Accessibility and UX in a large organisation —  an interview with Chris Gibbons and Anya Braun

Introduction

Reading the excellent “Sense and respond” book from Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden I once more got reminded of the challenges that large organisations face in the post-industrial, digital design era. Amongst many case studies mentioned in the book one stood out — an excellent story from Auto Trader, one of the biggest British websites. It wasn’t a coincidence that when I met Anya and Chris — who work at Auto Trader — I wanted to talk to them and ask about their experience. Braun and Gibbons have delivered a workshop at UX Scotland, focusing on the introduction of accessibility practices into the life of their large employer. We’ve quickly bonded and started discussing our working and private lives over a hamburger or two.

People, here are my two new colleagues: Anya Braun, Senior UX Researcher (ex-Auto Trader, now BookingGo) and Chris Gibbons, Principal UX Developer from Auto Trader.

Rock on 🤘

Questions

You have delivered an excellent workshop on web accessibility. How did it happen that, so suddenly, web accessibility became so important for you?

[CG] First, thank you for the feedback on the workshop, it’s great to hear that people are enjoying the story of how and why we are raising the importance of accessibility & inclusive design with Auto Trader.

For me personally, being a Front-end developer accessibility has always been important. I’m a big advocate of keeping things simple as well as using clean, standards based semantic markup.

As a result accessibility was always a natural addition to the list - plus by doing things right, you pretty much get it for free - after all HTML has accessibility right at its heart, and it’s us as developers & designers who can, and do, unwittingly do things that reduce or remove it.

[AB] Thanks for the feedback, we enjoyed putting the workshop together so I’m really glad you found it useful! I’ve been interested in accessibility for a while now, it actually stems from deciding to write my dissertation in accessibility and usability. During the research phase of the report I started to look into different types of impairments. It was then that I started to identify with some of the dyslexia traits and then consequently how I was diagnosed. So, aside from considering accessibility as something we should all be doing inherently, I also have a personal interest too.

What are the main accessibility challenges that users of Auto Trader face?

[AB] We are still at the very start of the journey here at Auto Trader, we’ve made some good steps in the right direction over the last year but we still have a long way to go. We’re very conscious of that fact and I think that is what drives up and has enabled us to keep the cadence going.  

[CG] As Anya mentioned we are really at the start of our journey and are learning as fast as we can with regards to inclusive design & accessibility. Users of the main consumer site, as well as our trade tools, will hopefully notice gradual improvements to the UI and usability of the site as we gain more momentum and knowledge across teams.

We know it’s not perfect and if any users wish to report issues to us then we’d happily receive them :)

What were the main challenges of introducing accessibility practices into Auto Trader?

[CG] Where to start and who to talk to! I say this tongue in cheek, but once we’d had conversations with the right folk it opened up so many doors for us.

Once we’d got these conversations going that focussed us on our next steps - to raise awareness, within the business, about the need & importance for people to know and care about accessibility.

We still have wider challenges ahead of us, but we’re hoping that by starting the inclusive design guild, this will give us access to voices across the various stages of the product development cycle to enable us to try new tools/process etc. which we’d maybe have struggled to have access to otherwise.

[AB] We knew right from the start that we needed to tackle embedding accessibility throughout multiple areas of the business if we were going to make a real change. The first port of call was looking into every stage of the product life cycle, from research into design and then from build into our QA process. It was a challenge auditing these processes that have already been established.  

I know that Auto Trader works towards a very proactive, if not even aggressive development lifecycle — utilising DevOps a lot. According to what I’ve read in “Sense and respond” you guys are rolling code out very often and experiment a lot. Can you shed some light on this for us, please? What is the customer research cycle you are engaged in?

[CG] We, as with most other large digital businesses, utilise both continuous integration and continuous deployment across all parts of the business, meaning that we can be doing as many as 300 releases per week, usually with minimal impact on business critical services.

