Scaling accessibility at Skyscanner with Heather Hepburn — Transcript
UX, Coffee + Code — S204
Speakers
- Mark Boyes-Smith — Host
- Jason Haritou — Host
- Heather Hepburn — Accessibility Lead, Skyscanner
Transcript
Mark Boyes-Smith: Hello Creative Creatures Episode four of the season already. Can you believe it?
Jason Haritou: No, I can’t.
Mark Boyes-Smith: On that note, we’re looking for season three speakers. If you’ve got a perspective on the design industry, get in touch. You can follow us on UX coffee and code on either Twitter or LinkedIn, or if you feel so inclined, you can email us on contact@uxcoffeecode.com
What’s on the cards for today, J?
Jason Haritou: Today is a juicy one. So on the show today, we’re picking up on our thread of accessibility and inclusive design. If you’re an avid listener of the show, you’ll know we’ve covered accessibility pretty extensively in the past, so we’re not going to dwell too much on the what’s, the whys, and the wherefores.
But if you haven’t, check out episodes one, two, and three of season one.
Mark Boyes-Smith: I’m not sure if it’s just me thinking this, but I get the impression that the problem for product teams these days is less about the advocating piece. Where it used to be about educating people as to what accessibility is and why we needed to think about it. Now it seems like the conversation has shifted a little and centers around “how do we put one foot in front of another and begin to move towards an accessible solution?”.
It’s like the how rather than the why.
Jason Haritou: Yeah, absolutely. I think everybody agrees that accessibility is an important thing to do. After all, An accessible product is a usable product. But like you said, people are just having a hard time getting started.
So joining us today to talk to us about accessibility and how you can get started is Heather Happen. She is an accessibility specialist at Skyscanner.
Mark and I had a fantastic time with Heather because we did UX, cocktails, and code, which was amazing. And yeah, if I slur my words, I do apologize…
Heather Hepburn: Now, I hope you have drinks because as it was cocktails, I have done that.
Jason Haritou: We do.
Heather Hepburn: I’ve done the “Southside” that was talking about before. So this is the Gin, fresh lime, sugar, and mint — with a little bit of sugar on the top.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Very nice.
Jason Haritou: Looks amazing. I’ve just got Malbec. Unfortunately, I’ve actually run out of spirits, so I’ve literally only got gin. But that’s it. I’ve got no tonic. I’ve got nothing to put in there and I can’t drink gin straight, so I’ve got wine tonight.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Not bad. Mine’s one step up. It’s not quite as good as yours [Heather]. I have my rye whiskey and Diet Coke. Obviously, I needed a third ingredient to make a cocktail, right? So I added two glacé cherries.
All right, let’s kick-off. Do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?
Heather Hepburn: Yes. Hello. I’m Heather Hepburn. I’m the Accessibility Lead at Skyscanner, and we are on a bit of a mission to try and improve the accessibility of our products, our websites, and our apps.
I’ve been running the program for about two years. We didn’t have a program , an accessibility program, when I joined as a UX writer and very quickly realized that we were not focusing on accessibility. During my interview process, I was asked to do a UX critique of our app and just realized, well, noticed so many issues that were accessibility related.
So when I first started, I found the Accessibility Guild Slack Channel. There were 70 people on there. So I said, Hello, I’ve come from a bank where I used to work. You know, we did, we did accessibility. Can I help what we’re doing? And it was silence… I think there had been a push a few years back to do something, but nothing has really stuck.
So yeah, I just went on a bit of a mission and got everyone together, 30 people in the room, and it was brilliant. I left that room with so much motivation to actually go and do something about it.
That was that felt like so long ago and that was just over three years ago now when that whole thing started.
Jason Haritou: So just for our listeners who are new to the industry, what is accessibility and why is it important? Why should people care about it?
Heather Hepburn: Sure. OK, so accessibility is how easy something is to use or interact with (digital accessibility if that’s what we’re talking about). and It’s normally used in relation to people with disabilities. So that can be:
- Visual impairments,
- motor impairments,
- and cognitive impairments as well.
So things like dyslexia, ADHD, and hearing impairments. So anything that can have an effect on how someone will interact with technology. We’re trying to solve these problems.
If people weren’t thinking about accessibility at all. There are barriers going up all over the place and the best sort of physical analogy, I guess, is the ramp into a building. You know, if that’s not there, then it’s a barrier for wheelchair users to not get into that building.
