Julie Elliott
Accessibility - Inclusive Research
Project Type: Sprint style rapid, iterative, usability research
Project Length: 2 Weeks
Project Summary
In May of 2021, Intuit hosted GED (Global Engineering Days) for two weeks. Every 6 months, Intuit allowed us to pick and fix an issue we were passionate about. Accessibility was one of mine, so for two weeks, we formed a team that included 2 backend and 1 frontend engineer, a content designer and myself. This project focused on allowing people that used screen readers to be able to input time in their time cards themselves. During thes two weeks I acted as the PM and the researcher.
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My Role
As the stand in PM, I made sure we all made stand-up each morning to do a round table of progress, issues that were blocking any progress, and overall mental wellness due to the quick turn around on the project.
As the researcher for the role:
1. I shadowed one of our engineers, that was interested in research, to understand the pain points from the perspective of our support site experts.
2. I interviewed three users to understand how they worked around inputting time in the desktop version of their time cards.
3. These interviews were quickly summarized and the engineers started working on the main insights we found during our interviews.
The Solution
Our team of 5 did some brainstorming to understand what could be the most impactful. After a mini 2 hour sprint we all decided that creating a workaround was the best solution. Our amazing engineers worked hard to get the screen reader to read to our users when they were on their time card and then what day so they could add their own time.
We were only able to reach one user at the end of the sprint to test the workaround. Our user was able to use it and the joy in her voice was heartfelt and amazing. This user just wanted to be like other co-workers and did not like calling the boss to input her time. This solution was a time saver as well as showing that we take our feedback seriously.
Results
The workaround we created for our users, but only able to show one of them, managed to reach many more. One month after releasing our solution, I looked at the data we have for master keyboard users and found, at that time, over 200 of our users had found the workaround and was using the keyboard shortcuts to add time to their time sheets. This number kept climibing while I was at Intuit.
This research was also featured in the Intuit Developers Blog, as I was the first Level 2 accessibility researcher the company had. Since this time, myself and our lead accessibility champion conducted "Lunch and Learns" to UX Researchers and Designers. By doing these we were able to take the numbers of just 2 UX professional employees to 16 by the time I left Intuit.