Matrix Group International

Author: Joanna Pineda

  • Designing for Users with Autism

    Website design and usage is getting more challenging for a lot of us. In addition to more older Americans accessing the internet via smartphones only, more young people than before are living with diagnosed cognitive disabilities like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says affects 1 in 42 boys and 1 in 189 girls.

    Researcher Cheryl Cohen recently shared those numbers in a UXDC Conference session about web accessibility for teens and adults with autism that I was able to attend back in April. Cohen gave an overview of the cognitive traits that can affect users with autism and some recommendations for improving websites and apps to better meet their needs. This was very eye-opening to me!

    What should we know about autistic users, and how can we design websites and apps to give them the best user experience? Here are the considerations and solutions that Cohen shared:

    • Contextual misunderstanding: Whether presented in words or in imagery, idioms and metaphors can be confusing to some people with autism.
      • Use more intuitive, less symbolic icons. Include descriptive text, which helps improve SEO, too.
      • When you’re writing for your website, keep the language simple. This might include shorter sentences or a conversational tone.
    • Visual processing: When looking at a lot of information all on one screen, some with autism become confused or distracted. So they simply focus on one specific item and ignore the rest of the page.
      • More white space, more visuals. Too much stuff crammed onto a screen distracts users and can add unnecessary steps to an otherwise simple task.
      • Fewer words, more bulleted lists. Large blocks of text make it difficult to find and focus on what is most important on a page.
      • Does your website feature rapid animation only viewable by Flash player? Get rid of it. It’s hard to look at and process fast-moving visuals.
    • Auditory processing: From voices to machines to their environment, some people with autism focus equally on multiple sound sources.
      • Sound quality matters. If your audio content or videos feature muddy or distorted sound, someone with autism will have a harder time discerning voices.
      • Captions improve comprehension. Mentally matching the sound they’re hearing with the images they’re seeing can be more difficult for a person with autism. Add captions to your videos and images as often as possible.
    • Different way of mentally organizing items: Inconsistencies can make it challenging for a person with autism to use web interfaces, especially if that person has trouble getting past mistakes or exceptions within a website.  
      • Watch how you design forms. In Cohen’s research, she found that teens with autism had a hard time filling out web-based forms. The biggest culprit? Inconsistent spacing between labels and input boxes.

    The teens she interviewed and observed will, perhaps, grow up to become members of our clients’ organizations — but at the very least, they will be, or already are, consumers and users of other online content and resources. Improving accessibility for these users improves the digital experience for all users, so why not always design with these user needs in mind?

    To learn more about designing for those with cognitive challenges, check out these resources from the good folks at Web Accessibility in Mind. 

    Are you considering these factors when designing web or apps? What other specific user accessibility considerations have you come across that improve the UX for all users?

  • How a $35 Device Disrupted an Industry

    How a $35 Device Disrupted an Industry

    A few months ago, the office space committee met to discuss conference rooms at Matrix Group. We have a standing committee that is thinking about the future of work and we decided that we needed more collaborative space, complete with a screen and projector since we’re always looking at wireframes, designs, applications or code.

    It was going to cost a bunch of money to outfit four meeting spaces with screens and projectors. Yuck. Would we have the budget to do it?

    Then one of the committee members said, “Hey, why don’t we just get big TVs and Chromecasts?” A Chromecast is $35 device from Google that lets you stream from your laptop or phone to your TV. I have one at home and we bring it when we go on vacation so that we can stream Netflix to the TV in our hotel room. Could this work in our office setting?

    We did some research. Amazon had 55″ LG TVs for $499 each. Even better, they were on Amazon Prime Now, which meant we could have them delivered within two hours. The Chromecasts were $35 from Best Buy down the street. For less than $2,700 (or the cost of one projector of decent quality), we could outfit all of our collaborative spaces with a large TV and Chromecast.

    So we did a trial run. We spent $550 on a TV and Chromecast and put it in our “war room” – the open space we use when a group of people are launching a site or troubleshooting a problem. The TV and Chromecast worked beautifully! The Chrome browser has the casting capability built-in. And when you cast your desktop, you can stream any application, including other browsers, PowerPoint, anything.

