Open Space

For Hackathon week, a Front-End friend of mine and I decided to create an accessibility-focused project based around a reoccurring issue we'd been encountering. 

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Problem

In order to create an accessible experience, it's vital that all product practitioners have a thorough understanding of the requirements they need to meet for each project they take on. My friend and I had previously printed and distributed physical checklists for the different role-based teams, but found they were not being used.

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Research 

We decided to do some research to understand why teams weren't adopting these checklists, and to figure out a way to make them more usable. After sitting down with a handful of product teams, these were our takeaways:

 

1. The checklist language was complex and difficult to follow.

2. The checklists themselves were not reusable. If iterations needed to be made on a product, it was not uncommon to overlook a previously checked item. 

3. There was no accountability among the team for each practitioner since they each owned their own checklist.

4. There was no easy way to share checklist progress with the team.

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Goal

Our ultimate goal was to create an intuitive experience for project contributors to be able to educate themselves and update their team on their accessibility efforts.

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MVP requirements

Based on the feedback we received, we decided to list out the items we felt confident we could complete during Hackathon:

• Project onboarding

• People / Role support

• Role-based checklists

  • Simplify language​

• Checklist statuses

• Project Dashboard View

• Must be an accessible tool itself!

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Nice to haves

We figured it couldn't hurt to take a quick look-ahead to see what work could follow:

• git integration (what does this look like?)

• Recent activity (feed of recently marked items)

• Enable the project manager to go in admin status and check things off on someone else's behalf 

• Include this as a launch criteria.

• PM is overall responsible for allowing the project to move forward

• A/B Test pages in confluence with a rubric

• Highlight finished projects for historical records

• it should be a 1-1 with a mapping between the hydra test or feature and accessibility package

• Ability to link to accessibility checklist to show that it's been done

• Ability to modify project name / nest projects

• Place for notes on the project at a whole project level

• Notification (email or slack?)

• Project Closure

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