Improving Profitability through Accessibility
Michael Durrant has found that paying attention to basic usability and accessibility guidelines can make millions of extra dollars for his company. He describes his uphill journey to improve accessibility and usability for users purchasing car insurance through their website. Michael shares many factors to consider and barriers to overcome—from those who thought it wouldn’t make much difference to their customers, to those who pointed out that it had been tried before and not made any money, to those who didn’t have knowledge of or even agree with some of the basic principles of usability and accessibility. Michael uses this experience as an opportunity to show that doing the right thing not only can help broaden a product’s reach but also can help the bottom line considerably, an argument that holds great appeal in his company—and probably in your company, too.
After working as a software developer for more than twenty years, Michael Durrant found his true passion as an evangelist for quality engineering. He has since worked in several small- to medium-sized startups in the Boston area as a principal quality engineer. A passionate Stack Overflow-er, Michael is in the top twenty on the Quality Assurance Stack Exchange site. He frequently has fun with Unix and Linux, too. Michael has spent the past six years working with the Ruby on Rails framework and has occupied himself recently with writing readable and maintainable UI Feature tests using Ruby, RSpec, and Capybara.