Essentially, users who download your app are likely not to use it beyond those first 24 hours. More specifically, the average app will lose 73% of potential users within 1 day, and roughly 90% within the first week.

How can you provide an experience that is informative, intuitive, and turns new users into long-time customers? That’s where user onboarding comes in.

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Make sure to always follow these content-specific recommendations to ensure a pleasant browsing experience for all your visitors.

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In fact, accessible design principles are often the same as good marketing or design principles. By making digital information and services accessible, we see tangible benefits for everyone.

What Is the Curb-cut Effect?

You’re likely already familiar with the curb-cut effect and just don’t know it. But in fact, you likely experience this added benefit of a disability-friendly feature most everyday. The curb-cut effect is the widespread use and appreciation for disability-friendly features that benefit both people with disabilities and those without. 

The original use of the phrase came from the curb cuts that exist on sidewalks. They act as miniature ramps for easier entrance and exit of the sidewalk for wheelchair users, but they are now universal and useful for strollers, bikes, scooters, shopping carts, and more. 

You may also be familiar with closed captioning. Although your dad may hear perfectly fine, he still may prefer to read the TV than watch it in order to not miss a single word of his favorite “Vikings” show. 

In an April 2019 study from Verizon Media, 80 percent of consumers are more likely to watch an entire video if it has captions. And 80 percent of people who use captions aren’t deaf or hard of hearing. 

So while captioning all your videos helps people who can’t hear, it also lets the vast majority of other users get your message as well. Captions can also be helpful for users who may want to watch a video in a quiet space (like covertly watching a recipe video at your work desk, or while a toddler naps), or for users watching a video that may have dramatic accents or shifts in volume, or for users who are watching a video in a language they are still learning. 

A more recent feature was added to Zoom added a recent feature that provides closed captioning during conference calls. This allows all users to participate in the digital workspace, even without audio. 

Examples of the Curb-cut Effect in Web and Product Design

Further examples of the curb-cut effect include color contrasts, alt text, and clean code. 

Color Contrast

Color contrast vitally serves people who may have vision impairments like color blindness, myopia, hypermetropia, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, and more. For people with visual impairment, color alone is not enough to distinguish between two separate items. There needs to be enough contract between two items to more clearly see the difference between the two. 

If you have 20/20 vision, you may think this doesn’t apply to you. However, color contrast on digital devices becomes important for all vision states in situations such as bright sunlight or other poor lighting conditions, very small screens like a smartwatch or phone, and low-quality monitors. (Remember that episode of “Game of Thrones” that was too dark for anyone with a normal TV to see who was winning the battle? That kind of issue can show up with low contrast text on screens, as well.) 

Curious to learn more about color contrast? Here’s a fun way to test color combinations that simulates several vision impairments and environmental situations.

Alt text 

Alt text, short for alternative text, was originally meant to describe functional or informational images on a page to users who may not be able to see them. However, alt text has become useful for users who aren’t necessarily visually impaired. 

In 2019, Facebook and Instagram experienced an outage that prevented images from loading. Every user saw alt text in place of images, some of which was generated by Facebook’s AI. Even if some of the alt tags were guesses on Facebook’s part, having some description of the missing images did help provide some context for users that weren’t visually impaired.

This also becomes relevant if users have a slow or unstable internet connection, or if your application or website’s server has a hiccup. Alt text can help all of your users have some frame of reference for images that aren’t loading properly. 

Still not convinced? Alt text can also help search engines index your images correctly, and can even help improve your website’s SEO. 

Ok, now that you’re all gung-ho about adding alt text to every image you upload, we do want to mention a couple caveats. First, not all images should have alt text. Decorative images don’t add new information to the content of a page, and therefore do not need alt text. 

For example, the information provided by the image might already be given using adjacent text. Or perhaps the image is a graphical accent, included to make the website more visually attractive (such as the textured background in the image below). In the case of decorative images, use an empty alt attribute.

