Inside Shopify UX S2 E05 | Accessibility and inclusivity in practice

Lola Oyelayo-Pearson: Welcome to Inside Shopify UX. As always, I’m your host, Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, UX Director at Shopify. On today’s episode, I speak with Senior Accessibility Specialist, Scott Vinkle, and Content Designer, Shay Perez, regarding inclusivity and accessibility. This is a really real talk episode on a topic I am passionate about and something everyone across the tech spectrum can certainly do better. I hope you enjoy. Thank you so, so much for joining me for this amazing episode on accessibility. As always, my name is Lola Oyelayo-Pearson. I’m Direct of UX here at Shopify, working on our money products. And today I’m joined by two amazing guests talking about a subject that is close to my heart, but I certainly wouldn’t necessarily grade myself massively highly on, but I do think it’s an important conversation for us to have, and that is around accessibility. So maybe hand over and let them introduce themselves and we can get into the conversation. Shay, do you wanna go first?

Shay Perez: Sure, so I’m Shay, Shay Perez. I’ve been at Shopify for about six and half years and I’m a content designer on Shopify Email.

Lola: Amazing, and Scott.

Scott Vinkle: Nice, yeah, I’m Scott Vinkle. I’m an Accessibility Specialist at Shopify. I’ve been back at Shopify for just over four years now, and I’m current only situated on the Flagship Themes team.

Lola: Did you say “back at Shopify,” Scott? Are you one of these boomerang folks who left and came back?

Scott: Yes, exactly. My first trip through the shop was around 2015. I was on the front-end accessibility team. Sorry, not front end accessibility team, front-end admin team, rather.

Lola: Ah, okay.

Scott: And that was a thing. It’s no longer a thing, but for reasons I left for a couple years. I actually joined up with the Simply Accessible Team with Derek Featherstone, and during that time I learned a ton about web accessibility, digital accessibility. Being embedded within that community helps me learn a ton. And for one reason or another, I decided to leave and I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next and I realized that my time at Shopify was really enjoyable and I wanted to come back and bring those years of experience with me to be, basically, the first in-house accessibility consultant that Shopify’s had, so that was my initial sort of plan.

Lola: Four years later, here we are.

Lola: Okay, so let’s baseline this conversation before we get into it too far, because much like words like innovation and inclusion, there are many people who talk about this thing called accessibility, but definitions are constantly shifting. So maybe let’s lead with that. Shay, how would you define accessibility for people who want to know what you are interested in or what it is that draws you about it?

Shay: Hmm, well, I don’t know if I can give a technical definition of accessibility, but for me it’s usability, essentially. It’s giving access to people, making sure that we have an equitable experience for anybody who wants to use software. And then inclusion I think goes a step further. So there’s access and then there’s like not othering, or excluding, or tokenizing or using still ableist language, even if you can still use the product, and so I think they go hand in hand, but they’re different.

Lola: I absolutely love that distinction. I would argue that’s quite a technical framing, but a very useful and easy to understand one. Scott, what about for you?

Scott: Yeah, I’d say that’s very accurate what Shay has said. I would say that, you know, for me, accessibility means making a product accessible and usable by people with disabilities who rely on assistive technology. But there’s a difference between accessibility and usability, I think, where you can make something that’s technically accessible, people can get to it, use it, sort of more or less understand it, but is it actually a good user experience. That’s sort of the question, right? I think that’s where, usability testing comes into play, is I can work with my team to make something that’s technically accessible, but then we host usability sessions to make sure we’re actually implementing something that’s usable and, you know, delightful, whatever the case may be, that they’ll wanna come back and use it again and again and share with their friends and family.

Lola: So this is getting to a really interesting point already, which is, you know, because if you think about it, in the last, I don’t know, I’ve been in UX for a really long time. I feel good about it. I know I look 21, it’s fine. I certainly feel like usability is easier now because our consciousness about bad usability is, like, way higher. The kind of the math and the ROI discussion is, you know, immutable, better products with better user experiences do better in real terms, so everyone’s kind of socialized on making things look aesthetically pleasing, readable, making language simpler, making it, but I feel like we’ve stuttered and started around accessibility and even though conversations been there the whole time, we’re still at a point where like accessibility still feels like a harder thing to do than just pure like usability. Would you agree?

