Universal design and accessible design are the same thingsĪfter learning what universal design means, you might think it’s a synonym for accessible design. Let’s review the top three misunderstandings about universal design. Three common misconceptions about universal designĪlthough universal design sounds like a simple idea, it’s one of the most misunderstood concepts in the digital world. Happy users are more likely to recommend products to their friends and family, leading to an increase in the market reach. Universal design is beneficial both for users and businesses, as higher user accessibility and satisfaction lead to better user retention. A design is considered “universal” when people with differing physical, sensory, mental, or intellectual abilities can use a product without any additional adaptation or modification. Universal design is a set of recommendations created to ensure that a product or service works for users with varying physical and mental abilities. This article will review the concept of universal design, its core principles, and practical tips for making a usable product across audiences and devices. Fortunately, universal design is a framework that allows product creators to design experiences that accommodate all users. One of the major goals of product design is to allow users with different abilities to interact with a product effectively. The W3C's CSS definitions are very clear on this ! On the other hand, I wonder if browser engines and operating systems are consistent among each other by now.Designing a product involves the consideration of many different factors, including functionality, reliability, aesthetics, safety, and more. The starting position of text boxes, the height of the baseline within a text box, the way how line height and paragraph spacing is actually adding above and/or below the text line – these are all very ambiguous. There's also some trouble with Adobe XD, though. Anyone demanding a 100% pixel-perfect execution from a mockup, is asking for trouble. That's why you need to hand it over to a developer (or an intermediate) who also understands these modern and appropriate principles of using flexible sizes. any conversion is better left to front-end developers and their frameworks, because of the difficulties and debates about screen densities. So handing-off your materials to a developer by converting all flexible values into pixels, will result in type not being able to automatically and accordingly scale in responsive designs, and it can't accomodate anymore for accessibility aspects. See this Wikipedia page for their usage, but keep in mind that it differs a lot between languages ! And that very idea of using a flexible size called em still lives on in CSS !īTW, the various lengths of dashes also refer to that principle: the em-dash, and the en-dash (half of the em). Hence the reason why typesetters also used to call that size the "em" or "the square". That M's physical block of lead or wood often measured as a square in width and height – not entirely coincidentally. Historically, the character M used to be the widest plain character in the letterpress collection of a font. So in essence, it's a relative size and certainly not a fixed pixel size.Īdobe XD loosely based its spacing/tracking value on a typographer's method for defining character spacing. The value stands for "thousands of an em",Īnd the " em" stands for the current font size. otherwise we are just designing in XD to impress ourselves and other designers with cool prototype videos that will never ever make it to code. We need to get out of our bubble and get tools for designers that actually help the process not hinder it with inside-baseball terminology. At this point only Webflow or maybe the new Editor X form Wix is closest to doing this. The first company to develop a tool that lets us as designers create real-word design systems and components that speak a developers language will win (Figma, Adobe, etc). It's hard enough to get engineers to take us seriously and when we use print terms when trying to collaborate with them it just justifies their argument that we don't know how a design system works in the scalable, atomic design world of modern engineering and development. So it's important that we as designers understand and use the correct terminology and design for the real world. I am traditionally a print designer so I know all about typography, letterpress, kerning, tracking, ligatures, etc.īut XD is trying to bridge the gap between digital product designers and developers, and this product is mainly for creating layouts that will be handed off for coding.
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