The second caveat is that you do not want to have duplicate alt text. In other words, if you’ve written a description in the body text or caption, you do not need to list the same description in alt text form. This causes “auditory clutter” for screen reader users.

Although there are plenty more examples of the curb-cut effect, the last one we’d like to cover here is something most users may not think about if they are not in the development business. 

Clean Code

Cleaner code describes best-practice techniques in a digital environment. This is often sought after simply to improve performance, which should be a goal for most any digital space. However, there are tricks built inside of clean code that also improve accessibility – for disabled and non-disabled folks alike. 

Screen readers and other assistive technologies rely on the underlying HTML markup to convey meaningful information about the structure and content of web pages. This means that it’s very important to structure your site or product’s HTML correctly. 

However, there are benefits beyond accessibility when your product is built cleanly and properly. Sites built semantically have cleaner code, load much faster, and perform better for all users. A clean semantic structure makes it a lot easier for search engines to crawl your website, which can lead to improved SEO performance. 

And semantic HTML also makes it a lot easier for new developers to familiarize themselves with the product’s codebase more quickly. In other words, accessible code is clean code, which improves user experience, searchability, and ongoing development. Pretty cool!

Accessible products are not just for people with disabilities. The curb-cut effect has resulted in the widespread adoption of accessibility standards to the point where all user groups now expect this level of accessibility. Need help getting started? We’ve got you covered.

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Since then, personalization has been carefully rethought and adjusted to reign in some of that Wild West, anything-goes approach and has more effectively made use of not-so-obvious personalization patterns that go beyond things like colorful themes or profile settings.

Personalization is the act of designing and engineering a product in a way that it starts to feel personal or customized to individual users. There are a myriad of different ways that websites and applications can represent personalization ranging from displaying someone’s name upon logging in, to suggesting content based on past activity, to allowing a user to reorganize the actual interface itself.

In fact, according to an article on UX Planet,

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In this post, you’ll hear from Michael VanRooyen, Chairman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Department and Director of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He is also an entrepreneur, investor and lead singer of a 90’s cover rock band.

Some of the topics he’ll address include:

• How his technology is transforming the emergency room
• Changes to healthcare as a result of Covid-19
• Innovations that are improving the lives of patients and doctors

VanRooyen is also the author of the book, The World’s Emergency Room, which covers how digital health is helping to deliver care to places around the globe. 

Brigham’s Grand Central Station

Healthcare is changing rapidly. It’s reaching out to patients, it’s using new technology, and it’s trying to provide better and higher quality care. Most people think of the emergency department as chaotic, crazy, cram-packed, dangerous and difficult. And it’s true, 20 or 30 years ago, the emergency department was not a very fun place to be indeed. Michael VanRooyen is changing that. VanRooyen’s current mission at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is to change the way they manage emergency department patients, and to expand the role of emergency medicine in the healthcare system. 

In the most basic sense, VanRooyen explains, “we are population rescue. We’re there 24/7 to take care of all kinds of patients, no matter what happens to you.” But the emergency room is more than that, too. They take care of the community as well as a larger network of transferred patients that can come in from all over to receive higher quality care. For this reason, VanRooyen views the emergency department as a “Grand Central Station of diagnostics and distribution of patients.”

Patients from all over are transferred to the Brigham emergency room from other hospitals, from nursing homes, from facilities, ambulances, and more. VanRooyen’s team conducts diagnostic testing and treatment, and then they decide if the patient should be admitted into the hospital, ICU, a skilled nursing facility, or go home and have home hospital or telemedicine contact.

What most people think the emergency department is, or was, is no longer the reality of today. Brigham in particular is very keen to change the model so that they can better serve as a hub of access for the healthcare system. 

Brigham and Women’s hospital is located in the heart of Boston and is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. As a result, VanRooyen’s team sees about 65,000 patients a year. If you include their sister hospital, the Brigham Faulkner hospital, where they fluidly admit patients back and forth, it adds another 30,000 patients a year. In total, VanRooyen’s team sees roughly 100,000 patients a year.

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