Scott: That’s an interesting point about the conversation being there. I might kind of disagree with that. I think one of the points that we need to start with, with systemizing considerations, might be to start by having those conversations. So, I think, by talking about accessibility and disability often we normalize the conversation and hopefully remove stigmatization. So people really need to understand more about disability and accessibility. I think first and foremost, it’s important to use the word in the correct context like we’ve been describing here. The typical, general, the context, the meaning is, you know, to make something available, whereas the context we’re discussing here is to make things work for people with disabilities who rely on assisted technology. So, I think, if there’s a general understanding of what accessibility is and why it’s important, people would react differently, react with an understanding and empathy to the problem rather than indifference or pushback.

Lola: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think the thing that I maybe was saying earlier on is that we’ve kind of normalized those conversations that allow us to have much more affinity with the idea of usability, but we haven’t taken accessibility along in the process. I still, you know, it’s kind of back in the day, like the most people are still kind of saying, “Okay, well, what’s the minimum WCAG standard that we can go to.” And, you know, “Let’s just aim for certification,” but they’re not really saying, “Hey, if we just made this small change in the way we designed it, a bunch of extra people would be able to access this, and we’re not targeting a, kind of, sign-off on QA, We’re actually targeting more usage and more kind of inclusion in lots of ways.” And maybe to come to you, Shay, I feel like you did a really great job by releasing something this year that kind of spoke to the simplicity in which the message can be delivered. And you just came out, you’ve released these content guidelines. So tell us a little bit about, like, why you did that piece of work and maybe some of the reception you’ve had since it’s been out there. Cause it is just wonderfully easy, I think, to take what you put out there and use it, right. So, so talk to us about that. Yeah.

Shay: Well that’s a goal met, and I think that’s a content design goal in general, so that makes my heart sing to hear. But I think it’s kind of interesting cause I was thinking a little differently from the both of you or maybe like shades of differently when you were just saying the, the previous thing. I think, in my experience, a lot of people who, usability, and accessibility and inclusion, they understand and care at the foundational level. But I feel like a lot of us, at least when I was starting the project, and still to this day, it’s like, but how, like, almost the technical, like how do I practically do it?

Lola: Yeah.

Shay: I think, like, step zero is like, why is it important? Understanding it, hearing the term. I feel like a lot of us are sort of, step one. We’re like “we do care,” but like, “what now?” And so the process of those guidelines was partially like me educating myself and also kind of putting out like that, here’s how we can take some steps towards it. Yeah. I’m trying to think of where to start. It was like a six month labor of love. So maybe we center this.

Lola: Yeah. Let’s, I mean, let’s, what did you put out? So we can kind of frame that for the audience. What have you actually produced then?

Shay: Right. So we put together a set of content design guidelines. So anybody who writes product content specifically. So for us, that’s merchant facing content. Those are the people who use our platform. These are guide lines for how to avoid racist language, gender language, or ableist language. And there’s sort of two pieces to it. There’s what we call the conceptual, Like, here’s what this is and why it’s important at a very quick, high level. And then it’s really tactical and practical. There’s word lists, there’s terms to avoid, there’s alternatives and just ways that, hopefully, if you’re kind of stuck in going like, “Ooh, I know I shouldn’t say blacklist,” but like, “What should I say instead?” Or, “is that true?” “Should I say that?” You can just quickly do a little command F search and you can find the answer.

Lola: And that there was the simplicity bit for me, like, realized, cause you kind of integrated it almost into the design system fabric that we have at Shopify. And so you would easily find the thing that you needed to be much more inclusive in that moment as opposed to like feeling alone, which I love. So Scott, tell us about how, like, yeah, you are embedded in teams actually, like, helping to make small changes happen in the way we build things. So tell us a little bit about how you do that and how it works.

