I'm a colourblind, left-handed and hard of hearing interaction designer. Oddly enough, this is almost a benefit in this context, because I have a much easier time noticing "intuitive" redesigns that fuck up accessibility in favour of the latest graphic design fad.

More generally, any UX design that does not involve user testing (ideally with both new and experienced users) inevitably leads to the designers missing things. If there's one field where co-design is crucial to decent results, it's IxD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design

I bring up these issues in every design session I'm involved in, but people just don't seem to get it. How can you make people care about colorblindness, etc?

8% of males are colourblind [1]. If my maths is right that's roughly the population of the USA. A group worth worrying about I'd have thought.

[1] http://www.colourblindawareness.org

We almost that exact discussion at work yesterday. The question from one of my colleagues in customer service was: How is the customer suppose to know if the product is in stock, when they're on the checkout page?

Apparently our UI design decided to indicate that with red and green dots on the order line. If he had though about color blind users, normal users wouldn't have issues either.

> If he had though about color blind users, normal users wouldn't have issues either.

That's what you meant, right?

Anyway, that's exactly the argument I always bring up: if you design for the colour blind, the deaf, don't assume righthandedness, etc, and you do it well, the interface will end up more user-friendly for everyone.

In your example, adding a hint based on shape/position/lightness (or all three even) as well as a colour is easier to read for everyone. Similarly, using some verion of Cubehelix[0] is the more readable option for heatmap-scales, and again not just for the colourblind but for everyone.

[0] http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/05/cubehelix-or-how-i-learned...

>That's what you meant, right?

Yes, exactly.

Law or strong corporate policy tantamount to a law. They're too small a market otherwise.

Well my experience designing my App (an appstore for renting expensive software) both the UI and the programing side (My cofounder is an expert arquitect but it was hard for him to be in every standup as it was a side project for him), is that most programers are too centered in the internal workings. It's hard for them to see the picture from far away, as an user. So after talking long about a behaviour of the app in certain situations, I still found that some obvious (to me) UX pathways, were not obvious to them, because they were thinking in terms of internal functions and data base. This is not a critique, programing is hard, and while learning to code miself I've learned how different is the mindsetting needed to program from anything else. Also UI and UX are very hard, harder than I would have guessed. Specially hard is keeping an app light in steps and options. Removing all the innecessary guessing from users while keeping a familiar structure. I think that trying to refine UX is the first time I found misself tired of actually "thinking".

Right, it's up to the designers to communicate a useful mental-model for the user, and to provide whatever conventions/affordances help them find the controls to manipulate that model.