The hidden value of Inclusive design for business and Innovation.
Not just about being nice — it’s about being smart
In the third of his article series on inclusive design, Bruno Perez explains how designing for inclusivity is now a broader business opportunity — rather than an unwelcome extra cost. Detailing four key ways you can use inclusive design for business advantage, he uses real-world experience to show how designing ‘with people’ will always beat designing ‘for people.’
I believe that inclusive design is not about being ‘nice,’ or even a moral necessity. It may well promote better relations between people; but here I want to focus on the business advantages that taking inclusivity seriously can provide.
In fact, everybody has the right to participate in everyday life fully, and the way we design products and services should reflect this. As designers, we must take responsibility for inclusion, and do it as a matter of intentional choice, rather than risking unintentional harm.
But there is another strong professional reason why inclusion matters: it expands our own thinking about problems that are worth solving. And it sparks our creativity to think in new ways, in partnership with new people. As designers, too often we define our user experiences based on our own assumptions, which we make about our own needs.
To design for everyone is to design for no one. That’s why we find such focus on personas and use cases, and we strive to understand user needs, to evolve a product or service around them. But the process is imperfect and requires humility. Overall, the good news is that inclusive design presents a clear opportunity to be curious and approach fresh user experience challenges with a desire to learn and grow.
And by taking an inclusive design mindset, we can actually save time and resources in the long run, fueling innovation that leads to business advantage. Sometimes we aim to solve a specific usability issue and end up creating a market shift — for example, subtitles for the deaf community. (Incidentally, the messaging has changed in the Amazon Prime Video interface from ‘Closed captions for impaired users’ to ‘Subtitles [on/off].’)
And disability is critical to any conversation about exclusion. It touches all our lives, eventually — yet disability is commonly misunderstood as applying only to a marginal percentage of the population. In fact, 15% of the worldwide population will face some kind of disability in their lives. There are over 56 million people in the United States and over 1 billion people worldwide with a disability. And today, roughly 360 million people in the world are deaf or have profound hearing loss. Thirty-two million of them are children like my son. By 2050 this number is expected to rise to 900 million, or close to 1 in 10 people. Nearly everyone, given a long enough life span, will lose their hearing as they age. These are huge numbers of people, and they need supplying with products and services.
And finally, it’s an ongoing process: it’s never over. We must remain open to consistent changes as user needs evolve with a product or service.
4 key ways you can use inclusive design for business advantages
- Customer engagement and contribution:
Engagement with a product increases when it’s easy to use and the experience is inclusive for most of the people. The key to this business justification is to demonstrate exactly how mismatched designs are affecting our customers. Involve customers in all the phases of the design process, and be diverse and inclusive in your pick to allow you to learn from that diversity. - Growing a larger customer base:
It might seem counterintuitive to start with a sharp focus on excluded communities. But the strength of this approach is that it outlines very clear constraints, helping the team build a deep understanding of the best way to connect with a wider target audience, based on their context instead of their abilities. Getting it right may permanently increase your customer base. - Innovation and differentiation:
Leaders are often surprised by how inclusion can fuel innovation. But inclusive solutions, in particular, have a history of seeding innovation that goes on to benefit a wider audience — new ingredients generate new products. A shift in perspective and context can also lead to new usage patterns and purpose to a solution. For example, the historic technology of the typewriter is still an important ingredient in our use of the internet and messaging — which also are result of an inclusive mindset. - Avoid retrofitting:
Many teams and companies treat inclusion as an add-on, something to consider only in the final stages of completing a product. When a solution is treated as ‘for disabled’ or ‘accessible’ there’s often little or no attention paid to the design as we keep considering it an add-on.
Designers should recognise that when inclusion measures are reduced to accessibility issues and treated as an add-on after the product has been developed, it may be too late for business advantage. The cost of rollback and re-engineering a design to fit it can actually be excessive.
Conclusion: Design with people, not just for people
Some services, however, cannot accommodate everyone. So it’s important to understand that we can choose what kind of mismatch our interaction will generate and if we decide to keep it, how we will correctly communicate that to the ones we impact, and allow them to understand the reasons behind it, instead of generating unintentional harm — and losing them forever.
We must also stop treating inclusion as an afterthought, or as a way of meeting minimal legal accessibility criteria. Never assume the users will adapt to your solution.
Create more services, better tailored to diverse people. Identify the exclusion experts you’ll need to guide you on this path; usually they’re the ones that face the greatest mismatch between a service and their needs.
Some cochlear implant receivers, like my son, chose to drop the technology. It is not only about how it works but how it looks. Some patients can recognise the benefit of wearing the device all the time; however, the psychological effect that the aesthetics of the device may have on the user can cause them to give up.
Inclusive design means capturing complexity and avoiding assumptions. When we understand the motivation and needs of a user for particular product or service, it means we extend the benefits of our design to a broader number of users in different contexts. And that can only be a positive thing.
Recently, I found myself working with a group of engineers from a voice-based service to identify how might we could make the service accessible to more customers. One of the ‘extreme cases’ we touched on was that of a deaf user. Surprisingly, they immediately dropped the challenge, assuming that the entire disparate group deaf people simply don’t hear or speak at all.
It was frustrating to see professionals, who should push hard to solve mismatched interactions, giving up so easily, stopped by their biases.
After a while in the same workshop I introduced them to the cochlear implant, the same technology that enables my son to hear and speak. This team had never heard of it before — and it was a eureka moment when they came to understand how and why deaf people would use their voice-based service. The key point here is not solving the issue to cover my son’s needs, but making designers and engineers more aware that the world of innovation is full of inclusive design opportunities waiting to be uncovered.
In the future we can’t predict what kind of mismatched interactions we will face, but we all need to be aware of the small ways we can shift our thinking in business opportunities.
“Exclusion isn’t inherently negative, but should be at least be an intentional choice rather than accidental harm.” Kat Holmes author of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
This article is the third in a series by Bruno Perez exploring the insights and implications of inclusive design. The others can be found here, including the last in the series which looks to the future for inclusive design.
