Articles, Experience Design, Industrial Design

Much has been written about the positive unintended consequences of designing for accessibility and usability.  Examples include mandatory curb cuts for wheelchair-bound individuals benefiting people pushing strollers and alt tags on website images for blind users benefiting individuals with slow internet connections.  While making products more usable for one group doesn’t always improve its usability for another group or in another scenario, it often will.

Helpful curb cut?

Occasionally, unintended benefits are really the result of failures of usability or accessibility.  I recently came across an article where a laptop was recovered because the thief didn’t realize that it had a built-in Internet data backup service.  I can imagine this being tauted as a ‘feature’ of the product in subsequent releases.  While the outcome in this case was positive, it seems clear that the end result was due to a failure of design.  Specifically, because a new user of the product was unaware of what was happening to his personal information, the application clearly failed to follow the ‘visibility of system status’ usability heuristic.

While some would say that data backup should be a ‘behind the scenes’ action that users don’t need to see, in an age of increasing concerns about identity theft and privacy, it’s imperative that users understand where their information goes and are able to control who can access it. 

Kelly McGillis as 'Charlie'

As Charlie scolded the Top Gun class: “The encounter was a victory, but we show it as an example of what not to do.”