Sponsored Project
Summary
Collaborated with Ux professionals to design 3 features, to make data visualizations in Microsoft Excel accessible to colorblind users to improve data interpretation.
Impact
Increase in interpretation of visualizations by colorblind users.
My Contribution
Conducted Research
Designed Hi-Fi Screens
Team
2 Senior Sponsors Product Managers from Microsoft
2 UX Designer
2 Researchers
Timeline
4 Months
Tools
Figma
Slack
Zoom
To design for accessibility in Microsoft tools for underserved communities.
Microbyte. (2024, February 19). What’s Included in the Microsoft Modern Workplace?
Focused on Microsoft Excel as a tool for colorblind users.
Microsoft Excel is a vital tool in finance, used by over 750 million people, yet it lacks essential accessibility support for over 300 million individuals with color vision deficiency, particularly Deuteranopia and Protanopia.
Identified areas where Microsoft could improve in terms of colorblind accessibility.
Financial charts often use red and green to indicate performance, but for colorblind users, this leads to confusion, inaccuracy, and a dependence on colleagues to verify their interpretations.
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(What to Consider When Visualizing Data for Colorblind Readers | Datawrapper Blog, 2020)
Identified user's stories to understand the causes of their problems and issues while using Excel and created a persona.
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Colorblind users create Microsoft-linked profiles that store their custom palettes (or use presets). Visualizations automatically adjust to their preferences.
An enhanced checker scans charts, heatmaps, and formulas for inaccessible colors. Users can one-click “Auto Fix” to apply corrections based on their profile or preset palettes.
Enables toggle views like High-contrast mode and Pattern-over-color Colorblind filters (visible only to the user, even during screen-sharing)
Since we did not have access to people in the financial industry so we decided to test how data scientists would use our tools to make colorblind visualisations.
Despite the limited resources, we were able to test our prototypes with one color blind user who used Excel often.
We presented our designs to our sponsors and analyzing the feedback from the sponsors and users we decided to add features that would complement our current designs and iterate on them.
Users felt anxious as they couldnt distinguish and talk about the visualisations in realtime while screen sharing.
Asking users to pick every color themselves was overwhelming and against the goal of automation.
Users were unable to understand why certain colors were used.
During presentations or screen-sharing, only colorblind users see a personalised layer with assistive descriptions. This enables them to follow along without modifying the view for others.
To avoid over-customization, we introduced pre-built colorblind-safe palettes. These allow one-click application of the most inclusive color combinations, reducing user fatigue.
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Users can add hover-tooltips to explain the semantic purpose of colors. E.g., red might trigger “Warning: Critical Value” on hover, improving clarity for all.
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We mapped the outcome of our project and the potential impact it could have on users.
We set a plan for further behavioral testing to understand how our solution would fit into our users life and understand the social impact of our solution.
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Identified the most important metric for the success of our features.
Planned for the development of features using RICE feature prioritization.
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Created a high-level roadmap for development and testing based on feature prioritization.
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Determined how features can scale across Microsoft.
Delivered documentation along with final designs to Microsoft sponsors and presented our design process to them.
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Feel free to drop me a message anytime—I'm all ears for cool and creative ideas! Lets make peoples lives better with the help of AI.
desnehashsh@gmail.com
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