Figma plugin

This project is particularly dear to me because I initiated it. I started a conversation with the accessibility director about organizational goals and the status quo of accessibility at eBay. The discussion led to collaboration and pitching to the leadership to get funding for building an accessibility plugin. Our team was small, which meant that besides leading the team, I also drove efforts to define the scope and roadmap, evangelized, created content for communications, established the team’s rhythm, managed the project, and anything and everything in between.

• Figma Inlcude Plugin community page
• Github open-source Inlcude Plugin code
• Articles on eBay Tech blog, Fast Company, Design Week, Forbes, and Figma
• CSUN Assistive Technology Conference 2023

The current industry standard for considering accessibility in the design phase is to create annotations for handing off the designs to developers. The accessibility annotations specify the implementation and resolve some of the accessibility issues in the design stage that, otherwise, are passed on to code and likely to end up in front of customers.

However, through concentrating on the implementation of accessibility, the process is overly focused on how engineers are developing the product and not enough on how the designers intend the customers to experience the product.

Designers that are new to accessibility annotations are often overwhelmed with how to start, which aspects are a priority for design consideration, or how to communicate the accessibility intent to engineers. This results in designers' steep learning curve in the technical and legal context.

Our team’s ultimate goal was to deliver a more accessible, consistent, and usable eBay experience. To do that, we needed to meet the designers where they are so that it is easy to do earlier and more frequent accessibility checks. We decided to develop Include, a Figma accessibility plugin, that facilitates that.

The Include Figma plugin provides an easy way to consider a comprehensive set of accessibility concepts for web and native during any stage of design. It generates annotations that help designers confidently communicate intent and support engineering partners in building fully accessible products.

The plugin increases the designer's efficiency in annotating designs via automated checks. For example, they can scan a mockup for text contrast issues or images. The plugin also reduces the overwhelm by showing information when it is relevant and guiding step-by-step with little visual prompts and handy tips. A designer can do everything within the Figma environment that is familiar and doesn't require creating additional documents or using different tools.

Deciding what to do first was the hardest part. The team was passionate about making a change and wanted to create the best possible product. We prioritized based on how big of an impact a particular feature would have and the size of effort it required. At the same time, being a small grassroots team allowed us to provide value quickly by improving iteratively.

Since I was in charge of leading how the team works, I was able to put forward a customer-centric framework (Jobs-to-be-done) and pod-based way of working (with all team members involved throughout the project).

Through the Jobs-to-be-done workshop, our team established desired outcomes: reducing designers’ overwhelm, enhancing designer-developer communication, fitting accessibility considerations into the designer’s process, and ensuring that we ask designers to think about the accessible experience (rather than doing redundant annotations that developers get for free).

That was followed by a series of concept developments, testing them with users (for both design and engineering sides), and gradually moving through MVP and beta versions.

The challenges of thinking about accessibility early in the design process are not unique to eBay but frequent throughout the industry. We wanted to share the plugin with other designers to help uplevel the quality of digital products beyond our company. That is why we launched the plugin externally for free. We also published the code as open source so others can customize it and contribute back to the community.

It was great to see the importance of the work acknowledged by the industry. Our story was featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Design Week, and Figma itself! There were also multiple shares of the plugin by design and accessibility leaders including by Smashing Magazine and by sidebar.io.

Our team was invited to give a talk at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, the biggest accessibility conference in the US. We focused on how we see the plugin help shifting left and thinking about accessibility early in the design process. We showcased our plugin and gave a little demo of how it works. We were excited to get a lot of interest (full attendance) and great energy in the room.

The warm reception was echoed in plugin views. In just the first six weeks, we got over 7.2k views and 3.4k downloads. That is almost a 50% conversion rate. We also got 259 clicks worth of love.