When a ramp is there, it not only helps the wheelchair users, it helps people push prams, and it helps the delivery drivers bring things into the building. It helps people carrying pulling luggage cases.
It’s got such a far-reaching… much further reaching than people think, you know, when you first think of accessibility, think of people with disabilities, you think of someone in a wheelchair and someone who’s blind…
Heather Hepburn: I think that’s a very common misconception. I think the main thing here is that anything you do to improve accessibility for people with disabilities, you’re improving the whole UX experience for absolutely everybody.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Definitely. It feels like accessibility is really just… The way I think about in my mind is like it’s just really great usability.
It’s the foundation of usability. One of the things that I see that’s quite challenging is that when people approach accessibility, especially if they’re designers or engineers or product managers and they haven’t been involved in creating accessible or inclusive experiences in the past, there seems to be a bit of a fear around how you begin to approach and tackle it.
There’s a lot of mystery around it. How did you kind of demystify the conversation around accessibility?
Heather Hepburn: Yeah, it still needs demystifying to some folks. It’s one of those things that, I think, will never be fully understood by everybody. I guess at the very beginning, there was a lot of talking, a lot of explaining, you know, what it is and why we should care about it as a business, which is really important to get that message across and I think it doesn’t have to be difficult.
The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are, in themselves, pretty inaccessible.I know they’re working on this, improve them. But if someone is faced with those, they will think, how are we ever going to meet all of these criteria?
But when you break it down… Like at the very beginning, I spoke to just designers.
So designers, here’s how you can help. We started talking about color contrast, page layout, and making things have more white space around them, or links being inconsistent. You know, just as you said Mark, great UX, like simple UX stuff, but that actually has such a big effect on some people with disabilities. So it was trying to target people that with this is how you can help.
So I spoke to the content writers as well. We spoke a lot about adding old text to images. So when the writers are handing over copy to the developers, they’re handing over my files with all the visible copy in place. So I’m saying to them:
OK, so you’ve got the visible copy at the same time as you’re writing this. Have a think about that hidden copy. The screen reader users will hear, stuff that was going to make this whole page make sense to them. Imagine you can see it. What did what extra copy do you need to add in there.Simple stuff, concise, trying out nothing but add what you need to add to make it make sense.
I think the hardest-hitting thing I did back then was to show people what it was like for someone who was struggling with our products. So a screen reader user trying to book a fight, failing, coming up against these barriers, people are like, OK, we need to fix this. There’s lots of ways to do that.
If you’re just starting out, show people struggling with your own product because everybody listens to that, it’s not a pleasant watch. Also putting people into the shoes of someone else. So this is something that actually worked so well and we did quite early on was our empathy labs. We ran empathy labs in our Glasgow, London, and Edinburgh offices where we set up a lot of stations around the room and we simulate different disabilities by using vision impairment goggles and arthritis gloves, and other tools.
We gave people tasks to try and do on our products. So book a flight from here to here at this time, knowing that they would come up against some barriers while doing that. And it was seriously like, light bulbs going off around the room above their heads. It only took a couple of minutes of, oh, I didn’t know this was a struggle. I didn’t know people interact with technology in this way or this would be a problem. So we left with an amazing list of things that people wanted to fix for a start, and people just being motivated to do something about it.
So yeah, one of my big recommendations is to try and get people to actually, you know, try things out for themselves and feel things for themselves. Though, there is nothing better than speaking to someone with lived experience, I must add that. We have people coming in and doing demos and user testing, people with different disabilities, and that’s powerful powerful stuff.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Just add something to what you were saying there… I’ve been in that place before, where you’re working in the world of accessibility and so you kind of you feel that you begin to know the solutions. Like, obviously we had some extra ARIA tags here, and some extra information there, and all of a sudden it works for screen reader.
I think you mentioned an important thing there, which is to take a step back and verify this with people with lived experience because the worst thing about the accessibility space is that when you work to make something more accessible for one group of people, you have the potential of making it worse and more inaccessible for another group.
It’s like a balancing act, right?
Heather Hepburn: It’s it’s tricky. That is where user testing really comes into its own. So we have we’ve just implemented this actually, and it I think is working well, where we have a new product testing framework and we are routinely testing new features or whatever it is for the different product teams. If we’re testing with new users, say we’re testing with five new users every three weeks, we are making sure that one of those users has it has a disability of some sort.
