When: July 2019
Length: 3 weeks
Role: Primary designer
Team: Just myself. However I often utilized my design manager and fellow designer for feedback
Task: Create a workshop that would teach the greater Vacasa design team about inclusive and accessible design practices and how to implement them into their workflow
Vacasa's design team of about 12 people had a quarterly get-together where we would all travel to the Portland headquarters. This was an excellent opportunity for us to knowledge share and update each other on what lies ahead.
When asked to fill a whole-day timeslot during one of these quarterly meetups, my manager asked me to create a workshop to teach accessible and inclusive design practices. We were both passionate about improving the design culture at Vacasa to be more accessible and inclusive.
I had been trained in various aspects of accessibility but I had never created or ran a workshop for accessibility. So I went to the web looking for examples of accessibility workshops. That is when I found the amazing Microsoft Inclusive Design resources. This included various videos, methodologies, and most importantly a series of activities.
With this toolkit of accessibility activities, I developed a framework of:
To build the slide deck, I gathered informational videos and Inclusive Design activities and organized each piece of information or activity into one of the three framework sections. Finally, I mapped the flow in order to estimate the time and make sure that the framework sections made sense and transitioned nicely.
The results of the workshop were very positive:
What I liked:
What I learned:
What I would do differently: