Chapter 5:
Are we on the path to Inclusive Design 2.0?
As more companies understand the benefits and business advantages of an Inclusive Design approach, I survey the current level of opportunity in this fast-growing field.
I aim to put forward a strong case for moving towards business innovation that is powered by an emerging Inclusive Design 2.0 approach — with user-centred design principles which can be expanded to keep pace with the constant evolution of trends in technology and data.
Re-introducing Inclusive design
Most companies are beginning to appreciate that Inclusive Design can be applied throughout a full product lifecycle, from igniting early opportunities, all the way to transforming existing products. They realise that Inclusive Design has now become a fundamental part of the process and not just an afterthought.
In my earlier series of articles here, I looked at how this reframing of the way we understand and cater for users with different needs leads to outcomes that are better for both businesses and consumers.
However, these days, the imperative to incorporate Inclusive Design principles at the start of a project, and to learn with users throughout the project lifecycle, has taken on even more significance. Having emerged from the pandemic with greater awareness of each other’s needs, businesses accept that the stakes have never been higher. In the era of digital transformation, where everything is on-demand at the tap of a finger, sustainable business change may depend on how we break from the one-size-fits-all approach.
The recent market evolution suggests organisations are ready to embark on a journey towards Inclusive Design 2.0 . This is where user-centred design principles should be developed in order to stay ahead of the curve and embrace new uses of technology and data. The objective is to cater for the needs of a truly diverse population, taking into account all user needs and abilities.
The size of the Inclusive Design market is growing fast in the UK
By some estimates, there are some seven million people of working age in the UK who have a disability and the combined spending power of these disabled households* is estimated to be approximately £249bn.
As a result, organisations that understand the importance of adopting an inclusive design mindset in their process may gain more than just a few ‘extreme’ customers.
The classical approach to Inclusive Design
Before we look at Inclusive Design 2.0 in more depth, it’s important to remember some of the basic foundations and principles of the classical approach:
1. Inclusive design is exclusively for minorities; extreme users or for those with a disability. Inclusive design is about understanding and embracing the differences between people, their mindsets, needs and motivation and applying this understanding to the Company Strategy.
2. You mean accessibility, right? No, accessibility is commonly misunderstood as being the same as inclusive design. In fact, accessibility comes from the qualities that make an experience open to all — providing minimum ways to allow everyone to use your product/service (e.g. colour contrast). In essence, inclusive design is a methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity.
3. It’s nice to be inclusive. Inclusive design is not about being nice; it’s about being smart. When you apply an inclusive mindset during your Strategic process, you are able to generate more meaningful interactions, experiences and products and therefore, extend them to a larger number of customers, with a more diverse range of needs. This generates differentiation and innovation.
What inclusive design certainly does not mean is developing one thing for all potential customers. The Inclusive Design mindset is about creating a variety of ways that allow a diverse range of customers to participate in interactions or services and it’s based on three key principles:
1. Recognise exclusion: This happens when we try to create experiences based only on our own biases.
2. Learn from diversity: Diversity is something that changes over time. We, as people, have the amazing ability 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.
3. Solve for one and extend to many: Focus on what is 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/experiences to others.
By applying the three basic principles you will be able to develop Product Strategies tailored to your user needs and mindsets, resulting in more meaningful experiences and driving further innovation.
It is important to understand that Inclusivity is both an opportunity and a challenge for a diverse range of organisations, from national governments to start-ups, which can lead to a more complex conversation, so as to form the core values of the experience you are trying to create.
How might we evolve the classical approach to Inclusive Design 2.0?
At key points in the product or service development lifecycle, good designers will step back from individual users and apply learnings to the wider community.
Inclusive Design steers an appropriate response to diversity in the population, by adopting the basic principles at the earliest stage of the product cycle.
In addition to these core principles, our inclusive tactics are most successful when built on the following strategic goals:
- Developing a family of products and derivatives to provide the best possible coverage for the population
- Ensuring that each individual product maps to clear and distinct target users
- Reducing the level of ability required to use each product, in order to improve the user experience for a broad range of customers, across a variety of situations.