Scott: Yeah. Okay. So I’ll share with you what I’ve been working with recently for, with my own, with the immediate team I’m on, Flagship Themes. It’s a new workflow I’m calling, “The Inclusive Design Workflow.” I think it sounds pretty cool.

Lola: I like that.

Scott: So, yeah, so we start with the design. So a high level at the design level, before developer handoff, the designer will actually ping me in Figma first, indicating that their design is ready for review. And then I’ll go into Figma, the design file, and then I’ll use the A11y Annotation Kit, which is a Figma community file. And I’ll just add notes on things like HTML elements, attributes, states, and properties, focus path, the DOM structure, et cetera. And also catch a few other things, maybe perhaps something like a color contrast issue, or other design concerns such as a custom, or a custom focus or hover state. So when I’m done with those annotations, I’ll let designer know that I’m all finished and they will pass the design over to the developer, so they’ll start coding. And when it comes to the development side, basically, the developer will take the Figma file and write code based on the annotations and the notes that I provided. So, basically, the Figma file actually serves as an accessibility specification for that component.

Lola: Nice.

Scott: And when the developer feels like the code and UI are ready for testing, they’ll ping me back in their PR on GitHub for, for review. So at that point, I’ll start testing using a combination of automated and manual testing, including various screen readers on desktop and mobile devices, voice dictation, and screen magnification software. And if the component is particularly dynamic or complex, I’ll actually also go and set up a usability test session with Shopify partner Fable. So in case you don’t know, Fable is, actually, a crowd sourced, usability testing platform, which hires people with disabilities. And using their system, I’m able to set up a session with any type of user who uses a specific type of technology that I would like to have tested. And it’s really, it’s really awesome. It’s very helpful.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: So when I feel the component, is in good shape, I’ll let the developer know that things are all good and then we’ll ship. So the whole point of this workflow is to address accessibility and inclusive design as early as possible.

Lola: Yes.

Scott: By doing so we’ll have, potentially eliminated a lot of the barriers to access before launch, saving the team a ton of time and effort to retrofit accessibility after. And it’s very expensive, right?

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: So why it’s working so well, I think, is that everyone on this team, Flagship Themes, from the designers, to the developers, to our leads, they understand why accessibility is important. So they know who I am, why I’m on the team and they trust my recommendations.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: So right now I’m currently working to scale this model with other teams by hiring more accessibility specialists, such as myself. I’m also working on some internal training material based on team specific product areas. So there’s a lot going on here. I also need to figure out, yeah, I also need to figure out how to measure this work and how to come up with a set of deliverables in terms of what team leads can add to their roadmaps.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: So, basically, how we can further scale this model.

Lola: Do you know what I love about that? And I guess what is ultimately gonna become that value prop is, I think, linking back to that idea of, like, how usability just became a thing that we all cared about is, the inclusion of designers at the earliest possible state. So, like, there used to be a time when business requirements doc would be produced and a business analyst, which I used to be, would then write the spec, and then a developer would build the spec, and then we would do usability testing afterwards. And sometimes a designer would be included beforehand, but often you were kind of just making things work because, you know, that’s what you did. And then suddenly that flipped and you were like, “Well, we’ll start with design.” And then we kind of did this weird waterfall thing, but eventually we were like, “How about we start with design and development kind of around each other with, like, Agile, so people talk to each other more.” And I feel like that’s how we raise the floor on, like, usable products being released more as a default. And it sounds to me like you’ve, basically, started that workflow that will, essentially, do the same thing for accessibility. So at some point the idea of having an eng team or, like, a product team with design, content, engineering and no accessibility specialist should just feel stupid. Right? It’s just like, duh, why would we do that? Like of course we need a Scott, you know. That’s the ideal state, I hope that we-

Shay: I hope we request one. I would love that so much.

