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AccessibilityOps for All

The Cigna Digital Design Operations stood up a new Digital Accessibility and AccessbilityOps team. Digital accessibility as a general term is the inclusive practice of ensuring that digital products (websites, apps, PDFs, etc.) can be used by everyone — including those with a disability or physical impairment — while retaining functionality and usability. Our team ran into many roadblocks including establishing processes, team structure, organizational support, and human resource issues, including onboarding a new team member who was blind. This case study showcases the steps, challenges, and lessons learned standing up a Digital Accessibility Ops team at a Fortune 100 Health Insurance company.

Mobile Accessibility and You

You may be familiar with desktop screen readers like JAWS, and desktop voice control like Dragon Naturally speaking. You might know about WCAG, and popular automated testing tools for your websites. But what about mobile apps? How do accessibility techniques apply on the touch screen? As the entire world moves mobile first, your accessibility strategy needs to adapt. In this talk, we’ll introduce you to some of the changes that doing mobile-first accessibility correctly requires. We’ll cover some of the most popular assistive technologies on mobile, give you tips for automated and manual testing of your mobile apps, warn you of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and help you bring your mobile accessibility strategy to the next level.

Designing the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust

If we seek to build effective, trustworthy public institutions, we must look for opportunities to affect change with design in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. It’s important to focus on designing great customer experiences. But equally as important and perhaps less visible are the experiences of government employees with heavy workloads and scarce resources, internal systems, processes and data sources, as well as infrastructure and platforms that are prerequisites for building great products. These factors shape the ability of institutions to effectively do their work. And they are areas ripe for design.

Public servants and civic technologists have an important role in restoring trust in our institutions. By building services that provide equitable access to benefits, seamless transactions, and streamlined user experiences, we have an opportunity to strengthen confidence in our government’s ability to serve people’s needs.

Drawing from nearly a decade of experience supporting digital services—from rebuilding HealthCare.gov to launching integrated benefits programs nationwide– attendees will learn how Nava practices design within critical, yet often unseen scenarios, enabling the government to deliver transformational digital services to millions of people across the country.

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

You may be familiar with desktop screen readers like JAWS, and desktop voice control like Dragon Naturally speaking. You might know about WCAG, and popular automated testing tools for your websites. But what about mobile apps? How do accessibility techniques apply on the touch screen? As the entire world moves mobile first, your accessibility strategy needs to adapt. In this talk, we’ll introduce you to some of the changes that managing mobile-first accessibility correctly requires. We’ll cover some of the most popular assistive technologies on mobile, give you tips for automated and manual testing of your mobile apps, warn you of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and help you bring your mobile accessibility strategy to the next level.

The Digital Journey: Research on Consumer Frustration and Loyalty

What drives customers to take the first step in their digital journey? What friction can knock their journey off-kilter or end it completely?

We surveyed thousands of consumers after they visited websites across multiple industries to understand how digital experiences can make or break customer loyalty – and ultimately, your bottom line.

In this session, you’ll see the results of our research and a data-rich deep dive on why website visitors fail to complete their intended missions, the barriers that cause them to give up, and where they go after a bad digital experience.

Small Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement

Through Open Cities, Granicus was able to expand on our ability to provide resident-centered digital experiences in local governments around the world. Our platform is the public sector’s leading digital customer journey platform that has helped thousands of local governments transform their websites, digital forms, and service delivery experiences.

Join Irina Tikhonova and Kari Dietrich in this session focused on the importance of starting small when elevating user experiences. We discuss how to focus on user journeys, involve the right stakeholders, and push for data-driven and human-centered policy changes.

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

You may be familiar with desktop screen readers like JAWS, and desktop voice control like Dragon Naturally speaking. You might know about WCAG, and popular automated testing tools for your websites. But what about mobile apps? How do accessibility techniques apply on the touch screen? As the entire world moves mobile first, your accessibility strategy needs to adapt. In this talk, we’ll introduce you to some of the changes that managing mobile-first accessibility correctly requires. We’ll cover some of the most popular assistive technologies on mobile, give you tips for automated and manual testing of your mobile apps, warn you of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and help you bring your mobile accessibility strategy to the next level.

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

You may be familiar with desktop screen readers like JAWS, and desktop voice control like Dragon Naturally speaking. You might know about WCAG, and popular automated testing tools for your websites. But what about mobile apps? How do accessibility techniques apply on the touch screen? As the entire world moves mobile first, your accessibility strategy needs to adapt. In this talk, we’ll introduce you to some of the changes that managing mobile-first accessibility correctly requires. We’ll cover some of the most popular assistive technologies on mobile, give you tips for automated and manual testing of your mobile apps, warn you of some of the pitfalls to watch for, and help you bring your mobile accessibility strategy to the next level.

People, not Petri Dishes: Stories from a Research Recruiter (Videoconference)

Less than a year ago, we opened an in-house participant recruitment service at Atlassian, a 3,000+ employees tech company, for anyone who wanted to do research. During that year, the Research Recruitment team grew to two people and serviced over 150 people who do research. In this talk, I share what our main learnings were, the pitfalls of opening a free-for-all recruitment service, and some of my top participant recruitment tips.

Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges (Videoconference)

As the problems facing society are getting thornier by the day, how do we bring design up to speed? Design thinking, as we have come to know it, needs to be rethought and expanded to enable more radical, systemic and long-term solutions. Christian Bason, Ph.D., CEO of the Danish Design Center, shares insights from his new book, “Expand: Stretching the Future by Design”, co-authored with Jens Martin Skibsted, arguing that innovation is in dire need of — innovation.