Public Digital #29: Accessibility, designing for trust and what's next for Jony Ive

Hello,

I’m Ben Terrett the CEO of Public Digital, and it's my turn to guest edit the newsletter.

I’m interested in where design, technology and society cross over. I wrote about that on the Public Digital blog last November and that’s what this newsletter is about too, with a focus on designing for accessibility and trust.

Given last week’s big news about Jony Ive leaving Apple there are a few links about that at the end as well.

Read on and let me know what you think on Twitter.

Ben
@benterrett

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Accessible design is good design

I can’t believe we still have to say that. But we do. Here are a few articles that have highlighted the issue recently.

Don Norman wrote a widely shared article entitled, ‘I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.’ The book he refers to is called The Design of Everyday Things. It is the bible of user centred design.

It's worth reading about the horror he refers to: a world “designed against the elderly.” He describes his own experience of this as he gets older. “Everyday household goods require knives and pliers to open. Companies insist on printing critical instructions in tiny fonts with very low contrast.”

I’ve never understood the train of thought that there is Design, and then Design for Accessibility, or Old Age. As we said in the original GDS Design Principles, “Accessible design is good design. Everything we build should be as inclusive, legible and readable as possible.”

I think designers - and the

organisations they work for - still struggle to relate to this. That’s why I find this diagram from Microsoft Design so useful.

✏️✏️ I was delighted to see the Xbox Adaptive Controller win a Black Pencil for Product Design at this year's D&AD awards. It’s a wonderful product tackling real issues at scale. Inclusive design is good design. I hope we see more work like this winning in the future.

Part of the problem is representation of disabled people in the design community. Cat Macaulay, the Chief Design Officer at The Scottish Government writes very well about just that. Design community – we need to talk about disabled people.

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Related, read this thread on e-bikes: “A man came up to me to tell me how an e-bike totally changed his 93 year old father's life."

Designing for trust

Trust should be a given with government services but it isn’t always. There’s a healthy debate going on about trust and private sector digital services too. How do you design for trust? And how do you that in a practical and useful way?

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At the recent protests in Hong Kong there were huge queues for paper tickets at train stations. Twitter threads illustrated the fear that police would track people through their (digital) Octopus Card and know they were protesting. I expect to see more of this as more transactions become digital. It will be interesting to see which transactions people want to keep “off grid” and why. I suspect it won’t be the ones we expect and it won’t be for the reasons we expect. Will this lead to new business models? Will organisations make a virtue of being offline?

Projects by IF have been thinking about designing for trust for some time and more importantly have been designing and building prototypes to explore these issues. This is what thinking with design looks like: how do you design permissions worth trusting?

One way to build trust is to do your work in the open, and invite people to trust you. Our friends at Nava (they helped fix Healthcare.gov) are a Public Benefit Corporation and just released their first public benefit report. It’s a brilliant web native review of their year.

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Governments sharing openly was a theme last month. The New Zealand government released their design system, based on UK equivalent - both of which were developed in the open.

Lastly, one way to design for trust is to stop designing exclusively for shiny, happy paths and instead design for a service to fail gracefully. Progressive enhancement is a good example of this in front-end development. Design for resilience - and read Jesse Weaver's post about why it's the design imperative of the 21st century.

Jony Ive special section

Last week it was announced that Jony Ive was leaving Apple to start his own design company. It’s an important story as his work has affected so much in our lives today. He’s also the second most important employee in one of the largest companies the world has ever known and one of the greatest ever designers.

It’s impossible to know the real story behind his departure and I think stories about Apple are can be distorting because the company is so unusual, but Ive’s position and influence is so rare we’ve linked to a few interesting articles below. It is unique to have a designer hold such a senior position at a quoted company of that size and to be so well known outside of the design world. Take Tinker Hatfield, for example, Nike's Vice President for Design and Special Projects. $100bn company, similar position, he has overseen the design of every shoe since 1985. Ever heard of him? Thought not.

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Jony Ive on leaving Apple, in his own words

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Dezeen has a good list of Ive’s most revolutionary designs. (FWIW I think the coloured iMac was the most revolutionary and iOS7 was Apple catching up.) Lots of articles also mention Ive’s growing distance from the day to day design team. This article in Market Screener seems better than most.

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There are many hot takes but here’s one worth reading. John Gruber at Daring Fireball is a longtime Apple commentator and often knows more of the inside story than traditional media. Here’s his view on Ive's departure.

Meanwhile, Vice has a more critical article focusing on built in obsolescence and environmental concerns.

Lastly, it's worth re-reading this long piece from the New Yorker in 2015. A rare in-depth interview with Ive and probably as close as we’ll get to a look behind the curtain.

Emma and Mike were in Boston 🇺🇸last week for a convening Public Digital ran in partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School (here's Diego Piacentini in action). It was a brilliant event, with digital government experts from all over the world coming together to share stories. Huge thanks to everyone who came to @hks_digital and made it an inspirational few days.

News from Public Digital

James wrote a blog post about IT spending. Helpfully, the title - IT spending is just spending - also acts as a tl;dr.

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This week we had teams working on four continents, Emily, Sonja and Stef were in Madagascar, Dai was working with our partners IDEO in Peru, Andrew & James were in Holland and Mike was in the US.

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An interview with Mike was published in Action Publique, a French government publication. A good read for anyone interested in le digital par défaut: focus sur la stratégie numérique de l'administration britannique.