Inclusive design

My desire to advocate for inclusive design led me to create a presentation communicating the importance of inclusivity including the business case for it, as well as actionable guidance to implement inclusive design principles for all roles involved in the creation of products and experiences.

How might we figure out what users need and like without directly asking?

Background

I gave versions of this talk at:

  • Design for Tomorrow global conference
  • IBM Spark Design Festival (lightning talk)
  • IBM Inclusive Design Guild in-depth presentation

We can’t focus only on inclusion; we have to be anti-exclusion.

Tech has a global impact, but the tech community isn’t representative of the people interacting with that tech. This results in unintentional harms.

An inclusive mindset and anti-exclusionary practices can mitigate some of these harms.

overlapping circles made up of dots creates new and interesting patterns

But what is inclusive design? It's a mindset of creating products and experiences that consider the range of human diversity to enable as many people as possible to interact with the product or experience.

To be inclusive, we have to recognize the factors that make up the spectrum of human experience, including:

  • Ability
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Gender expression
  • Sexual orientation
  • Education
  • Economic circumstances

  • Culture
  • Lanuage
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Geography
  • Access to services
  • Access to technology

There’s a huge spectrum of lived experiences, and lots of people on that spectrum are part of marginalized communities. These statistics reflect just a handful of those communities. Why should this matter to businesses? Because it matters to consumers.

1.3B

People globally experience significant disability
(World Health Organization, 2023)

15-20%

Of the population is neurodiverse
(Forbes, 2021)

12.5%

Of the population experiences mental health issues
(World Health Organization, 2022)

10%

Of people worldwide identify on the LGBT+ spectrum
(LGBT+ Pride 2021 Global Survey)

Steps to building an inclusive mindset

1

Identify & address points of exclusion

2

Confront personal biases

3

Cultivate and practice empathy

4

Be intentional in decision making

Identify and address points of exclusion

Exclusion permeates our culture so deeply that it often operates unconsciously. While some exclusion criteria such as race, ethnicity, gender, and age are readily apparent, others are subtler. Consider inviting friends for dinner and serving steak and chocolate cake, assuming they eat meat and are not gluten intolerant. Alternatively, choosing a destination wedding without realizing it might pose economic challenges for some friends. These examples illustrate how exclusion can manifest in everyday situations.

Unintentional exclusion also happens at work. How many of us has worked on an MVP that doesn’t include accessibility design and testing? How often have we heard that we should focus only on the target user? How diverse are our user samples when we conduct research and testing? Getting in the habit of identifying these points of exclusion in our design practice will make inclusive design a part of our design culture.

Once we start recognizing points of exclusion, we can begin to address them and build an inclusive mindset.

Confront personal biases

Personal biases. Everyone has them, and the majority of them are unconscious. This is neither good nor bad, it just is.

Having an inclusive mindset means being aware of our biases and trying not to let them impact our decision making. Thankfully, there was ways of developing awareness. I highly recommend looking into Project Implicit. The site was created by scientists from Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia to study implicit bias. The site has various evidence-based tests anyone can take to get an idea of some of the implicit biases they have.

Another great resources is Biased by design. This site breaks down the most common cognitive biases that designers deal with and recommends ways to avoid them. Both sites are in a Resources doc I made that you can download.

The best ways to persuade and inspire confidence will be to outline business outcomes we've helped past clients achieve, case studies, and live demos to reflect how our expertise can improve the client's business.

Be intentional in decision making

The last principle is about being intentional. It’s not possible to immediately change the status quo and focus on the needs of all users, but we can be actively anti-exclusionary and intentional about the decisions we make in the design process.

You should always consider a diverse range of individuals in your design practice and be mindful of issues like exclusion and personal bias. It’s true that everyone in the world isn’t going to use your product, but if you design inclusively, you’ll give more people the opportunity to use it and will create better products and services.

Diverse teams can bring a larger range of perspectives and experiences that better match the general population.

I’ll end with some actions for executives and leadership. These individuals have the power to change the lack of diversity and representation in the workforce. In doing so, organizations appeal to a larger audience, and - more importantly - they will enable their teams to create products and services that are more inclusive because diverse teams can bring a larger range of perspectives and experiences that better match the general population.

This is true of leadership too. If you want a change in company culture, as a leader, it’s important and impactful for you to model that by advocating for more inclusivity in leadership. Lastly, we need leadership to set an expectation of inclusivity in products and experiences for the teams in the company.

Inclusive design practice by role and responsibilities

Creative brief & strategy

  • Ask questions about who is being excluded and why.
  • Ensure inclusive practices are built into timeline and milestones.

Research

  • Advocate with stakeholders for diverse user research.
  • Conduct secondary research to supplement.
  • Learn about best practices for conducting user research with people from different communities and with different abilities.

Content design

  • Ensure content is simple and easy to understand.
  • Use inclusive language (If you’re unsure about something like whether to use person-first vs identity-first language (person with autism vs autistic person), do some research).
  • Avoid using idioms and phrases that would be difficult for someone new to the language to understand.

Development & testing

  • Stay up to date on accessibility best practices and implement accordingly.
  • Work with your designers to make sure you get designs with accessibility annotations (headings, alt text, aria labels, etc.).
  • Write inclusive documentation.
  • Always do accessibility testing.

UX, UI, & visual design

Depending on the size of a team and other factors, these actions may be completed by one person or multiple people so I’ve grouped them together under the umbrella of UX, UI, & visual design.

When making design decisions, provide an exceptional experience for everyone, to the best of your abilities and within reason. This means always considering the diverse range of people who may interact with what you’re designing, especially when it comes to things like personas and archetypes.

  • Examine your approach and look for exclusion.
  • Consider the diverse range of people who may use the product or interact with the experience and different situations, especially when using personas and/or archetypes.
  • Prioritize content and tasks.
  • Provide comparable experiences (alt text, transcripts, captions, etc.).

  • Give people control to interact with content in their preferred way (for example: let people to change standard browser settings for orientation, font size, etc.)
  • Offer alternative ways of completing tasks (ex: if you have a graph, provide a data table as well; when offering a delete option, allow for swiping on touch devices and include an edit button).
  • Stay up to date on accessibility best practices and use available tools to test your designs.
  • Ensure that the product or experience is easy to use for as many people as possible regardless of physical ability, previous experience with technology, level of education, etc.
  • Include accessibility annotations in the designs for developers