Omnis is Latin for all or every, for those of us that are not so familiar with the word omnichannel, that basically means every channel. In terms of e-commerce it means:
Omnichannel is a term used in ecommerce and retail to describe a business strategy that aims to provide a seamless shopping experience across all channels, including in store, mobile, and online.
Another explanation of omnichannel from Oracle retail (opens in new window).
In my book, it’s about proper ecommerce user experience that covers physical world and digital world. A design (or business) strategy that makes ecommerce user experience high quality across all channels.
Today I will focus on digital channels – like online store, mobile app, social media, online advertisement, email, virtual reality, extended reality and other relevant user experiences.
Even if you are not in the scope of European Accessibility Act, I suggest you start with accessibility to improve Conversion Rate Optimization.
It’s difficult to find accessible solutions, it’s impossible to find omnichannels to be accessible
Even best in class ecommerce vendors have issues. Having highly dynamic and large scale systems accessible at all times seems to be impossible even with businesses that invest a lot in accessibility. It’s normally much worse with organizations that are seemingly not aware of – or just ignoring accessibility.
It takes just a couple of minutes to find inaccessibility and it does not take a specialist, let me show you what is typically wrong;
- Autoplaying carousels and videos with no pause or stop buttons.
- Poor contrasts of text and interactive elements.
- Placeholder alternative texts in emails that are visible for everybody, before they allow images in their email client.
- Videos without captions.
- Buttons too small to operate.
- Unusable form error messages.
I could go on and on, but you get my point. Adding other channels to the situation, repeating same issues over and over again is the omnichannel inaccessibility I was referring to.
Even when websites are obviously improving on their accessibility issues we often see other channels delivering inaccessibility. Most common example are email campaigns where alt texts are often totally forgotten, revealing email vendor placeholders, or every alt text just becomes the company name.
Different teams producing different channels gets obvious when there is no consistency and mobile apps live their own life – as in visual design and accessibility standard when compared to main channel (usually a website, but can also be the other way around).
Video adds, outsourced to agencies, with no strategy besides trying to be viral is another example. Often made in a way that even captions can’t make accessible for visually impaired people.
Not to even mention virtual and augmented reality that requires research beyond existing accessibility guidelines and therefore extremely difficult to make accessible.
We need leaders to lead, with accessibility
The more I work with accessibility, the more I see the solution in leadership. That needs to require and empower accessibility. That needs to lead and make sure accessibility is implemented.
Where to start? I am certain that process of change management is nothing new for leaders. Change is a constant in all organizations, and that is not only philosophical statement. Therefore I suggest starting measuring accessibility, in parallel mapping accessibility maturity and implementing EN 17161, Design for All.
Until organization can be self-sufficient it needs external help and I need to add that people with disabilities need to be involved early, especially when we want to build omnichannel accessibility usable and not only technically compliant!
