During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell.
To escape, each of us had to find clues in our own cell to figure out how to open the doors. We each had to find an object that solved a piece of the puzzle, and once we put them all together, the door would open. As a first challenge, it was easy enough. Everyone found a brightly colored object in their room and described it to the team so we could piece it together. Everyone but one team member.
"Come on, read it, man, we can win this."
He froze. Someone jumped in to help: "Mine was the most obvious green object in the room. Just look for something bright. Maybe blue, or orange, something that seems out of place." He didn't respond. He just sat there, frozen on camera. We figured he was having internet connectivity issues. We waited a good five minutes before he finally found it, and we moved on to the next level.
I didn't think much of that day. We finished the game, we had fun, it was great. He waited until our next one-on-one to explain what had actually happened. He panicked, and he was embarrassed. It turned out he was colorblind. We were yelling random color names at him, and he couldn't, for the life of him, see any of them.
As far as I can tell, I'm not colorblind, and it never would have occurred to me that this was something to account for. Just last week, I learned about Vehicle Motion Cues on the iPhone, a feature that helps reduce motion sickness. I don't think I've ever experienced motion sickness myself, or at least never in a car.
Watching a blind person navigate a website was eye-opening for me. I realized that many of my past design choices would have worked against their experience without my ever knowing it. The same goes for someone navigating a computer entirely by voice. I recently rediscovered Windows Speech Recognition, which I found pretty annoying for my own needs. But for someone who relies on it for all of their computer use, it's an essential tool.
A coworker once mentioned, almost in passing, that she struggles to read certain fonts because of dyslexia. Tight letter spacing and low-contrast text make some of our internal tools nearly unreadable to her. I had picked those fonts because they looked good on a demo slide. It had never crossed my mind that a font choice could be the difference between someone reading a document easily and someone giving up on it entirely.
In some of our zoom calls, a teammate would often ask if he could do audio only before the call. While it didn't bother me at all, the managers kept insisting on everyone turning on their cameras. But after he used the camera for a few minutes, his connection would start dropping. I just assumed he had slow Internet. But the reality was he was located in a rural area and he relied entirely on his phone's hotspot to connect to the internet. The zoom call was using up all his data in minutes.
None of these problems were problems for me. That's exactly what made them invisible. Unless you are experiencing these issues, there's little reason to ever notice them. We tend to design our tools, our meetings, and our expectations around our own experience of the world, and then mistake that experience for the default. It takes a colorblind teammate freezing on a call, or a friend who can't ride in the passenger seat without getting sick, to remind us that "normal" was only ever normal for us.
You can never anticipate every invisible problem in advance, that's impossible. But at the very least, we should remember that our own experience is rarely the default. We should be a bit more curious on how others experience the tools we build.