Week 945

Matt Kirkland

It's Week 945!

A handful of our projects are with innovative teams that get grant funding to do their work. One of those is approaching its reporting phase, so we got to write up some things we did to help more people feel welcome to use it. I liked it so much I'm rewriting it here.

On this project in question, the North Star is about widening the workforce pool in their industry. We're providing some onboarding tools and resources to help people consider switching to this industry. And to expand this workforce, we need to make sure people from all kinds of backgrounds feel welcome exploring the field. We've done some really intentional things in this direction.

Inclusive name fields! We researched best practices for designing inclusive Name fields to help make sure that individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and with a wide variety of name formats feel welcome and respected. This research involved reviewing existing literature, analyzing user experience studies, and consulting with experts in cultural inclusivity. We focused on identifying approaches that accommodate varying name structures, such as mononyms, multi-part names, and characters from different alphabets, while also considering the importance of flexibility and personalization. The findings from this research informed our efforts to create a user-friendly system that promotes inclusivity and enhances the overall user experience.

No second-class languages. Brand New Box developed the application with a language-agnostic approach, ensuring that both English and Spanish are treated equally and neither language is prioritized as a “first class citizen.” This involved designing the user interface, navigation, and core functionalities to seamlessly support both languages from the ground up. By doing so, we ensured that Spanish-speaking users would have the same level of access, usability, and overall experience as English-speaking users. This commitment to linguistic inclusivity promotes equity and helps ensure that our application is accessible to a broader audience, irrespective of their preferred language.

Mobile-first as equitable access. Brand New Box adopted a mobile-first design approach to ensure that users who primarily rely on smartphones or tablets receive a top-tier experience when interacting with the application. This decision was informed by our understanding that many aspiring home visitors, particularly those from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, do not use desktop or laptop computers as their primary devices. By prioritizing mobile functionality from the outset, we optimized the application’s performance, usability, and interface for smaller screens, ensuring that key features are accessible, intuitive, and fully functional on mobile devices. This approach helps bridge the digital divide and makes our platform more inclusive and equitable for all users.

Those are relatively small things in the scale and scope of this app - but ones that we think will make a reasonable difference in accomplishing its goals.