Improve usability & accessibility

[Background
This is not really a specific feature or request, rather a suggestion for improvements in the design process that came out from a conversation we had last year with a customer regarding the new redesigned version.]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Decidim’s design process does not currently consider the end users in the best possible way. Especially navigating a default Decidim website is cumbersome and very difficult for a normal citizens. The navigation structure does not follow any common usability principles, such as those written by Jacob Nielsen. Multi-level navigation systems are complex, hard to understand and cause excess cognitive load on the citizens trying to use Decidim to participate in the city’s decision-making processes.

Describe the solution you'd like
Normal citizens should be in the core of the Decidim’s design process and improvements should be constantly tested with real end users, not experts. This can be improved in small steps that are easy to implement when developing new versions of the platform. Rather than develop and test, we would endorse for a development model that encourages thorough testing and prototyping before a single line of code is written.

Small steps, large impact:

1. Gather a group of volunteers from all walks of life: young people, elderly people, mid-aged people, different nationalities, different cognitive abilities (e.g. disabled people), different devices (mobile, desktop), etc.

2. Analyze the current situation: arrange user testing sessions with these groups of people and give them easy to understand tasks to perform on a normal Decidim website (e.g. “vote in PB”, “submit a proposal”, “participate in a debate”), try to make the situation as close to a real situation, i.e. the participants should not be assisted too much during these sessions and the platform should represent the structure of a real life website. Focus on making navigating the platform simpler and different features easier to discover.

3. Make a report based on following how the participants of the user testing sessions succeeded with their tasks, put emphasis on the most common problems that people faced

4. Give the report to designers to further analyze how the situation could be improved

5. Make prototypes, make lots and lots of prototypes, before writing a single line of code. Test the hypotheses with actual users using the prototypes before implementing the improvements

6. Repeat, repeat, repeat (and learn along the way)

Describe alternatives you've considered
Customizing the user interface in a way that makes it understandable but this makes the system very hard to maintain especially when larger user interface updates are implemented. This is a lot of wasted effort as these changes need to be replicated every time larger user interface changes are implemented in the platform.

Additional context
After the redesign, we have not seen any large benefits in usability or accessibility of the platform, which we felt are very important in real life use cases. Especially navigating the platform has become even harder than it was in the legacy version. There are some small improvements here and there but overall the platform could be better and easier to use.

Does this issue could impact on users private data?
No.

Funded by
N/A