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Designing for the extremes
How to turn everyone into an a11y persona.
In this article I’m going to draw on the Design thinking concept of designing for extreme users and I will argue that designing for extreme users can be considered a case of designing for accessibility. I’m going to talk about pilots, (who doesn’t like pilots, right?) to shortly mention how to incorporate accessibility into personas and the inclusive personas context, and I’m going to dig into Designing for the extremes focusing first on a single aspect, right before telling you some persona stories.
There is no such thing as an average pilot
(There is no average user)
In the 40s the US Airforce was losing many pilots due to crashes. They investigated many possibilities and, like good pilots, landed on the cockpit design: it was designed to the “average” pilot of 1926.
They started a new research to fine-tune those measures, but a member of the team compared the 10 physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for design, and found that out of how many of the 4,063 airmen matched all 10 dimensions… ready to make a guess how many they were? I mean, we are talking about the army, you need to have a certain height and weight in order to be allowed to enter at all, how difficult can this be?
DRUMS ROLLING…
If you guess ZERO, you are correct! None of the 4,063 airmen fit the average range in all 10 dimensions. Not. A. Single. One.
But hey Lt. Daniels gave it a second chance… what about picking only the 3 most important dimensions? want to try again?
(Sorry no drum rolls this time)
If you picked 3 dimensions, less than 3.5% would match.
The data was clear: the average pilot DID NOT EXIST. Designing for the average pilot was designing for NO ONE.
They learnt the hard way that any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.
The US Airforce then embraced a new guiding principle: individual fit. Fitting the system to the individual, not the other way around.
