Did you attend the Applitools workshop last week for You, Me, and Accessibility: Empathy and Human-Centered Design Thinking? If you missed it, don’t fret; the recording can be found on-demand and my recap of key learnings, Q&A, and poll results are right here!

Applitools workshops are designed to bring together talented people within software development teams to provide hands-on learning experiences. Folks shared with me after the workshop just how enjoyable learning about accessibility, empathy and human-centered design thinking is and discovered ways to share with their peers and product teams.

What we covered in this workshop

Human-centered design thinking

What it is and how we can use it!

Empathy sessions

What are they? Who are they for? The benefits they provide.

#A11y tools and resources

Manual and automated testing resources and much more!

Great products come from conversations, experiments, and learning. Human-centered design thinking is a wonderful process for problem solving. Here you can empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test your solutions early and often! Empathy sessions fall right in line with the concepts of human-centered design thinking as an opportunity for exploratory testing of our users. 

We kicked things off with a base question of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) awareness. I am thrilled when I see a majority has knowledge of accessibility when it comes to digital content, and truly appreciate an opportunity to share with folks newer to the topic.

I spoke at length about common accessibility (often shortened to a11y) categories, where to consider them in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and what the intersection of software and empathy looks like. We explored human-centered design thinking as a tool and demonstrated ways empathy drives innovation. Humans are emotional beings! There is value in proficiency in the technical side of software development as well as the human-centered side.

How does empathy drive innovation?

Empathy supercharges creativity and innovation by giving us insight into experiencing what someone else is thinking and feeling and allows us to more fully understand their motivations and anticipate their needs in ways the user may not be able to express themselves.

For the purpose of our workshop, we wanted to dig into what role folks play on their current product teams. To do this, we asked them! We went over what happens in the software development lifecycle and why it’s important to talk about how users are using technology. There we had opportunities to explore the different types of users who could potentially use our products or services. Then we discussed how those opportunities can be expanded upon by utilizing design thinking and in empathy sessions. 

What is human-centered design thinking?

Based on three principles:

1. Collaboration
2. Empathy
3. Experimentation

What happens in the software development lifecycle? We talk about the products and services that we want to make for our users. We make the products and services to the best of our ability. We test and ship those products and services to our users.

We wrapped up the workshop with some wonderful questions and answers that I wanted to also provide additional feedback and resources for. 

If you enjoyed this recap, be sure to follow me on social media for more content like it on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also read more of my insight into empathy, software testing, and hot accessibility testing tools on medium!

The post You, Me, and Accessibility: Empathy and Human-Centered Design Thinking Webinar Recap appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.