Chapter 2:
An accessible guide to inclusive design
It goes beyond the way we hold our phones and the colours we can see.
Continuing my series of articles on inclusive design, focusing on designing for a sense of belonging. Here I explain the practice of inclusive design, how it differs from accessibility, and outlines the various methodologies that are emerging. I cover the principles that drive successful inclusive design thinking, and point out the pitfalls that can hinder effective progress.
Have you ever tried to use a service but were excluded because you didn’t have the appropriate knowledge or skillset? Most of us have. You may have felt rejected, even hurt. Bad feelings.
As designers, it’s our responsibility to understand that when we design services, products or interactions we hold the power to decide who can or can’t participate. That’s why we should try to understand the world beyond our own biases, not just make assumptions.
The risk of creating a design based only on our own experiences and abilities is that it will generate solutions that work well for people similar to ourselves, but could exclude many. The bottom line is that we could, in effect, be creating disability.
To prevent this from happening, we should apply an inclusive design mindset from the beginning. That way we end up being more sensitive to the different needs, motivations and limitations our users may have. We conceive of a more inclusive product or service. We should implement human-led design, not just human-centred design.
What inclusive design isn’t
Two common misunderstandings of inclusive design:
- It designs exclusively for minorities, extreme users or for disability.
No, inclusive design is about understanding and embracing the difference between people, their mindsets, needs and motivations, and applying this understanding to the design process. - It’s nice to be inclusive.
No, to be inclusive is not to be nice, it is to be smart. When you apply this mindset during your design process you are able to create more meaningful experiences and extending it to a larger number of customers with a more diverse range of needs. You are generating differentiation and innovation.
“Inclusion means many different things to many different people.” — Kat Holmes
Design for a better society
Inclusive design isn’t a new thing, it’s existed as a methodology since the early ’90s. But it’s currently gaining more relevance as the forgotten voices of society are coming out of the shadows, powered by digital technologies that allow them to participate regardless of their mismatched interactions.
Inclusive design is about engaging with people who are completely different to you, stretching your imagination as to what’s possible. It has a trickle-down effect, boosting people’s lives and improving society.
How related methodologies compare
Inclusive design is often confused with accessibility and universal design. Here’s how they’re different:
- Accessibility:
The qualities that make an experience open to all. It provides minimum ways to allow users to use your product or service, eg. colour contrast. - Universal design:
The way we design an environment to make it accessible and usable in the widest possible range of situations without the need for adaptation. - Inclusive design:
The methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives.
The principles of inclusive design
Inclusive design doesn’t mean you’re designing one thing for all people. You’re designing diverse ways to allow users to participate and thus ignite in them a sense of belonging. It’s based on three key principles:
- Recognise exclusion: Exclusion happens when we try to create experiences based only on our own biases. Designers are quite good at it — we call our biases ‘assumptions’!
- Learn from diversity: Diversity is something that changes over time. As humans, we have an amazing power to adapt to different situations. However, it’s important to understand why people need to adapt to our interactions and services, instead of the other way around.
- Solve for one and extend to many: Focus on what’s important to the customer mindset you are designing for and their sense of belonging. When the solutions are ready to be tested, you can identify the opportunities to extend those interactions and experiences to others.
Driving innovation
Inclusive design enables you to understand user mindsets and, as a result, you can create more meaningful experiences. This drives innovation for other customers you haven’t initially considered.
“It is important to understand that inclusivity is both an opportunity and a challenge for a diverse range of organisations, from national governments to startups.” — Mark Curtis, CCO at Fjord
The organisations that understand the importance of adopting the inclusive design mindset in their design process can gain more than just a few extreme customers(Link). And if you’re not convinced about the size of the market we are leaving behind by not being inclusive, here come the numbers…
Begin by recognising exclusion
To clarify what generates exclusion, we need to define disability accurately:
“Disability is not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.” — World Health Organization
When designers recognise disability through the lens of ‘mismatched interactions’ it helps us to recognise our responsibility more clearly. It’s also necessary to understand that disability is context-dependent:
When designing a product or service from scratch that is inclusive, we need to look at different contexts, iterating or creating new ways to enable people with different mismatches to interact with it.
There is, in fact, no such thing as ‘normal’. The world ‘normal’ was first used to describe mathematical elements of this curve that are perpendicular to each other. It did not simply “common” or “usual” (E.T Jaynes, Probability Theory: The logic of science)
When a bell curve reflects the distribution of human abilities, it incentivises designers, or maybe lazy ones, to target the ‘average human’ in an effort to reach the greatest number of people, and this average becomes thought of as ‘normal.’
The bell curve mindset mistakenly leads us to believe the market opportunity for inclusive design is minimal. According to this thinking, if there are no normal users, there are also no extreme users.
“ Finding an emotional connection between things, services and people is very important to what we as designers do or what we should be doing” — Richard Seymour Seymourpowel
The way to successful inclusion
Today’s universal demand for inclusivity is, paradoxically, reducing our sensibility to design for it — and commoditise it. We’ve become blind to the fact that our current interactions are full of mismatch moments that generate frustration and exclusion and can lose customers forever.
We should understand that mismatches will always exist in our interactions. Success is achieved by recognising this and iterating our product or service around it instead of expecting the customer to do so.
To successfully apply inclusive design in our projects let’s remember that this approach is not only a great addition to human-centred design, it’s good for business and innovation.
“Exclusion isn’t inherently negative but should be at least be an intentional choice rather than an accidental harm.” — Kat Holmes, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
This article is the second in my series exploring the insights and implications of inclusive design. The others can be found here, including the next in the series which tackles the burgeoning business value of inclusive design.
Hungry for more?
In the past few years, multiple companies and good people have been writing about things related to this article if you are interested in reading more about it here are a few places where you can start:
