FOSS Backstage 2024

A UX Toolbox for Usability, Accessibility, and Security
2024-03-05 , Stage Wintergarten

How do we move usability beyond a set of heuristics, towards a holistic approach that mitigates risk within human-centered tool design? This talk will explore our User Experience Toolbox, a set of resources that aims to bridge accessibility, usability, and security as core principles.


In today’s landscape of increasingly riskier digital experiences, successful software development requires more than just functionality and aesthetics. The challenges faced by software teams require prioritizing user experiences while carefully addressing potential harms and respecting human rights. While traditional technical security audits serve a valuable purpose, they do not typically focus on the socio-technical aspects of a tool that make systems insecure, like its usability. Similarly, accessibility practices and audits often happen in addition to, not in concert with, usable security reviews, and sometimes they don’t happen at all. As UX practitioners, we’ve learned that there is interplay, overlap, and synergistic benefits between each of these aspects, and developed our open UX Toolbox for Risk Mitigation and Accessibility to provide tool teams, designers, and product managers with an adaptable set of resources that help them work holistically toward secure, usable, and accessible user experiences. This talk will explore the research and landscape analysis that led to the development of the toolbox, discuss use cases for some of the open resources included, and seek community feedback to help improve it collaboratively.

See also: Slides (1.1 MB)

Katie is a lead design researcher at Superbloom, a nonprofit design and research organization that helps Open Source teams design technology and services that center and protect communities’ most vulnerable needs. She is a practitioner of human-centered design research, incorporating mixed methods from social science, UX design, and participatory action research. Before working in public interest tech, she wrote about and researched housing justice and gentrification policy in the San Francisco Bay Area.