Lola: I would like a few. But it sounds also like you, with that audit step, like, you are catching the types of naive mistakes that your average person would make because they don’t have that lived experience of that accessibility. So, like, something as easy as, like, changing the way you deliver a focus state could make the difference for an assistive technology. You just wouldn’t think about it unless you knew about that technology, right?

Scott: Right. Exactly. I think that’s, I think maybe, Shay, you mentioned before how we don’t really know how to go about this. When we understand accessibility, what it is and why it’s important, but how do I actually do it? What do people, how do people use assist systems technology and what do they expect in terms of a usable environment?

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: That’s sort of hopefully what I’m going to get to in terms of my training. I’m working with a few other folks at Shopify to build out training modules, for example, for onboarding, and then also, like I said, for training geared towards specific product areas to try and share, basically, at a high level, this is the expectation and this is how you test, and hopefully be good. You know, we don’t expect people to be experts right away or anything like that. I think it’s more the idea to start the conversation, build awareness and then if they have more questions, where do they go from there?

Lola: Yeah. That is labor that I think is unfortunate that people with sort of different abilities have just gotten used to doing on behalf of tech, right? Is that they are, you know, bug catches, they’re, like, QA folks, they’re on the receiving end of the experience and then having to help us all try and make a better product. And, ideally, that should just never be the case, you know. You know, would we be able to constantly be on top of every new assistive technology? In an ideal world, yes, but probably, practically, no, but certainly not making tons of obvious mistakes over and over again. Like, that just is the kind of thing that has to go away, you know?

Scott: So coming back to this idea of how to actually measure an organization, how it’s doing. There’s a framework that’s called, “The Accessibility Maturity Model,” and there’s a few of them out there. Shopify partner Level Access has created one that they have, Microsoft has their own, which measure measures their own internal progress. But like the idea of, this one here, it’s very simplified, so. Level one is called, “Initiating.” So you’re at this level, if you’re starting the conversation within your organization about the importance of accessibility. So if you’re working on, on accessibility, it’s very ad hoc, it’s very volunteer based and not really well documented. You’re at this initiating level.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: Level two is called, “Establishing.” So you’re at this level, if your company is committed to accessibility, either via public statement to our policy page, which Shopify does have.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: But you’re still getting started with putting the practices in place and processes for these workflows. So this may include things like individual contributors with some experience with adding accessibility to their workflows, which we have a lot of, a lot of folks who do this.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: Or someone taking the time to create an actual inclusive workflow for a team or establishing training, such as, what I’m doing. And then level three is called, “Scaling.” This is the top level. You’re, basically, at this level, if you have established processes and practices in place for digital accessibility. So you’re working to scale these processes to other areas of the organization. And this level’s really about leveling up, sharing widely and making book practices repeatable, in other spaces across the org.

Shay: Well, I’m just thinking that, like, you’ve talked a lot about how do we measure it. And to me it’s like, how do we measure anything we do in UX? Like, we talk a lot about quality bars. We talk about beautiful designs and a lot of standards. Accessibility is that to me, it’s part and parcel of it. There can’t be a beautiful, usable, exciting, gorgeous product experience or a good user experience without accessibility and inclusion.

Lola: Yeah, well, accessibility in itself is a form of the quality bar, so, like, you can’t, I completely agree with that. I completely agree with that. And I think it’s, yeah. Go ahead, Scott.

Scott: I was gonna say that there’s a big myth out there that people think you can’t have a beautiful design and not have accessibility at the same time. Completely untrue.

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: We are throwing that out the window every day on the Flagship Themes Team. These themes are looking gorgeous and, by the way, they’re also very highly accessible.