So it’s a reflection of society. It just normalizes everything and it just brings it into our standard processes.
Jason Haritou: What would you recommend to somebody who’s just starting out on the journey you did two years ago, in trying to make an accessible product and trying to build that awareness? Where should you start ?
Heather Hepburn: There’s actually so many great resources out there, and I think a lot of people have looked at those guidelines and they felt exactly the same way as you’re describing, and they’ve kind of created their own.
I know that, from me looking at them, we build out our own design guidelines, writing guidelines, and developer guidelines. [We] based [them] on WCAG, but also reading some books, reading other people’s guidelines, picking out the important things that we could focus on. The BBC, for example, has a brilliant set of guidelines, we recommend them to our developers.
There’s so much out there and it can be too much. I mean, the WCAG guidelines themselves are too much and there’s so much out there. I think, finding people who you resonate with. So going to conferences and who’s speaking your language. So who do you want to hear again and who do you want to follow? So I must admit, I’m not really on Twitter. I wish I was, because I think a lot of good chat is there.
I’m more of a LinkedIn girl… I see what they’re posting. I learn so much from there, articles and their media articles about accessibility. There are so many places to learn rather than going straight to those guidelines and just following so following people speak a language that you admire.
There are a couple of brilliant conferences, [like] Axecon. And for anyone starting out, there were so many talks on exactly how to do that. My favorite talk was a developer I had not heard of before Mark Steadman. Absolutely brilliant. I learned some stuff in that. He was fantastic. I found myself actually rewatching it the next morning.
Mark Boyes-Smith: That’s right. You know, it’s good.
Heather Hepburn: Yes. He was just so good .That’s another one about how to get developers started out on this. He was talking about asking people, do you have 15 minutes, just 15 minutes a day to start to think about accessibility and what you can do. People would say no and he would say, OK, but you’ve got 10, so here’s how to do it.
His advice and superb. So listen to him and he was fantastic. But the thing about Axecon, they have the design stream, they have the engineering stream, they have the stream for people like me (the organizational accessibility folks), and then they had a miscellaneous stream. The whole three days is running concurrently and you can just choose what you wanted to watch.
So I had bookmarked 34 sessions, I looked at that and thought no chance, but you can also download them afterwards. You still have to register, but you can have access to all of the talks, the slide deck. It’s phenomenal.
That’s in the US., but the best conference in the UK is TechShare Pro and that happens in November. Actually, that was a huge inspiration for me, the first one I attended of that. That and that happens in London. So the last couple of years it’s been online, it’s run by Ability Net, and it is fantastic. Same kind of concept as Axecon, but just Europe based. Great speakers and so much information shared.
The first one I went to was where I listened to Sam Solomon, she was from Verizon media and she was talking about her accessibility strategy. I stole that strategy and have been using that ever since.
But this is the thing, you don’t need to always reinvent the wheel. There’s so much great stuff out there. I loved her strategy. It was the simplest thing I’ve ever heard.
It was:
Raising awareness leads to increasing adoption, which leads to improved advocacy… which leads to raising awareness. And it just goes round in this lovely circle.
So there are three things to it; awareness, adoption, and advocacy. Everything I do, I can attribute to one of those areas. I think for the whole first year of my being in this position, I was focusing on raising awareness and now we’re at that adoption level, well, there’s never enough awareness, but I’ve trained a lot of teams.
We have so much information out there and now it’s about, OK, let’s start really getting down to business and, you know, doing this well.
Jason Haritou: Have you ever had pushback on getting [to] an accessible product or have you had somebody basically say, yes, yes, yes, it’s important, we’ll get to it… How do you raise the importance of accessibility when there are competing product features and interests?
Heather Hepburn: It is a very tricky challenge. And I’ve been lucky in that I’ve not had pushback from leadership. So, I was allowed to go on the secondment, I was allowed to move into the full-time role, I’ve been given a bit of a budget. All of that is great. The pushback comes from the, as you say, when there are competing priorities.
There are many many reasons why that is still the case. People will say, OK, we’re delivering an MVP in two weeks. We’re not building accessibility in and we’re going to do that afterward. And that’s a massive new NO moment….
