Digital Accessibility: Interview with a Lead UX/UI Designer

Putting a face to our expertise and delving into the heart of design professions: this is the approach launched by Inès Mallick and Paul Courtois, marketing interns. Through this series of interviews, they share the experiences, vision, and daily life of UX-Republic consultants.

For this second episode, they met with Arnaud Poffé, Lead UX/UI Designer for the Benelux region and a key expert on digital accessibility within the Smile Group. With twelve years of experience in the field, Arnaud passionately shared his dual expertise: how to design for 100% of users through accessibility, and how to harness AI to dramatically accelerate design projects without ever losing sight of critical thinking and technical aspects.

Discover the journey of a designer passionate about technology, for whom digital inclusion is not an option, but a standard.

Who is Arnaud Poffé?

Arnaud fell in love with tech very early: at 10 years old, he was already tinkering with his first computer programs. After finding his path in technical studies, he entered the job market in 2015, right when UX Design was starting to take shape in France. From Beijing to Luxembourg, he honed his skills working on accounting applications and in a communications agency, where he quickly rose to the senior level.

Today marks six years since he joined the Smile group. Now Lead UX/UI Designer for UX-Republic in the Benelux region, Arnaud discovered a true passion for digital accessibility five years ago. For him, good design should leave no one behind. His daily goal? To reconcile technology, inclusive design, and automation through AI.

Designing for the public interest: from government ministries to the transport network

Inès & Paul: You've just come back from a major project. Can you tell us what you've been working on recently?

Arnaud: My last assignment was for the Luxembourg government , where I had the opportunity to redesign the entire Design System for the country's various ministries. It's a large-scale project, as this system is intended to be deployed across nearly 80 government applications.

Before that, my longest assignment lasted three years for STIB (the Brussels public transport network). We rebuilt the entire website, the technical infrastructure, the UX case study, and the user research. This project was a source of immense pride because we designed the very first 100% accessible transport website in Belgium.

Digital accessibility: empathy taken to 100%

Inès & Paul: Digital accessibility is your favorite topic. What are the major challenges today?

Arnaud: Since 2019, European legislation has closely regulated digital accessibility. The fundamental challenge is to ensure that all platforms, websites, and even physical ticket machines for public transport are usable by absolutely everyone . It is currently estimated that 70% of the population has no major difficulty navigating the web, but that 30% encounter significant obstacles on a daily basis. These range from color blindness to motor impairments, including blindness or visual fatigue related to illnesses such as multiple sclerosis. Making a system accessible means ensuring that it works perfectly with assistive software , such as screen readers , speech synthesis, or keyboard-only navigation.

From a business perspective, opening up its product to this 30% of the population is far from negligible. For a company like STIB, which records over a million connections per month, this represents a potential gain of 300,000 additional connections!

But beyond the numbers, this is a major social inclusion issue for the years to come. As a designer, my role is to create experiences. My vision is to push empathy to its maximum by no longer designing for 70% of users , but for 100% of them.

Inès & Paul: Does this approach also benefit users who do not have a disability?

Arnaud: That's the great thing about this approach: accessibility ultimately benefits everyone . When you simplify and streamline a user journey during the UX research phase to make it accessible, the flow becomes so natural that it benefits the entire audience. It requires a bit more design work upfront, but you get a clean , robust product without needing to make costly and extensive fixes later. That's exactly what we did for three years at STIB by including panels of testers with disabilities from the very beginning . It's a real game changer for our industry.

The accessible design toolkit

Inès & Paul: From a technical point of view, how is accessibility translated into the concrete design of a product?

Arnaud: Accessibility rests on two main pillars : design (30% of the work) and code (the remaining 70%).

From a design perspective, we rely on strict algorithms to calculate color contrasts . We must maintain a precise ratio (generally 4,5 ) between text and background color to ensure comfortable reading. Typography choices are also very carefully controlled: we favor straight, highly legible fonts. Finally, it's crucial to adhere to standard navigation structures . Users have universal habits on the web; we shouldn't reinvent the wheel or disrupt their established patterns, but rather work within proven frameworks.

On the development side, we get into the pure technical aspects with the ARIA specifications . We implement detailed text alternatives for all images, and we rigorously configure the keyboard focus (the visual outline that moves from one element to another with the Tab key) to ensure that all dropdown menus and buttons can be activated without a mouse.

AI and design: transformation, speed and ethics

Inès & Paul: How do you perceive the evolution of your profession as a designer in the face of the rapid rise of AI?

Arnaud: I don't think AI will replace designers, because the critical eye and sensitivity of humans remain essential. Today, AI can generate an interface for you in a few seconds, but the result is often riddled with glaring UX errors.

On the other hand, AI will significantly transform and accelerate our daily lives . It saves us from manually redesigning every repetitive component. I've measured these gains on my own projects: we manage to save more than half of the production time, representing a roughly 60% increase in speed . A job that previously took 30 days can now be completed in 10 days thanks to AI.

My message to junior profiles is very clear: now is the time to jump on the bandwagon . In a year or two, those who haven't integrated these tools into their workflow will be completely left behind by the realities of the market.

Inès & Paul: So, what advice would you give to a junior to use AI in a relevant way, while preserving their critical thinking and measuring their ecological impact?

Arnaud: Regarding the ecological aspect, the key lies in the art of prompting . By learning to formulate my queries precisely, I learned to halve the number of tokens (and therefore the computing energy) used for a much better result.

Regarding critical thinking, I have a firm stance: a junior designer should not use AI as their primary design tool . They must first acquire solid theoretical skills and grapple with the fundamentals to be able to judge whether what the machine proposes is valid or not. AI is a formidable facilitation tool for senior or mid-level professionals who have the necessary perspective to spot the machine's errors.

The junior must be even more rigorous , learn to design using traditional methods and understand the code to acquire this essential intellectual structure.

Curiosity, vigilance and sharing

Inès & Paul: The pace of innovation is frantic. How do you manage to stay constantly up-to-date?

Arnaud: Curiosity is the primary quality that separates a good designer from a less good one . My research relies on two main channels. First, LinkedIn , where I closely follow the official accounts of research labs like Anthropic and recognized experts in the field. Second, YouTube , where I consume a lot of specialized content and technical conferences.

You have to be proactive : when a new, high-performance open-source model comes out, I don't wait. That same evening, I devour the technical documentation, and the next day, I install it locally to test it . It's a truly passionate approach. You also have to put your ego aside , exchange ideas with your colleagues, and accept that our methods from yesterday aren't necessarily the best today.

The final word

Inès & Paul: To conclude this interview, what essential message or piece of advice would you like to convey to the design community?

Arnaud: I have a favorite phrase that I often repeat to my teams: " Accessibility isn't an option, it's a standard. " We need to go back to basics and consistently rely on the native standards of the web and operating systems. Designers sometimes want to revolutionize everything graphically, but the majority of effective interaction structures already exist. By respecting these standards, we save valuable time on development and system maintenance, and we avoid catastrophic redesigns during major OS updates (like Apple or Android).

My second piece of advice: go read the developers' documentation . Understanding the technical constraints of the code allows you to communicate on equal footing with the development teams, avoid designing unworkable interfaces, and gain immense credibility on large-scale projects. Be curious, educate yourself about the realities of coding, learn to master the tools of tomorrow, and your skills will skyrocket!