Lola: Yeah. Well and it’s also, like, one of the things about the tech getting better in general. Right? Does anybody miss a million and one hover states and tool tips when they moved around the internet? No, because, like, basically, good content was buried under like something that you couldn’t see and tell that you could click on. So, like, getting rid of that, to me, was a massive improvement for everybody’s user experience of the web, because suddenly now we have, like, things that are actual touch targets. Things you can click. And so things don’t have this impermanence and you’re not doing mouse dancing all over the place. But I do think the idea of setting the bar at accessibility and kind of combining that with having a Scott, we’re gonna call it having a Scott, let’s start that campaign and we’ll go around interning, we’ll be like, “okay, who’s up for having a Scott?” “We’re gonna create a Scott thing around the world.” But, like, I feel like that combination is the combination that’s gonna get us there, because at some point you need an expert who’s gonna be able to say, “Hey, here’s the thing.” And this is also why, like, we don’t ask engineers to design things anymore because we need actual product designers. And at time you wanna socialize the baseline of what good is. And so you want the maximum number of people to be thinking about that essentially, and everybody to be sort of pushing upwards from there. So, yeah, what would you, I mean, what would, maybe projecting into the future then, like, what is that ideal state that you could imagine where accessibility was a thing that just was a natural and organic part of the work, as opposed to a initiative or a campaign or like something that you’ve gotta pump people up about? What does that start to look and feel like for you?

Scott: Well, exactly. I think that is the ideal state is that I, as a an accessibility specialist, am not needed at Shopify because our designers and developers, our content writers have all these knowledge as part of their workflow, and they just do it by default.

Lola: See, I love that, but I disagree with one part of it, which is that we wouldn’t need a Scott. Right. I think, well, so it’s the same thing. I think about this as it maybe relates to a bunch of other specialist craft areas, right? Like, I don’t really believe in unicorns. And I think like tooling gets better and people’s range expands and we can all do a little bit more of more stuff. But if you really care about something, sometimes you need somebody whose job it is to really optimize for that thing. And I think there’s always a danger, like, when a thing becomes everybody’s job, it becomes nobody’s job. And maybe that’s part of the challenge, right? There was a point in time, I think 10 years ago, when everyone was hot on accessibility and then it immediately went to this everybody’s job point. And, actually, what that did was it desensitized us to the topics. And, and then we kind of forgot about it again. And now here we are trying to restart that conversation again and say, like, do you know what I mean? So I’m kind of like, I don’t know if it’s everybody’s job for a long time, if ever, you know, to just try and maintain that.

Scott: I think that is accurate to how it is decentralized when it becomes everyone’s job, but I don’t know, it’s tough because in a way it is everyone’s job, but at the same time, it is so expansive. Accessibility is so big.

Lola: Exactly.

Scott: That to be embedded in this community and to keep up with the technology and to know all the little tiny nuance that I’m experiencing, as I read the blogs, as I go to community events, when I attend conferences, it is a full-time job to keep up with this industry in itself.

Lola: Absolutely.

Shay: Definitely, but I think that there’s always room for having a Scott on the team. So there’s somebody who’s always going to the conferences. Who’s kind of like leading the charge and owning it, but it’s still part of everyone’s job. Similar to like knowledge management. I can spin up like an internal document that shares the knowledge that I have, but there’s still always gonna be that knowledge management expert, who’s gonna help me, “Where should it live,” and, “How should I socialize it?” And like, what’s the best way to do it and can answer my questions.

Lola: Yeah. I think, and maybe, does that align with your worldview of what, like, good looks like Shay?

Shay: Yeah, definitely. I think that a lot of the issue, I come back to like the intentionality and the care is often there. Like, we see it, like, I know for myself, I can speak for myself only. If you had like job stories and you broke it down, it’s like, “I want to do X, but I don’t know what the next is.” “Where do I look?” “What should I be doing?” I’ve started using things like the Accessibility Annotation Kit, but like, my confidence is low, cause I don’t know which parts of the kit always to be using. So, I think, having that knowledge, captured, and shared and readily available. So if it’s the early stages of a project, and myself as an IC in UX, I can just go to the right place and know, “Ooh, I’m at the stage where I should be doing X, Y.” when it comes to whatever part of the project process, I should know, “Ooh, let me get into Fable,” because my project meets, you know, certain reasons that I should be testing it.