[AB] From a research point of view we try to attack this from many different directions. We run classic lab studies and collate more qualitative research from participants that we interview. We also carry out qual research remotely using the User Zoom platform to reach a larger audience size or quickly run experiments. These are usually scaled up into A/B tests so we can learn with live users and have a higher confidence that new changes or updates will land well with our consumers. We also work very closely with our ‘Voice of the Customer’ team as they collect a huge amount of customer feedback from both a consumer and retailer perspective from many different channels. We often hold sessions to draw out any patterns we are observing from a UX research, market research and Voice of the Customer aspect.  

You obviously have a very large customer base — care to share numbers? How can you make sense out of it all? How are you able to test efficiently?

[AB] From a consumer point of view we have around 55 million cross-platform visits every month. We’re very lucky in being able to launch tests with such a high volume of traffic to be able to learn very quickly. We are by no means in the same position as Amazon with their 11 second learning time but we are very fortunate. The other side of our business is what we could our ‘Retailer’ side which comprises of 13,000 car retailers and dealers.

Chris, you are responsible for the introduction of accessibility practices into the development team. What are the main challenges you and your colleagues face?

[CG] The hardest thing was - and still is in some cases - is getting the conversations actually taking place for both front end related chit chat as well as accessibility! Within Auto Trader we have adopted the Spotify model, this ultimately helped with the creation of a Front End chapter, as well an Inclusive Design Guild, and giving us the correct forum and structure to bring together like minded folk who want to make a difference.

I remember you talking about frameworks and how you aren’t keen on introducing them in a situation when there is no ground knowledge of underlying technologies. What can you say about that?

[CG] One of the earliest lessons I got taught as a junior developer was the importance of understanding the fundamentals. Now, I’m no expert in JavaScript, but I do have a good understanding of it. Back when jQuery was the de facto library of choice, the team I was on at the time, overall, had a bloody good knowledge of ES5 (we’re going back a while!) so when we dropped in jQuery to do some of the heavy lifting for us, we all knew what it was doing under the hood and why it was so useful.

In the right situations I’m a big fan of frameworks but sometimes we have to question do we actually need them? And if we’re introducing them, is there a good enough spread of knowledge in the team so that working within the software isn’t going to be a big overhead.

Sometimes as developers we get caught up with the new and latest shiny, that we forget the basics and in turn get them wrong. This lack of understanding of the basics is, imo, being accelerated via the use of the term “full-stack”.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with some extremely talented developers in my career, I’ve also worked with some terrible ones, and the difference between them? The talented ones recognise they can’t do it all; and over my 15+ year career I can count on one hand the amount of true full-stack developers - one’s who I know could debug a front end, or a11y test a site, or produce Sass better than a lot of FE devs could, whilst also doing all the usual BE work. I think it belittles the discipline & skill of a FE/UI developer, and is slowly eroding all the good work over the last 10-15 years of promoting and championing web standards.

Anya, how are you making sure that your findings and vision make their way up to the stakeholder’s ivory tower? Is there an ivory tower — or are your senior stakeholders engaged?

[AB] We definitely don't have an ivory tower, but equally we are continually learning how to improve as a company. We have steering meetings with our product teams and our senior stakeholders to ensure that we are all on the same page. In terms of accessibility we are quite lucky in that the company is really bought into creating a diverse and inclusive culture. So, naturally accessibility considerations are usually well received. I also think it helps if you can talk about how accessibility can positive influence key business objectives and metrics.

You must be running many collaborative activities within your company, am I right? Can you elaborate?

[CG] You are indeed! Personally I think being collaborative is a core part of being successful within any business, large or small. Within Auto Trader we use the Spotify model of squads, tribes, guilds etc. This, alongside being multi-disciplinary squads helps in itself to be collaborative.

Across the wider business there are many guilds covering a whole raft of topics and bringing together an amazing cross section of people. One of the smaller chapters I’ve helped to introduce is the Front End chapter, with its sole purpose being to bring together front end across the entire of Auto Trader.

At a practical level our new pattern library (aka. ‘Spark Plug’) helps to drive consistency across trade and consumer products, and is a hugely collaborative piece of work not only between designers and developer, but designers & developers across many parts of the business.

How about the evangelisation aspect of UX; I am interested in how this works at Auto Trader. Do you have an opportunity for sharing your knowledge internally?

