In this The New Stack Makers podcast, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams spoke with Ayesha Mazumdar, senior UX designer at Optimizely, during Node+JS Interactive in Montreal about what needs to be done — and why human-centered designs are becoming not only nice-to-have features but technical requirements.

Oftentimes, when developers and engineers think about human-centered design, there is a “very prominent tendency to go around designing for humans like us,” Mazumdar said. “This is subconsciously something I think we all fall victim to, but I think [human-centered design] is becoming this technical requirement,” Mazumdar said. “We’re realizing certain users aren’t able to interact with the application we’ve built in certain ways, because we never accounted for that use case in the first place.”

The main issue is that a design might be accessible for some people, but not necessarily for the end user, Mazumdar said. “Accessibility has to be continued down the line, and show up in the developers workflow so that we can ensure the final product is actually usable by absolutely everyone in all aspects,” Mazumdar said “And so I think, making it a technical requirement involves making it part of your development process,” including making it part of GitHub and Q&A processes, for example. “Inserting accessibility checks along the way ensures that we don’t lose it at any point during the development cycle,” Mazumdar said.