Lola: Yeah. I think that really aligns with my worldview, as well, because that’s already a natural thing that we do in other domains. So like thinking about in my world, we build money products. You can’t design a thing without considering the regulation. Do I know the legals of all of that, inside out and every single clause? No, but I do have a legal team I can speak to. You know, we do have that concept of democratized responsibility, but like owned expertise. Like, that is the thing that we have. And, I think, I’m quite excited about that. Even as an individual who just wants to learn, it’s like building on what you said, Shay. It’s like, “I care about it, but I don’t know how to go on a learning journey.” Like, teaching myself is one thing, but there’s gotta be a limitation to that. At some point it’s like, I’m probably more dangerous than not, unless I have a guide, somebody who can steer me and I can actually validate and vet that learning journey, you know. That’s the thing I’m excited about. Getting to that point where we’re, kind of, much more evenly socialized. We’ve activated all the people who care, but we’re also tapping into like layers of expertise. So like everything else, the quality bar goes up, the floor goes up about the minimum accessible standard. And then the quality bar gets held higher about, well, what is that other level that we could go to that would be valuable for the widest merchant population that we can support, you know. That’s holy grail scenario. And then we’d be, like, level three and above. Level three plus, plus on your maturity model.

Scott: I’m talking a lot to directors and VPs recently these days, which is really great. You know, over the years past, I’ve always sort of kept myself and done the work and, you know, sort of, quote unquote, shielded people away from all these problems. But I’ve come realized this is totally the wrong thing to do. I have to be very loud.

Lola: Shout, shout from the rooftops and the mountains. Yeah.

Shay: Bring the light in.

Lola: Yeah. I love it. Shay, Scott, you guys have been amazing, but before we kind of close out the episode, we have one final thing. Our wonderful seasons gimmick, our cootie catcher, slash, fortune teller, slash, chatter box. So you’ve got four options, a banana, the cart, the lettuce, and the rocket. And Shay, if you go first, you can pick one and I’ll do the rest.

Shay: Definitely the banana.

Lola: The banana. Okay. Let’s go. B-A-N-A-N-A. At some point, I’m gonna realize I can’t spell banana with all of this. So you’ve got five, six, one and two. Which number would you like?

Shay: Five.

Lola: Okay. One, two, three, four, five. And then you’ve got four, seven, three and eight. And one of these will have your question behind it.

Shay: Ooh, okay. Let’s do 8.

Lola: Eight. question eight is, figure out how to get it. Okay. “What app, service or product do you wish that you had worked on?”

Shay: Ooh, okay. Well, don’t hate me from mentioning COVID cause I know we’re all getting a bit sick of it-

Lola: It’s a think in our generation.

Shay: Yeah, absolutely. But like both the service design and the content design, I would just wanna do all of it by myself, no. But vaccine rollout, especially, I actually think access and accessibility tied in so much there-

Lola: It did.

Shay: And I got really lucky with some of my family members that I had flown home on a trip, right when they were rolling out certain aspects of it. And I was like at everyone’s houses, trying to get them booked appointments, getting rides organized, and all of these things. And I just saw like all of the different pinch points. And also when I go into the VaxiCode app, which is ours here, and I see some of the confusing, or like, let’s say there’s room for improvement around the language being used. It just burns me and I really would love to solve that problem.

Lola: Well, isn’t that such a great example, also, of a product where the minimum viable version of it was like massively accessible by default because the populations that needed it the most also needed to be the people who had like mobility issues, compromised immune systems. Probably other conditions that were, you know, and they were trying to access the service. And in such a great example of where accessible by default, isn’t like a thing you aim for, it’s the minimum thing you hit if you’re actually doing this right. Saying that, I know that there were a lot of grassroots efforts and lots of, like, social groups that created versions on top of the rollouts here in Canada and kind of had like, you know, much more accessible local versions of things. In fact, I know one of them was using Polaris, because it was easy for them to spin up using the design system initially. Here in Ontario, at least, which was amazing. But yeah, I’m kind of with you there. If only we could have galvanized even more around that, that would’ve been amazing. Okay. Scott, next one’s yours to pick.