These principles should be embedded in our process and designs should be tested with groups that are representative. Inclusive design principles help us to build products which can be used by people regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status or ability. It is fair to say that Inclusive Design is simply good design and that using these design principles can also benefit our businesses by increasing the pool of potential customers.
But there are additional emerging principles, and the most innovative businesses need to begin adapting their processes.
As we speak, some companies are already losing out by not adapting their own inclusive design principles with the speed and flexibility that clients now expect from successful Product Design. The fact is that businesses still lose approximately £2 billion a month by ignoring — or failing to respond to — the needs of users with disabilities. Not only is it clear that much is still to be done; but it is also apparent that our techniques, strategies and processes will need to evolve as well.
Now Inclusive design 2.0 is emerging as a combination of the classical approach with new design principles, including these modifications and extensions of best practices:
Powered by data, led by behaviour: capturing data accurately, promptly, at scale and knowing how to use it, is crucial. The next iteration of Inclusive Design will incorporate more data science techniques and strategies, harnessing them to anticipate, decode and respond in real-time to mass behavioural shifts. But this push to incorporate data must always work hand-in-hand with a commitment to understanding users and behaviours.
As this becomes a strategic imperative for all organisations in the coming years, we will see a significant overlap between what is considered ‘standard’ behaviour, and what is not. An expert product and design team will need to combine ‘cold’ quantitative data with behavioural observation to identify the best insights into a product or service.
Cultivate an experimental mindset and trust lean iterations: Don’t wait until your product or service is absolutely perfect before you launch it. Make the go-live process a part of your experimentation if possible, in order to learn from your customers and evolve your product, according to their feedback.
Work for end-to-end, sustainable, actionable outcomes: think of your product or service as a human being. This will evolve your team’s learning in new ways, helping them adapt to needs without losing sight of your North Star vision.
Case study: Extending Inclusive Design to new areas for a South African major insurer company
The technological and financial reality in South Africa means a smaller percentage of users can afford smartphones and data connections are poor; while safety and trust play a key role in services carried out in the home.
Developing a new service for a major insurer in South Africa, our team used Inclusive Design 2.0 — by combining the classical approach with heavy data collected from the market and provided by our client regarding its uniqueness of it — as part of a core service design approach, despite the client and service being unconnected with the traditional areas of disability.
We created a new app that accommodates a completely new service ecosystem. We combined behavioural understanding with heavy data information in order to identify key opportunities within these constraints.
The service ecosystem was composed of multiple features to support the customers to run and maintain their homes as well as to hire armed security to their homes and keep updated with their gás and electric usage preventing them to run out of credits and shout down the house.
The result was a service that reflects the unique needs of the market, supports customers to hire trustworthy professionals, maintain their homes and keep the hose safe as well as supports small business owners to be connected to their customers and manage their business without heavy usage of data on smartphones.
The path to Inclusive Design 2.0 is opening up
Inclusive Design is now a fundamental part of the design process, opening the experience up to customers in all their diversity. Innovative organisations now agree that the design principles which follow from this should be embedded in their processes.
By harnessing data and understanding more diverse sets of users, we can face the challenge of updating these principles so that we can move faster, base our solutions on more comprehensive datasets, and respond to a wider range of user needs and capabilities.
By doing this we extend not just our customer base, but also the potential of our solutions, taking Inclusive Design to the next stage in its evolution of fitting products to users in better and more value-creating ways.
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:
- It’s time to reconsider your target audience, by Raffaela Rein, July 18, 2018
- The Same, But Different: Breaking Down Accessibility, Universality, and Inclusion in Design, by Matt May, Feb 4, 2018
- Inclusive Design: 12 Ways to Design for Everyone, by Oliver Lindberg, Mar 23, 2018
- Designing for Access: Creating new features for guests with disabilities
- Categories by Airbnb — Nanako Era, Jake Hytken and Chris Arvin
- The practice of inclusive design by Apple
- The process of inclusive design by Apple
- Spotify + Inclusive Design: Global Accessibility Awareness Day Round-Up
- Inclusive Design Podcast by Pause + Effect
Other Sources:
Not all the knowledge comes from me, I studied the subject for the past 5+ years to be able com build my rationale. Here are a couple of references I used during the article.
