Design for everyone

What do I do at Digital.ai and what are the products of Digital.ai?

We help the world’s largest enterprises accelerate their digital transformation initiatives — connecting software planning, delivery, and application security in the first intelligent Value Stream Platform that provides the end-to-end visibility organizations need to deliver value and drive growth.

We have more than 8 tools ranging from Agile planning, DevOps, testing, application protection, ai and ML reporting. We have a full Software Delivery pipeline under our portfolio.

I am working on the DevOps side of the company and a bit in Agile planning.

What are the challenges and how did we include diversity and accessibility in all of those tools?

Nearly all large organizations like UBER, Pinterest, Airbnb, and Spotify have design systems that bring a consistent visual language to their products and teams. As the Digital.ai solutions & capabilities come together, we need something similar to deliver on the promise of a world-class user experience (UX).

Traditional UXers typically enter into their careers working on B to C software like e-commerce websites or mobile applications. Mountains of user data usually are available to help inform designs and make their job “easier” or at least more informed. However, B to B, precisely enterprise Agile planning and DevOps software demands a different breed of UX professionals. One that is proficient in design, research, and information architecture and technically minded enough to stay ahead of some of the most brilliant engineers solving some of the most challenging problems out there.

For us in Digital.ai, UX is not just UI and application flows. It also means DX (developer experience) designing for CLI’s (command-line interface), helping to ensure API’s (application programming interface) are consumable, and providing the experience is seamless across different user types and all their touchpoints. We often work hard to remove UI and meet our user base where they are. Working on very complex AI/ML initiatives, complexities of organizing delivery planning capabilities that scale teams are just some of the nuances that we strive to build efficiencies from the top/down and the bottom/up at Digital.ai.

We are designing and building a platform that truly delivers value and outcome-based results for our customers beyond any design system or component library.

Designing for a big enterprise brings a lot of challenges making you as an individual and designer responsible for implementing designs in such a way to include everyone.

I will be talking about how to go beyond your pattern library in tools that you were producing designs with color accessibility built-in core of your design system, and at the same time working with developers to ensure that color and keyboard accessibility as a DOD for any component that is made and later on in implementation.

About author

I’ve started my journey back in 2005 as a graphic designer and used to build websites (in Flash) as a side project. During the last 15 years, I went through a journey of “make it pretty” and serving developers with assets, to the many opportunities that lead me to be a part of teams responsible for solving complex business problems through innovation, design thinking, and applying Agile methodology

Through our collaborative process we had to solve problems taking into consideration these factors:.

• Visual language patterns
• Reusable components architecture
• Documentation and discovery of the design patterns and component library
• Prioritization while focusing on product requirements
• Team communication and collaboration
• Designer, Developer and product collaboration

One of the examples of inclusive accessibility is TV remote control.  The remote control was invented for people with limited mobility.