DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY AT XP INC
Project Details
Role: Product Designer / Product Design Lead
Company: XP inc
Year: 2020 - Now
XP inc is the first "Brazilian unicorn", one of the biggest independent investment broker in Brazil, and in 2020 became a bank.
Project Details
I created the digital accessibility initiative at XP Inc in July 2020 and I am still leading this topic. The goals of this project are: to implement accessibility in all the company's digital products, refine the process to include accessibility on its core and coach the teams in the long term about this subject.
PROBLEM
In my first month working at XP Inc, I noticed that the design process and projects discussions didn't include accessibility. XP digital products weren't accessible and there were no initiative to improve it in the company's roadmap even though it's a Brazilian legal normative.
STRATEGY
Since accessibility was not an official project of the company, the first thing I needed to do was to find people engaged on the subject who were open to invest their time on this side project with me and plan the best strategy to be efficient in the process. Beside that, implementing accessibility on a company is a long term project and it's more about changing a culture than just refactoring our digital products, so I divided the initiative into four topics:
1. Research
How to make inclusive user research and how to customize our users experiences matching qualitative data and quantitative data from our CRM base.
2. Data
Measure the impact of this whole project effort on our company and clients.
3. Education
Focused on coaching the design, product and IT teams about accessibility with workshops, mentoring and online events.
4. Process
Include accessibility in the main processes of the company to make sure it's being thought from the beginning of a project to its final release.
SOME ACHIEVEMENTS
Workshops and Mentoring
To install the accessibility mindset in the company, it's important to have a team with knowledge about the topic. With that in mind, I led some workshops for PMs, Product designers and developers with our "accessibility allies" team.
Since the workshops were a big success, we extended this training to the Xpeed and Flyper Teams (branches of XP Inc) and also made some open mentoring for students of the São Paulo University.
64
hours of workshop
22
workshops
4.8/5
CSAT - Customer Satisfaction Score
53
hours of individual mentoring
Review of All Design System Elements
To scale up the refactoring of the digital applications accessibility, we decided that SOMA, XP design system, was going to be our ally. All the design system elements were tested and respecified with the right accessibility. This full implementation is currently happening and is expected to be finished by Q1 of 2022.
QA of XP APP
To map all the non-accessible features in our solutions, we made a partnership with the Rodrigo Mendes Institute, a NGO that helps people with disabilities to have a more accessible education. The Institute assisted us on assessing the accessibility of our mobile apps, our top priorities after analyzing the daily number of access and the backlog that could help the refactoring to be released faster.
The project had a duration of 3 months and involved all the mobile team, PMs, designers and developers. We broke down the deliveries by business units to make the future prioritizations more agile.
The output was several documents with a list of the WCAG guidelines and the corresponding items that needed adjustments. There was also a follow up to make sure the corrections were being prioritized in the backlog and, if not, why. This status was reported directly to the company's VP.
Patterns for Accessibility Specification
To better connect the accessible usability created by our design team (already trained in the subject) to our technology team, we created a specification and QA format to help on the refinement and the planning sessions.
The first specification must be used before the tech team codes the solutions. With this document, they know exactly how some assistive technologies integrate with the application, material honesty of the elements, labels, complementary texts, page hierarchy and reading order by screen readers, and other elements to enhance the solutions in an inclusive way.
This also makes the developers' work easier and supports a script for the future QA testing.
The second document aims to verify if the accessibility was corrected implemented. So, before the new features get released to the market, the design team can make a manual test to check the usability and accessibility of the solution. If any issue is found, this document will guide the technology team to fix it or make the prioritization discussions easier with the product manager.
How to do the accessibility QA:
- One test per platform (iOS, Android, Web, etc)
- Use the most popular screen reader of each operational system.
- Check the linear navigation by the screen readers and make sure it makes sense.
- Check the usability by interaction elements and make sure their context is understandable or if a complementary text is needed.
- Check if the material honesty of each element is right.
- Make manual tests but also use other applications to verify the code semantic, contrast and hierarchy, for example, WAVE and Axe.
- Specify the severity of each refinement for the tech team and product manager.
- Run a refinement session with all the team to prioritize the adjustments taking in consideration the importance for the user experience, implementation effort and backlog.
Pilot Team
To analyze the impact of all these modifications in the process, we selected one pilot team, the credit card business unit. I trained the technology team and designers, in addition to select developers that were already used to implement accessible solutions to be part of the initiative and spread their knowledge.
With the accessibility specifications, the agile rituals naturally incorporated this topic and the designers became more careful about the WCAG guidelines when creating user interfaces.
We monitored the implementation effort in the following sprints and, as the knowledge of the team increased, the effort got lower. At the end of the experiment, the effort was almost the same as the one before including accessibility as a DOD (definition of done) and the team was naturally more engaged to the subject.
Anti-ableism Manual
In order to change our products, we needed to change our company culture and policy. To promote a better place for people with disabilities to work, we created a guide to teach our employees about ableism and inclusive methodologies. This guide was released on XP social media by "Incluir", the group of people with disabilities from XP Inc.
The Current Result
We still have a lot to do, but in one year and a half, there were big changes in the company's culture, process and knowledge:
- Our applications are still being refactored, since accessibility is a constant process. Now, all the new features need to be accessible, since it's included in our DOD (definition of done).
- The XP Credit Card and XP Bank Account experiences are almost 100% accessible, following the WCAG guideline. The investment experience is being fully revised and it's going to be implemented by mid-22.
- The Design System refactoring is planned to be finished by Q1 of 22 and now we have a dedicated team to constantly review its accessibility.
- The accessibility specification is now an official output from the design team and all the designers are trained once they are hired. There is also a short training for the product managers to make sure accessibility is part of our product culture.
- The internal process was revisited making possible to hire more people with disabilities in different departments, turning diversity into the core of XP culture.
- Currently, the team engaged on the accessibility initiative has more than 60 people, of those, 27 are product designers.
- Our CX team now has people trained to better support users with disabilities. They also have the responsibility to influence the digital products backlog to guarantee the user autonomy.