Mark Boyes-Smith: I think, as well. The issue is with accessibility sometimes, especially when we’re just starting this journey, [is that] we think about it as this feature or this capability that sits on top of whatever feature we’re building.
There’s a kind of mental kind of leap that you need to do, certainly as a designer or as an engineer. You have to move to a position where, actually, this is just part of the way that you build things. Just in the same way that we choose colors, we choose type settings, our engineers might choose HTML semantics depending on what they’re building.
We start from a position where actually we know a little bit more about accessibility and we make the right decisions upfront. So it’s not that like additional investment, it’s just part of the foundation, right?
Heather Hepburn: Absolutely, 100%.
It is challenging to get to that. And I’m still working hard on that because it’s too easy for people to say we don’t have time to do that if they don’t understand or if their teams are not incorporating it into their processes from the start. If they do see it as an add on, then they’re going to push it out for as long as they can.
Unless the business is fully mandating it from above and not allowing anything to go away unless it’s a certain level of accessibility, which is the ultimate goal, I guess.
But it’s about embedding it into everybody’s processes from as far left as you can possibly get. So before design at, you know, strategy level, what’s happening? What do we want to do with the business? Then down a bit to how we’re dealing with this project, then down a bit again, what’s this project going to look like then into design or research?
Even before that if it’s not considered at that very, very early stage? And then we expect developers just to do their thing at the end. It doesn’t work like that, it has to be thought about from the beginning. And so we’re really trying to get our designers thinking along these lines and making it just part of what they do. Is this going to work, is this going to work for everyone?
And then when they hand over their designs or when they’re talking about their designs to the development teams, talk about accessibility, OK, how is this going to work for someone just using a keyboard or just using a screen reader? How’s this going to work? Is it going to work at all? Does it make sense?
If they are thinking about that early stage and their designs are annotated with accessibility information, then an engineer can’t ignore that. So that’s what we’re really trying to push at the momen. But also, I think, very much comes down to product managers and product owners. If they are not expecting accessible design from the beginning and they’re not giving time to the developers to do the little extras that need to be done, the little bit of extra testing, et cetera, then it’s not going to happen.
I think that they’re in a key position to make or break an accessible product.
Jason Haritou: So how much does design systems factor in how successful you’ve been at Skyscanner.
The design system team were the first team that I worked with alongside the new mobile website team. We have a great design system, the engineers are using it a lot. The designers were working on making a more, I guess, robust system that the designers and developers can use equally well.
A lot of our accessibility champions actually work in the design system team, which is quite handy. So that was the first thing we audited. We realized we had a huge list of tickets for accessibility fixes across web iOS and Android components. We’ve been working on working our way through those. And so component level, we’re in a much better place than we were.
There’s still work to do. From a design system guideline perspective, we’re working on a new project where we are embedding better guidelines at that component level to assist with acceptance criteria, with testing, with design information as well, like why background and why we’re doing certain things and I think the more information, without overwhelming anyone, so concise is good. Detail around why you’ve made certain design decisions as well as super helpful.
They are the biggest keys to doing this. If you’ve got accessible components and you’re providing guidance at that level and everyone is using the design system… There’s another challenge.
Jason Haritou: Oh no, that one.
Mark Boyes-Smith: We’ve all we’ve been there.
Jason Haritou: We’ve been there.
Heather Hepburn: Tell me more.
Mark Boyes-Smith: So, J and I have really been through the wringer on design systems in the past. Right. In previous businesses.
I’m nodding along to everything you’re saying because I think there’s something so important there. Getting to an accessible product is hard. It’s not an overnight thing. You talked about two years of dedication to this, and it takes a long time, takes a lot of people contributing to that goal.
Design systems play such an important role in driving, not only the conversation, like you say, about being able to describe kind of the decisions we make and why, but also actually helping people get to an accessible solution.
One of the things that J and I saw when we last paired on design systems was the concept of, beneath your components, the things that make up your components are like the foundations of your system.
You’ll have like color and typography, and elevation and spacing, and you can bake accessible considerations into those. I think you talked about color contrast. Well, if you’re color palette, your core color palette that supports your entire business, supports combinations that pass 4.5:1 or 3:1, depending on what you’re using them for, you all of a sudden remove the need for people to have to worry about that on a daily basis.
And you left one of the considerations off, right?