    I gave the trial my blessing and now every meeting space at Matrix Group has a TV and Chromecast. We even added a Chromecast to the projector in our large conference room to make it easier to project, but we kept the large, pull down screen. We also got a Chromecast for our reception area so it’s easier to show PowerPoints and movies in our lobby. Yay! No more wires, a friendly user interface, super reliable casting, and no special software needed. When we have guests who need to project, we just ask them to go to Chrome, cast their desktop, and then go to their browser or PowerPoint presentation; they are always amazed at how easy the process is.

    Total win for Matrix Group, big loss for the projector industry, another industry being disrupted by a small, innovative and inexpensive device.

    I’ll be talking a lot in the next few months about disruption and innovation. No matter what business you’re in, you’re in disruption or about to be disrupted. No company is exempt. So what’s your innovation strategy in the face of disruption?

  • “What’s Special About Today? Life Lesson from a Six-Year-Old”

    “What’s Special About Today? Life Lesson from a Six-Year-Old”

    I was trying to get my 6-year old out of bed the other morning. He wouldn’t budge. Finally, he challenged me by asking, “What’s special about today?”

    That stopped me my in tracks. “What IS special about today?,” I thought. I named a few things: “I’m picking you up early. You have TaeKwonDo. I’m making pasta.” Satisfied, MJ bounded out of bed and ran downstairs. The day proceeded normally, better than normal even.

    As I’ve blogged about in the past, my children make me better by making me see the wonder in life. Is it really special that we’re having pasta tonight? And yet, by simply asking the question and coming up with an answer, I reframe my day and change my perspective. You know, it IS special that we’re having pasta because it’s my son’s favorite pasta and he’s happy when I make it.

    At work, perhaps it’s special that my team hit all their deadlines today. That my most recent project is under budget. That I had a great conversation with my mom. Or that the downstairs deli has an especially great egg salad sandwich today. But how often do we acknowledge and celebrate these victories every day?

    Research shows that feeling awe makes us more spiritual, generous and content. Research also shows that being grateful can transform our lives.

    In 2017, one of my resolutions is to recognize more of these special moments and acknowledge them as special. Now when any member of the family is a sleepyhead in the morning, we ask, “What’s special about today?” It’s a great way to start the day.

  • Members Want Curation and Insight from Their Associations – Part One

    Members Want Curation and Insight from Their Associations – Part One

    One of the best parts of my job is conducting user interviews. Nearly every Matrix Group project starts with a User Persona exercise where we interview staff to glean their most important target audiences. Then a team of Matrix Group staff interview people in each group. Whenever I can, I help conduct these interviews because I like doing them and I learn so much about what members and non-members want, their pain points, their challenges, and what ultimately motivates them to act.

    Over the past year, across industries and professions, across trade association and professional societies, here’s what people have told us:

    • Surfing to find out what’s new is dead. It doesn’t happen anymore. Any web surfing is done to meet a specific need.
    • People are overwhelmed with data and information. When they Google, they get too many results. They find their association home pages too cluttered.
    • Members wants their associations to keep them up to date on important trends and give them insight into the future.
    • Members want fewer emails, shorter emails, less cluttered web pages.

    Over and over again, we heard, “Our association needs to tell us what we should be paying attention to. I don’t want the same news I can get elsewhere. Tell me the 5 or 6 most important things I should be doing, reading, attending.”

    Even if Matrix didn’t do interviews for you this past year, I bet your members would say much the same things. And if your members are hungry for curation and insight, what are YOU going to do about it?

  • Should You Crowdsource the Session Topics at Your Next Conference?

    Should You Crowdsource the Session Topics at Your Next Conference?

    Teri Carden, Founder of ReviewMyAMS, has a unique take on conference sessions. She crowdsources several of the sessions at AMS Fest. AMS Fest is an event that brings together AMS (association management software) vendors with association executives looking for a new AMS. It’s basically corporate speed dating.

