Gina Bhawalkar

Over the last two years, digital accessibility quickly became a business priority. Forrester has seen a significant increase in inquiries related to accessibility, and more companies are hiring accessibility specialists — an encouraging signal that companies are making investments in this space. This increase is partly driven by the pandemic, which elevated the importance of […]

Does your organization want to create inclusive experiences for your customers? Are you following an inclusive design process? If the answer to both questions is “yes,” great! But if you’re like most companies we speak with, you’re missing an essential component for creating inclusive experiences: an inclusive and diverse design team. Having such a team […]

Is your site ready to welcome all customers this holiday season? Follow these best practices to apply inclusive language in your customer experience.

Are you creating inclusive experiences for your customers? Many companies aren’t. For example, here’s a sampling of what we heard when we evaluated typical approaches to collecting personal information from consumers: “There is no open box to identify yourself. Ticking ‘other’ is alienating; therefore, if I didn’t identify as male or female, I wouldn’t feel […]

Our research shows that the best organizations use a design system to streamline and scale experience design (XD). Learn the benefits of a design system.

(This blog is coauthored with Gina Bhawalkar.) Accessibility is one of the hottest topics in design. More and more companies are making it a business priority. We wanted to determine how big of a monetary impact accessibility will have on design technology vendors and services companies offering design. Based on our analysis, at least $10 […]

Update 4/21/22:  For more recent guidance on this category of vendors please see my blog post Get Help With Digital Accessibility: Tips For Selecting An Accessibility Partner. Let’s get straight to the point: There’s no quick fix for making your digital experiences accessible. That’s true even if your approach to accessibility is narrowly focused on […]

The design industry is booming. Our recent research, “The Design Industry, 2021,” estimates the size of the global design industry to be $162 billion and growing. But the increasing recognition of the importance of design creates a challenge for design leaders: How do you effectively establish, scale, and evolve a high-performing design practice that reliably […]

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, in many cases making digital the only channel through which customers could interact with brands, Forrester saw a significant uptick in inquiries related to accessibility, mostly from companies getting serious about accessibility for the first time. The pandemic served as a wake-up call not just about the importance of digital […]

La pandémie a servi de signal d'alarme, non seulement sur l'importance de l'accessibilité numérique, mais aussi sur ses avantages. En savoir plus.

I speak with companies weekly about the growing importance of digital accessibility, and prior to 2020, those conversations almost always started with this question: “How do we make our sites and apps accessible so we don’t get sued?” It’s a fair question — after all, the number of web and mobile accessibility lawsuits has increased […]

L'inclusion numérique n'est plus seulement axée sur la conformité mais sur la création d'une excellente expérience client pour tous.

To give you insights on the state of experience design (XD)/user experience (UX) teams, my colleagues and I, who cover design and UX, run an annual survey. In our most recent one, 61% of respondents reported that their design team impacts strategic decisions, for example. And I’m excited to share that our 2020 State Of […]

A design system continually evolves — it’s not a project a design team can complete and move on from. In fact, a design system requires an ongoing time and resources investment just like a customer-facing digital product.

The two companies' recent actions highlight the difference between placing accessibility front and center versus treating it as an afterthought.

What do consumers expect from their banks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? We interviewed 40 customers of 14 banks to find out.

There’s a new buzz phrase in the air — “open source design.” What is it? It’s a “remix” (to borrow a term from Figma) of the open source software movement’s commitment to sharing and collaborative validation and improvement of software source code. What Are Examples Of Open Source Design? You don’t need to look far to find companies embracing this idea by: Making design systems public. Most design teams are […]

When I speak with companies that are new to digital accessibility, they almost always start the conversation with some version of this question: “What do we need to do to comply with accessibility standards so we don’t get sued?” They’re right to ask, because web accessibility lawsuits are proliferating — there were over 2,000 in […]

Discover what federal agency websites excel at and where are the biggest areas of opportunity.