A Step-by-Step Guide to Improving UX on Your NDIS Website| WEB 105

While user experience and user interface are elements of great interest and priority for all kinds of web designers and developers of modern websites that aim to rank high, gather a substantial audience and succeed, NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme, Australia) websites face a much bigger challenge with regard to both of these.

Optimization of UX on a website is done in accordance with the target audience of the website and its needs, demands, preferences, and so on. When the target audience segment for your NDIS website is such a complex group with different kinds of impairments that can significantly impact the accessibility of your website, developers and designers are faced with an especially higher demand for a more keen, focused, and considerate optimization of UX backed up by a significant amount of research.

The Impact of UX for NDIS Websites

There is the simple, applicable-for-all solution for the process of UX optimization available everywhere online, and then there is the much more complex and intricate series of steps that can be used for the UX optimization of an NDIS website. Many of those steps involve a significant level of research that has to go into the target market for NDIS websites – naturally composed of people with significant disabilities.

Although every website targeting a generalized audience logically should keep the disabled percentile of the population in mind, it is an absolute must for NDIS websites that aim to serve mainly and solely the disabled people and provide them with easy and quick access to the information and help that they need.

According to the NDIS itself, there are 4.3 million such people in Australia who have what they prefer to call “a permanent and significant disability that impacts their everyday routine” and who need support, services, and an early intervention to prevent unnecessary and avoidable damage as much as possible.

When your audience’s disabilities are impacting their lives to that extent – accessing, viewing and navigating through websites is usually one of the things they might face certain difficulties in. Almost all those difficulties can be solved through a few UX techniques and tools specifically designed for and aimed at the disabled community.

The Accessibility of Modern Websites

While these UX techniques remain essential for NDIS websites, they are also very important for other websites as 15% of the world’s population has some sort of disability that can prove to be a hindrance in their web surfing. If you ignore the disabled, you keep 15% of your market out of the entire spectrum of your audience on which you are basing your UX design. 15% of the world’s people mean 1 billion people – a huge number.

Websites these days are usually aiming at appearing sleeker and more sophisticated – focusing on the aesthetic side and professional looks – which can be good for savvy internet users but significantly crippling for the portion of the audience with disabilities. Smaller, more aesthetically appealing fonts and color palettes focused on aesthetics make things drastically complicated for such users.

Without further ado, let us get into the series of steps that can help you improve UX for your NDIS website significantly.

Market Research

Market research is important not just to give you an idea of what disabilities people have and what problems they face but also let you know which problems are more common and need to be addressed first. For example, when ranked with respect to frequency and the percentile of the total disabled population affected, the following disabilities are arranged like this at the top of the spectrum – in a descending order with respect to frequency of occurrence.

Color Vision Deficiency
Generic Visual Impairments
Dyslexia
Deafness
Motor Disabilities

While this is a highly specific list of the disabilities that most people are affected by, the general types of disabilities when arranged in descending order with respect to the number of people affected across Australia are as follows:

Intellectual
Sensory and Speech
Psychosocial
Physical Restriction
Head Injury, Stroke, or Acquired Brain Injury

(Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2020)

You have to make sure that the data you have gathered about the frequency of disabilities is relevant or specific to the Australian population.

Let’s move on to the main problems that these specific groups face when navigating through websites, as we have to recognize them before we can address them.

Color Vision Deficiency

While color vision deficiency affects 8% of the total population of males in the world and 0.5% of the female one, it is often ignored by designers while designing user experience and interface. Most of the modern websites and applications use different colors to help users differentiate in certain design elements. The problem is that while any normal user can recognize the contrast, people with color vision deficiency such as deuteranopia and tritanopia cannot.

The contrast is not clear to them AT ALL and therefore, they fail to recognize the design elements completely. Deuteranopia or red-green blindness is the most common one, and such users cannot differentiate in red and green buttons that you may be using on your website. Even so, red and green are two of the most common colors used in UX design to help people differentiate in good and bad buttons because green is associated with good and red with bad. So, it is usually like green is “OK” and red is “NO.”

That significantly impairs the ability of color-blind people to benefit from or even understand the interfaces designed. Let us go through a few examples of what a normal person sees versus what a color-blind person sees, so that we can be more empathetic about the disability of color blindness of deficiency.

To deuteranopic people, both the colors red and green appear as shades of yellow which are not nearly as distinguishable.

Normal Color Vision:

Protanopia (Red blindness)

Deuteranopia (Red-green Blindness):

Normal Color Vision:

Protanopia:

Deuteranopia:

Tritanopia:

Generic Visual Impairments

This group includes the people who are partially blind due to some disease like cataract that they contacted or due to any kind of biological issue – a birth defect or otherwise. They will obviously have trouble reading the website’s contents and differentiating in all the design elements UNLESS the design elements are very clear and vivid.

Dyslexia

Around 7% of the world’s population – that’s half a billion people – have some serious difficulty in reading words and are called “dyslexic.” The most common problem for dyslexic people is that they have a tendency to flip letters – perceive ‘b’ as ‘d’ or ‘p’ as ‘q’ – and also find it very hard to differentiate in different letters and thus spend a longer time trying to recognize the shapes on the screen and make sense of them.

When modern designers focus on aesthetics, legibility is often given a secondary preference. The problem is that no matter how pretty the information looks – it is useless if it is not getting conveyed or delivering its meaning in the first place. An important function of an NDIS website is to actually inform and educate people to motivate them to ask for help. The NDIS program is for the disabled, and if the disabled can’t really access any information about it, it will automatically lose its purpose and meaning.

Deafness

Deafness is a problem that, despite being common, does not really affect UX at a very large scale because websites are usually composed of stuff that people need to read or see – not listen to. However, some elements like introductory or informational videos can complicate things for deaf people as they cannot make sense of those – so sound shouldn’t be entirely relied on in any design element or content type.

Motor Disabilities

Motor disabilities are very common in the elderly as well as the disabled – people may not be as adept with a mouse or a keyboard or even with using a touch screen as they need to be to navigate through a complex interface. For example, very long commands like the “command+option+shift+s” used by PhotoShop can make things complicated even for normal people.

Researching “Solutions, Aids, and Favored Design Elements”

Once you have recognized all the problems that users may face while navigating through an NDIS website, it is time to devise solutions to all of those that can be possibly solved with the help of some minor tweaks to the UX.