This month’s spotlight is all about Betterment’s product blog. It’s fun to see what other companies are up to and find out what they’ve done to improve their product over time. Let’s see what they’ve accomplished recently.

Accessible Data Visualization

If you want a compelling case study in accessibility, read A Comprehensive Guide to Accessible Data Visualization to look at how Betterment improved their data visualization for the visually impaired. The Product and Design team at Betterment uses visual filters to demonstrate how subtle changes make a huge difference, showing how different designs are perceived with various forms of colorblindness.

Engineering Inclusive Design

In Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features, the Engineering team at Betterment highlighted the “preferred name” feature they recently released. By adhering to targeted universalism, Betterment provided a tool primarily meant for trans users but can be valuable to other users as well. The article also goes over the infrastructure that was set up to make sure the change was as thorough as possible. Betterment created an internal tool called Uncruft to notify engineers when a deprecated field is used in the codebase. Uncruft is open source and available on GitHub; I might want to give it whirl some day.

Up Next

I kept this month’s content roundup short and sweet. For December I’ll compile a “Best Of 2020” list for all of the things I forgot to mention this year. Stay tuned!