Scott: Okay. Lets go with the rocket.

Lola: Rocket. Okay. R-O-C-K-E-T. One, two, five and six.

Scott: One.

Lola: One. And then you’ve got, no one’s done that yet. Four, three, seven and eight. And Shay just had eight. So probably four, three or seven.

Scott: Okay. Seven.

Lola: Seven. Okay. Seven is, “What is your process for starting a new thing?” So the first day you get a new project, or brief, or piece of thing you need to do, how do you get started?

Scott: Well, I’d probably go to the selection. Introduce myself. Say, “Hey, what’s up?” “I’m here to probably work in the accessibility of your thing.”

Lola: Yeah.

Scott: Which I’ve done many times in the past. So just get comfortable with the team, let them know why I’m there, and start the process from there. You know, it’s a funny story that, one of the first projects that I was on was the checkout accessibility way back in 2018. And I introduced myself rather abruptly in that slack channel. Cause I actually got a piece of feedback from one of our, like, 360 peer review type things where it said like, “Scott was a little aggressive when he came in to our channel to start this project.” But the good thing was that that team was already on their way to starting an audit project for checkout. So the time actually worked out. But yeah, that’s probably how I would start things and just, hopefully, hope for the best.

Lola: Did you go in and just were like, “you’re all rubbish.” “I’m here to fix you.” “My name’s Scott, let me into your dev environment or you’re gonna have it,” like, was it that level of aggression or was it?

Scott: Kind of a little bit. Cause you know why? My first time here at Shopify, at one point in time, I was a developer a front end developer, and I shipped a piece of code, that I don’t know why, still to this day, I don’t understand, I broke the ability to upload images to admin. So that was a really bad day, first of all. But the team that was on was really great. They’re really supportive. And they were like, “Ah, don’t worry about it.” “It’s okay. Everyone breaks something once in a while.”

Lola: These things happen.

Scott: But then someone told me, I’ll never forget this, they said, “As long as you don’t break checkout, it’s fine.”

Lola: Yeah. And I’ve always had that with my mind.

Scott: Yeah.

Lola: And why I was so aggressive with the checkout team when I came back was that I was thinking that, like, checkout for Shopify is everything. If it doesn’t work, then what are we doing?

Scott: That is money out of merchants pockets.

Scott: Exactly.

Lola: Yeah. And it’s such a great way to close off this episode. Like, I think ultimately the lens we apply to this is exactly the same lens as our mission, which is making commerce better for everyone. Everyone means the widest set of people and, like, making sure we apply that lens to the broadest group, because entrepreneurship shouldn’t have a predefined ability set other than, you know, your own smarts. And so I’m super grateful that we’ve been able to have this conversation. Shay, Scott, this has been absolutely awesome. We will stick your socials on here. And Scott, you said you were hiring, so potentially a bunch of people can come at you and just be like, “Hey, I wanna be your specialist, guy or gal or person.” And Shay, thank you so much. We will link to your amazing inclusive guidelines document that is out in the world for everybody to benefit from. So thank you so much for being on this.

Shay: Thank you Lola, for having us.

Scott: Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much for setting us up.

Lola: Thanks for listening to inside Shopify UX, check out more from our team or find out how to join us by visiting ux.shopify.com. Inside Shopify UX is hosted by me, Lola Oyelayo-Pearson.

Jen Shaw: Produced by Jen Shaw.

Isabelle Hamel-Caressi: Assisted by Isabelle Hamel-Caressi.

Michael Busse: Edited by Michael Busse.

Alisha Giroux: With art and graphics by Alisha Giroux.

Dani Chavez-Zackerman: Dani Chavez-Zackerman.

Trevor Silvani: And Trevor Silvani.

Matt Griffin: Music by Silent Quiet Spaces.

Lola: On the next episode of Inside Shopify UX, one of my favorite topics, inclusivity and accessibility.