[AB] Auto Trader have multiple sessions for knowledge sharing from stand ups where we discuss what's being worked on that day and any paint points. We run multiple showcases where we present new work at a team level every week and also a bi-monthly company wide showcase which the whole business is invited to. We also have tribe breakfasts, lunches and days (Auto Trader have adopted the Spotify working structure with squads and tribes) in which different teams will give an update on what they are working on or have the opportunity to share new insights. In terms of research we also filter new learnings out via every communication channel possible! From emails, slack channels, yammer and through our Trello board.  

What are some of the main learnings that you have taken from the journey to a more accessible product?

[CG] To always have accessibility (and standards) in mind, I know it sounds obvious but it’s incredibly easy to add/change features as a project evolves without considering the wider implications. I try to check the FE code within the projects I work on regularly against automated tools such as pa11y/aXe, I also ensure that I manually test pages, so turning CSS off and looking at the page structure, can I tab through the page content, use tools such as WAVE and SiteImprove (both free and are bloody amazing!).

[AB] Think about accessibility from the start! It will be a lot easier and cheaper than trying to retrofit it in.

Can you provide an example of a feature that was surprisingly easy to implement but provided a lot of value for website users?

[CG] The ‘Skip to content’ link was very easy to put into the code. The benefits of adding this are obvious, not only for users of the site with assistive technologies, but for all users! It was a feature we could add in with very little noise and has provided us with some usage stats to help us as we move to promote inclusive design across AT.

What would you like to do in the future? What’s the pipeline for Auto Trader when it comes to the implementation of more accessible solutions?

[AB] We have many plans! Hopefully more embedding inclusive thinking into the product life cycle, perhaps including some automated tests and processes.

[CG] As previously mentioned we’ve been exploring adding automated a11y testing, as well as various manual testing techniques, into our build pipelines using amazing tools such as pa11y and aXe. These two tools work really well with each other and provide us with an extremely good level of recommendations which could easily be missed.

Hopefully with the introduction of these tools, being more vocal on the whys & wherefores of accessibility, as well as continued education and training, our hope is that all our products - both new and legacy - will organically become more accessible.

Many readers of this blog struggle with an adaptation of UX culture in their organisations. Can you share some tips with them?

[CG] I think the main tip, or piece of advice, I could offer is to not be afraid of trying out new things, especially in smaller groups or squads. Many years ago, when HTML5/CSS3 started emerging myself and a fellow FE developer made the call to JFDI, we could easily have just waited until they became full specifications, but we wanted to try it and see what, if any, benefits they would provide.

No matter what size of organisation you work in, you could, and should, be trying out new tools and techniques. This is by no means an exhaustive list but you’ve probably heard of Google design sprints; Lean Coffee retros; A/B testing; Testing prototypes (can be done guerilla style rather than running full blown user research labs)

By trying and testing any or all of these tools, you can easily validate as to whether they will provide you with benefits required, and if they prove successful then it will empower you to share insights with the wider business.

[AB] I would highlight the importance of UX by doing a ‘dogfooding’ session in which you get employees, of all levels, to use their own products as if they were a real consumer or user. It works wonders and really opens people's eyes!

Is there anything that you would like to say to a bunch of eager UX designers who might be reading this? Any uplifting words of wisdom? Go for it!

[CG] My top three to any one would be: Become a more T-shaped person; Network and go to meetups, if there aren’t any in your area then start one! And learn basic coding if you can do HTML/CSS then you will have a better relationship with FE as a discipline;

[AB] I would say to really get comfortable with any and all types of feedback! The sooner you become more comfortable with ‘constructive criticism’ and can ask for it, it will help you become the best version of yourself! On a last cheesy positive note, I always think of the quote ‘Dream, Believe, Create, Succeed’ you can do anything you put your mind to!

Thank you!

[CG/AB] Thanks so much! :)

Chris and Anya are on Twitter. Connect!

The next paragraph is in Polish.

Ten wywiad przetłumaczyłem także na język polski. Jeśli interesuje Cię to tłumaczenie, odwiedź mojego bloga.