Our full-time staff and our student designers, current and former, put real effort into this, and it is wonderful to get to share this moment with them. We sustained accessibility scores for our core website above the industry benchmark in 35 of 37 monthly measurements over three years. During that time, scores fluctuated and individual issues got resolved as new ones appeared.
Winning an award that recognizes sustained performance over time feels special. I love the idea that this ongoing, team-based, and genuinely “never finished” kind of work is considered and celebrated for awards like this. I think it recognizes the ways in which so much work happens in a slow and sustained way, and that progress comes through ongoing care and craft.
What did you learn from this experience that you can share with other UC teams?
The first takeaway is that sustained quality requires both shared values and structural solutions that put those values into practice. Everyone needs structures that support individual and team-based craft and creative processes.
If you haven’t done it already, every team can start with the values you already hold, write them down together, and then ask: What meeting pattern, what recurring practice, what communication norm would express and strengthen those values in daily work?
Another takeaway is that teams can hire students into real work and co-create team values and practices with them. The learning travels in both directions.
We have an email list going, where we share our community events, job opportunities and a glimpse into the job. The Student Design Team creates a little slideshow about what they do and what they like about what they do. People who are interested in the job can get this first-hand look from their peers about what it’s like to have the job. This leads to interest in the job and allows us to stay engaged with a growing community.
During interview rounds, we ask very experiential, scenario-based questions, like: What would you do in a situation like this? Walk us through this. Show us how you would approach this challenge.
We’ll have a large pool of candidates with technical skills, so we found that the most successful students are those who bring qualities like ambiguity tolerance, love of iteration, ability to receive feedback, desire to ask questions, and service orientation.
So far, we’ve had 16 early-career designers come through our team. They’ve gone on to UX and design roles, carrying inclusive design and accessibility practices with them. In some ways, the biggest impact of the work we do together will happen out there in the world, when our student employees graduate and bring their experiences with them.
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