with desktop only.

This is because if you do one round of testing with 1x person with low vision on mobile and 1x person with low vision on desktop we cannot compared the findings against each other so they become biased opinions rather than factual insights.
We understand that can be a big financial commitment so we can work with you to find options that suits your budget and needs while ensuring the quality of the recommendations

No, you don’t because depending on your website/product content you might not need to have certain disability groups represented in your testing. We can work with you to decide which groups should be included. Eg. if there is no audio content you might not need people who are deaf.

There can also be a lot of overlap in issues between the different disability groups e.g. people who are Deaf and speak Auslan as their first language will benefit from simple language similar to people who have cognitive and learning disabilities