Heather Hepburn: Exactly. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking at at the moment nicely. And I’m really pleased to say that there were so many issues with our color palette (accessibility related issues) that we’re having a review of our palette, it’s not that old and it’s beautiful but it wasn’t designed at the time with accessibility in mind.
Heather Hepburn: So the color pairings that are suggested we use, when you suddenly check them for contrast issue are failing in many places. Yes, it’s still it still does look lovely, but not everyone’s going to able to read it. So what’s that? What’s the point? So, we are doing a review at the moment and I’m so thrilled that accessibility was one of the reasons why that project kicked off. I think, of accessibility issues, the biggest are color contrast, which is crazy because it’s it’s the easiest thing to fix.
Heather Hepburn: And that’s what I would say as well. Starting out if color contrast is all we can look at for two months, three months, whatever it is, do that. And there’s so many tools available to check color contrast. You don’t need to know anything about accessibility. If you’re in Figma/Sketch, download Stark or something else where it has to be color contrast checker tool in there.
Heather Hepburn: And if you’re checking while you’re checking your spacing and everything else, just check your color contrast and make sure that passes. And it’s even so as you ticks and crosses, you don’t even need to understand what you’re doing. It’s straightforward to fix, just do it.
Mark Boyes-Smith: And it’s so satisfying to fix when it’s in the foundations. You’re right, like you, you spend a couple of days figuring out your color palette and you combinations. You solve it once and that is it. You never need to solve that again. And that is that’s a lot more rewarding than the screen reader stuff, which is arguably a lot more complex.
Heather Hepburn: Agreed. Agreed. Well, I think that is the hardest part that’s what we have found. The most challenging is the screen reader making something accessible for screen readers. It needs the most knowledge. I think everything else can kind of be explained quite easily and we don’t need too much background detail. It’s just like, yeah, OK, this is this is best practice.
Heather Hepburn: Screenreader stuff is more challenging, actually. We just did a fantastic workshop teaching some of our champions how to use screenwriters and again, we did that through Ability Net, feel like I’m plugging them but they do a a great conference and they do great screen reader training. But we did. Yeah, it was over two days, two lots of 3 hours workshop.
Heather Hepburn: First of all was on a mobile, second one was on desktop use and it was real hands, hands on. We did this over Zoom, brilliant. And there were designers, there were engineers, there were loads of different disciplines at this. And it was just so, so good. I think you have to just take a little bit of time to understand how people are interacting with your products.
Heather Hepburn: And as soon as you do that, you’re like, OK, I need to make this work. I recommend turning on your screen reader to absolutely anybody, just as long as you don’t know how to turn off. I think that’s the key.
Jason Haritou: I use it on my phone if I’m in the kitchen and there’s an article that I can’t read because I’m making tea or something, I have like a shortcut with like three fingers down or read the screen to me.
Heather Hepburn: Oh, nice.
Jason Haritou: It’s nice, but it takes about 20 minutes to get to the article because it reads the title and then who is by? And then you call all these references and actually getting to the article is a pain in the backside. So yeah, use the products, try them out and you’ll see how people struggle with.
Heather Hepburn: Exactly
Jason Haritou: Just reading a news article. It shouldn’t be difficult.
Heather Hepburn: Yeah, that’s me. You want a little skip link at the top just to go.
Jason Haritou: Straight to the content.
Mark Boyes-Smith: There’s a bit that I’ve really struggled with. Certainly trying to kind of educate designers around accessibility, and that’s for me, like I think about accessibility a little bit like an iceberg. Like the vast majority of the solution lives beneath the waterline in the underlying technology. And there’s a piece there around how do you teach the designers all the capabilities and considering missions that the engineers need to know on the underlying technology, like how do you get them to speak that language?
Heather Hepburn: Yeah, I think that’s a great point and a huge challenge. The way we have tackled that is by creating an annotation tool kit. So there are three different annotations, accessibility annotations for designers to put onto their designs before handing them over. And we’ve kept it really, really simple. We hope to kind of build on that when people are comfortable.
But to start off with, it’s really, really simple, it’s marking what is a heading. And if it’s web, what level of heading is that. So we’ve got little circles with H1 / H2, and that’s quite a straightforward concept.
We’ve [also] got accessibility text annotations, so rather than putting the onus on the designer to know if that’s ALT text or an ARIA label or any other kind of hidden text, just call that accessibility text and the developer will work that out.
