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Please, please, please understand your end users

In an attempt to solicit feedback, Scion commits an end-user faux pas which drives me nuts. In a previous post, I showcased a similar end-user violation by Men's Health.

Website accessibility is no different than in-store accessibility within a retail environment. Would you design your store aisles and product shelving so only people that were 5'10" or shorter could fit into the aisles? Of course not. Even if the majority of your customers may be 5'10" or shorter and only a small percentage must duck and maneuver their way through crammed aisles, this small percentage are being turned away for really no reason other than poor planning. There is no excuse for this type of website accessibility limitation because it's not a bug -- it was literally a decision made to specifically not develop a survey (of all things) to be accessible to everybody.

When working on the bleeding edge of technology with ajax and dealing with the browser-specific intricacies of javascript (among many other challenges of a web 2.0 implementation with an older end-user demographic), we spend a large percentage of our time in the QA stage testing features of Levolor.com across operating systems and web browsers. From Windows 2000 running "vintage" versions of IE6 to Mac OS X running Safari 3, Levolor.com is very accessible.

We're human and do admit to making mistakes -- and sometimes the capabilities of an older browser simply cannot support web 2.0 functionality -- but at the same time go out of our way to ensure an optimal experience for all of our visitors from accessibility to usability. Popular brands like Scion need to embrace similar strategies for all online touch-points.