    Teri held AMS Fest events in Chicago and in Washington, DC last year. She accepted proposals to speak at AMS Fest. But she didn’t choose who got to speak and she didn’t pull together a committee to review and vote. Here’s what she did instead:

    • At registration, each attendee got 5 star stickers.
    • The session descriptions and titles of prospective sessions were posted on a long wall without the name of the presenter or presenter’s organization (no popularity contest here!).
    • Each attendee voted with their stickers. Attendees could cast one star vote for the top session of choice, or they could cast up to five votes for the session they really, really wanted to see.
    • The top vote-getters got to present.

    Yup, it meant that some folks who prepared sessions didn’t get to speak BUT it also meant that conference attendees got to hear speakers on topics they really wanted to hear about.

    What if a session was a bust or it got really sales-y? After one particularly sales-y presentation, Teri introduced a sales-o-meter, which allowed her to gauge the audience’s preferences and yank a speaker off the stage. As Teri put it, “My event, my rules, and it’s all about giving the attendees quality, content heavy, sessions. Vendors need to know that there is a time and a place for selling and the crowdsourced sessions aren’t it.”

    Crowdsourcing is not a new concept to associations. Want to start with something simple? You could ask members to recommend and vote on topics. You can ask attendees about their most pressing challenges on your registration form and then source speakers for those topics.

    You might be surprised at what you learn and you’d be gaining valuable insight into what’s keeping members up at night.

  • The Life Changing Benefits of Google’s Primary Inbox

    The Life Changing Benefits of Google’s Primary Inbox

    GoogleInboxsmI blogged recently that Matrix Group switched over to Google Apps. I have had a personal Gmail account for many years now and my family can’t function without our shared family Google calendar.

    So now I have Gmail at work and I’m loving it. I especially love Gmail’s inbox configurations. Here’s how it works.

    You can have one inbox and all of your email will flow into it. Minus the spam, of course, which Gmail does a great job of filtering. So far, no false positives.

    Or, you can configure your email to have multiple inboxes. The default setting divides your email into Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates. Gmail will automatically put email notifications from sites likes Twitter and Facebook into the Social inbox. Ecommerce promotional emails from sites like Nordstrom and Snapfish go into Promotions. Email newsletters and bulk emails usually go into Updates. Spam goes into a spam folder and you get a summary each day. Everything else goes into Primary.

    This auto sorting by Gmail has been life changing. I actually feel like I can focus on the emails that need my attention most. Like the email from a client wanting an update. The inquiry from a prospect. The request from a staff member for clarification on a set of project specs. My inbox has gone from hundreds of emails a day to fewer than a hundred.

    The best part? I can train Gmail to do a better job of sorting my emails.

    The emails to the DC Web Women list were going into Primary. I moved a message to Updates and Gmail asked if future messages should be sorted that way. Yes, please!

    Email newsletters from my sons’ school were going into Updates so I moved one into a Primary and now those messages go into Primary. Phew! Now maybe I won’t miss the next opportunity to come into the classroom and read with my son.

    It’s still a battle to manage all of my emails. I still have to go into each inbox and review the emails and take action, tag for later, unsubscribe or delete.

    But when I’m busy, I know that Gmail will do the first line of sorting so I can focus on the most important emails of the day. Yes, I still get behind, BUT I don’t feel as buried at the end of each day. This is a victory.

  • Why Matrix Group Was Finally Ready to Switch to Google Apps

    Google appsA few years ago, I blogged about Google Apps. I wondered if my business, and businesses everywhere, were ready to make the switch to Google Apps.
    Well, a few years later, we finally made the switch. A couple of months ago, Matrix Group switched over to Google Apps. We now use:

    • Gmail for email
    • Google calendar for our corporate calendar
    • Google slides for presentations
    • Google drive for file sharing
    • Google hangout for some internal meetings

    So why did we switch to Google Apps?

    First, the Google Apps suite is just so good, it’s hard to ignore as an offering. The calendar and email are terrific. Second, many of us use Office 365 but the file sharing is simply not as easy, fast or intuitive with OneDrive, so we started using Google Drive. Next, we were already using Google slides for presentations because it is simply awesome having five people work on slides at the same time during collaboration meetings. Finally, a friend who runs a private security firm gave Google the thumbs up, so any lingering concerns about security melted away.