Heather Hepburn:
So just write what the text description of that image is. If it’s on a we have lots of cards so where we talk a lot about flight details so it’s like outbounds and return, dates, times, length of journeys, you know, all of that is in a card. So trying to make that into something that makes sense to screen it or user is tricky, but I don’t want the designers to have to know exactly how that’s going to be built… Just well, what sounds good? At least if it’s there in the design, it starts a conversation with the developers, and then they can talk about it and the developers then might be able to educate the designers on, OK, well that actually would be in an ARIA label or we would do it this way and have a look at the code. This is actually how we do it.
Our third thing, third and last thing is just the focus order. If the focus order is going to be different to the default. So different to top to bottom, left to right. Do you want it to someone to hear this in a different way? or be moved around in a different way? I think keeping it simple in the language designers understand as well without having to go too heavy into HTML or anything is a good starting point. I have heard of design teams going through kind of basic HTML courses so that they have more of an understanding of and you know, how buttons exist and what makes a link, which is ultimately perfect, really, really helpful.
But I don’t know if it’s possible all the time.
Mark Boyes-Smith: I love that line. I think I think that’s a really nice clean line. It puts the power back on the designer to really design that experience. It’s like kind of the non-visible experience. The one that I would add because I’ve only recently started thinking about this, but we don’t use it enough presentation only. So when something is kind of a really nice piece of display, the text doesn’t add too much value, but it kind of sits there from an aesthetic perspective. We don’t need to read it out to screen readers or maybe like the the kind of orientation of that text means that it’s not it doesn’t read top to bottom… PRESENTATION ONLY…
Heather Hepburn: That’s right.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Hide It from the screen reader. Yeah, yeah, yes.
Heather Hepburn: And the more complex designs, there is quite a lot that you do want to hide because it just it wouldn’t make sense, so you may end up hating three or four elements and replacing them with one short ARIA label that will describe exactly what’s going on and then, you go back and say, Designers, do you really need all that stuff for visual users?
We did something really very recently where it was, it was writing the hidden text that made the designers go, we don’t need that other stuff because actually we can just do it this way. So I love that. That I think, is one of those moments of realization of, Oh, this is this really does make sense. This works. Why are we not thinking about this all the time?
Jason Haritou: I think there are good news stories. I think the idea of accessibility is progressing is getting more popular. I mean, you’ve seen this in the video games, so a few video games, AAA games that have come out recently, I think, Horizon 2 and The Last of Us 2, are fully accessible games, the full open-world games that are incredibly complex to describe. But the development and design teams have made those incredibly complex experiences fully accessible so when we’re looking at some text on the Internet, it should be easy, right? It should be. Why is it so hard?
Heather Hepburn: Why is it so hard? Yeah, I think the gaming world is doing such a phenomenal job, and quite rightly so. Yeah, they are making gaming ultimately accessible by absolutely everybody. And I love it. And we do talk about that quite a lot. You know, how we should go learn from them. Actually, they should. They should be the ones teaching us.
Jason Haritou: I think we should just go spend some time playing some games and….
Heather Hepburn: Maybe that’s it, take a year off, just learning.
Mark Boyes-Smith: So what’s next for you and your team?
Heather Hepburn: So at the moment? Well, just the last couple of weeks I’ve been really focusing on trying to design a new strategy for our Accessibility Champions Network.
So we have an amazing group of passionate accessibility champs and we’re all part of the guild, but it’s quite an informal network, so there’s no onboarding process, there’s no role description, there’s no real recognition for the work either other than me going, Yes, thank you, thank you and our other champions thinking they’re wonderful.
So I really, really want to formalize our network and allow people time to come and actually do this important work. And so I’ve kind of designed something that I don’t I don’t actually know if it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a go where rather than having everyone together all the time from all disciplines.So we’re talking research, design, copy, engineering, office management, legal, user satisfaction, social marketing, you know, everybody… Splitting it into more disciplines, specific areas. So hoping to split people into pods, design pods, product pods, engineering pods, and marketing and comms pod
Then to hope to tie everything together, we’ve got an operations pod, very exciting, so as a bit of a hub and spoke model with that operations pods, being in the center. We will all still come together but I’d love those pods to operate independently as well.
ff we take the design pods, for example, that will have designers, product designers, UX writers, and researchers, if they’re together, they can really make things happen in their area. If they’re just dealing with that and they can talk about just their things, what can, what can they do in that one area?
Heather Hepburn: And then they’re going to come back into the bigger group and share the progress. So I’m trying to kind of distribute responsibility, but also help people really grow in this area because it’s so important and people are so into it. So I’m hoping to kind of put leads into each of the pods and who I will meet with more often.
It’s a new a new framework, a new strategy. And at the same time, actually trying to look at the whole of Skyscanner’s network strategy. How does OK, if this is going to be how the Accessibility Champions Network works, how does the Security Champions Network work? Does it work in the same way?
Is it different or how does our Race network work, so that’s been really nice, trying to align how everything happens and trying to develop a framework that each network can follow the same framework, making it super simple for a new network just to pop up anytime, because everything will be there for them. So that’s the kind of main focus.
I just I think doing that or really help embed best practices into each of those areas better. And I love the fact, oh, I love the thought of these teams and going off and kind of doing their own thing, but coming back and telling us about it, I think, I think it’s fantastic.
So there’s that. And then the other main focus is trying to really embed best practices into processes, which is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, something that is working in some areas, but it’s not working across the board. So we are having another look at, OK, what do we need to do here?
Actually, I think that might be the first job for the pods. OK, here are the three things that are really going to help us in that design space. Can you guys go and see how you think the best way will be to make that happen?
They know the space much better than I do. So you guys go in and see what you can do. And this is really exciting. So yeah, those are the two main things at the moment.
Mark Boyes-Smith: It’s amazing kind of hearing and really such a short space of time how far you’ve managed to kind of take the conversation.
Heather Hepburn: Yeah, it has been, has been great.
Big things have happened actually in those two years, which are… Well, I guess we are accessibility is now one of our web production standards and app production standards, which is fantastic. It does point to, you know, are all the standards met all of the time, who’s policing the standards but still is there, which is a good start and that’s a whole other project as well as to actually, you know, embed that properly.
But we also joined the Valuable 500, which is a group of 500 companies from across the world who are publicly committing to improving disability inclusion. Founded by Caroline Casey, who is a phenomenal person ,she is remarkable and has so much backing. It’s fantastic and I first heard about it at TechShare Pro because she spoke there. and I was like, we have to be we have to be part of this because every company makes a commitment that’s basically publicly available of what they’re going to do to improve disability inclusion. And it has to be signed by the CEO. Yeah, I couldn’t submit it.
It had to be signed by him. Started the conversation way back and I just watched the numbers grow, it got to 418 of the 500 and I thought, we have to join this…
Yes. So we have a commitment up there and it’s fantastic. To get from a company. You know, we’re such an inclusive employer. We are Skype, Canada, fantastic. It just wasn’t on the radar as was the same with so many organizations. So being able to put it on the radar to the point where the CEO was OK to say, Yeah, OK, well back that and publicly was, was brilliant.
I think that it has helped a lot of things actually happen, since then. We’re going to work with them as well. They have a nice concept for different industries, so members of the Valuable 500 getting together and actually seeing what they can do for the industry, which really excites me.
So, the priority at the moment obviously is getting Skyscanner accessible to everybody. But the thought of being able to do something industry wide is phenomenal. So, we’re meeting up with them to talk about, OK, what can we actually do together? And the best thing about accessibility is there’s no one cares who your competitor is and everyone is just shares what they’re doing, talks about what’s working, what’s not.
I love that. Everybody is your friend and it doesn’t matter where they’re from and it’s brilliant. So I think we could actually do something really special there.
Jason Haritou: What a lovely thought, what an amazing thought. I just want to thank you so much. I have learned so much and I’ve had an amazing hour with our cocktails and code and just chatting, where can people find you? Where can people find out more about you and what you do?
Heather Hepburn: I guess LinkedIn is the best place to connect and I’ve got a couple of articles up there as well about the work we’ve been doing at Skyscanner. I guess outlining how to kick things off, but I love speaking to new folks. I speak to different companies all the time and anyone who wants to chat, just connect with me on LinkedIn.
Mark Boyes-Smith: Thank you so.
Heather Hepburn: Lovely to chat to you both. Thank you.
Jason Haritou: So that’s all we’ve got time for today, but join us next week when we’re going to be sharing a coffee with Alp Turgut. He is a senior UX designer, contractor, speaker, and mentor, and he’s going to be talking to us about freelancing.