    We timed the switch to coincide with our email renewal and discovered that switching to Google Apps is less expensive than the renewal for our email alone. And now we don’t need to worry about hardware, patches and upgrades.

    So what’s different and what have we learned?

    1. Most of us already use Google personally, so it wasn’t a huge stretch to switch to Google. We did find, however, that we needed to create new protocols for scheduling meetings. For example, we have a main calendar and a PTO calendar. The PTO calendar makes it easy to filter on who’s out. Only the admin staff can edit the PTO calendar.
    2. Even though it’s Google, training is still important. We’ve held several all staff trainings to review the protocols for calendar, email and security. IT worked with each staff person to make sure they downloaded the Duo app, which we use for two-factor authentication. We also have a Slack channel devoted to Google Apps issues, questions and discoveries.
    3. We are only scratching the surface of what’s possible. We embedded the Google calendar into our intranet, which was super useful because we can see everyone’s schedule, with the ability to filter by person. During the last staff meeting, I figured out how to create a Google hangout from the calendar detail page. Score! And we think there’s a way to create a hangout from a Slack channel. We’re learning new stuff every day.

    So far, the switch has been terrific. For less money, we’ve added new functionality, made systems more intuitive and made our systems more secure. I’ll keep blogging about our journey with Google because I suspect the journey has just begun. If you are using Google Apps, why did you switch and what’s been your experience so far?

  • Pokémon Go

    Pokémon Go

    Can you tell we’re a bit Poké obsessed ourselves? We love the Pokémon Go site for it’s big, bold design and the simple yet effective copy about how the game works.

  • Histography

    Histography

    I could get lost in this interactive timeline for hours! Histography pulls historical events from Wikipedia spanning 14 billion years of time. You can filter by time period and category, too! (Note: this is only supported by Chrome at this time.)

  • I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers

    I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Include Web Browsers

    M_and_tap_200For my birthday this year, my husband bought me an Amazon Tap. The Amazon Tap is a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled speaker that lets you use voice commands to play music, check the weather, order stuff on Amazon, look up things on Wikipedia, and on and on.

    Who knew that this little speaker would quickly become my gadget of choice? I carry my Tap with me everywhere!

    The Tap is powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant. I connected my Tap to my home and work Wi-Fi, my iPhone and my Alexa app. I then connected my Alexa app to my IHeartRadio app and my Amazon app. There are many more Alexa integrations to what Amazon calls Skills. And since I’m an Amazon Prime member, I have access to Prime Music.

    I mean, look at the kind of day I now have with the Tap around:

    • In the morning, I say, “Play NPR,” and Alexa starts playing the live stream from WAMU, the local NPR affiliate.
    • While I’m cooking or cleaning, I’ll say, “play 80s music,” and Alexa will say “Playing 80s on Prime Music.”
    • While getting dressed, I’ll say, “What’s the weather?” and Alexa will tell me the forecast from weather.com.
    • If I want to know about something, I’ll say, “Wikipedia Abraham Lincoln,” and Alexa will read the first paragraph about my favorite President. I can ask for more info, and Alexa will keep reading.
    • I can ask Alexa to read my Kindle books out loud.
    • And on Amazon Prime Day, I ordered a drone with just two voice commands!

    I haven’t yet tried it, but I can connect Alexa to a Domino’s account and order pizza by voice.

    I can’t do everything on my Tap, but it’s coming. And from what I read and hear, voice is the new new thing. The XFINITY voice remote already lets you search for programs by voice. We can already talk to our cars. And we endlessly give commands to Siri on our iPhones and iPads.

    Amazon allows developers to teach Alexa new skills. Apple just opened up Siri so that third parties can give Siri access to their apps.

    It won’t be long before we’ll talk to our refrigerators, stereos, ovens, and furniture, and interact with websites and apps with just voice commands.

    I’ve seen the future… er… rather, I’ve heard the future, and it sounds bright!