Designing for all users

A guide on how a designers can create products that are physically, emotionally and cognitively appropriate for everyone.

Few important terms before starting :

1. Accessibility: An attribute; a quality that makes an experience open for all.
2. Inclusive Design: A human- centered design process that embraces equality.
3. Usability: Usability is a quality that accesses how easily products are designed are to use.

Let’s talk about a classic example of a non-inclusive design first :

This bridge was intentionally designed and kept very low so that people with only cars are able to commute from here. This was made to make sure that people who commute through the public transport like buses were restricted to go to the other side of the bridge, which were recreational parks.

In general, when we talk about inclusive design, we try to include majority of the people who could use our design but unknowingly, we tend to exclude a lot of people.

Now the question is, who are the those people who get excluded?

These are those people who might not be able to use our product the way we wanted them to use it due to some disability.

The disabled (handicapped) parking spots are not in the right location and are very far from the entrance.

Ramp and Stairs in One

Now, there are several types of disabilities :

• Permanent disability eg. No thumb by birth, no hand by birth etc.
• Temporary disability eg. Fracture, Ear infection
• Situational disability eg. Travelling while applying for a job so not able to pay proper attention to it i.e not able to use the product in the way the user intended.

1 in 7 people have a disability worldwide.

This means, there are a lot of potential users that we are missing out because we are not taking them into account as users for the product that we are designing.

This means we are losing so much audience for the apps/products that we are building.

1 in 12 men are colour blind

The main reason behind the changing of non-veg logo is for better understanding between vegetarian & non-vegetarian products especially helpful for ‘colorblind’ people.

Create for 1 extend to Many

Example 1: The subtitles of the video that we see on the video, that was mainly designed for the people who are deaf but that could also be extended to people who have temporary disability like ear infection or a bar tender in the crowded party hall or a loud pub.

Example 2 : Bendy straw was designed for disabled people but bendy straw could still be extended to normal people, it’s appearance is cool.

Example 3: Microsoft flow, one hand typing experience for people who have disability e.g. 1 hand and it also extends to the situationally disabled people for e.g. when the user is holding bags from one hand and can use the keypad from the other. Therefore, it helps both permanently disabled people and situationally disabled people.

Example 4 : Dark mode for apps, this started off as a battery saver and easy on the eyes and it eventually helped the people who have vision problems.

Inclusivity in mobile apps

Chevron down instead of cross so that it’s intuitive that by simply dragging down, the overlay menu will close, this is good for people who have smaller hands who’s thumb cannot reach to the top of the bottom sheet.

Making the checkbox position as in the second image, it becomes easier for both left handed and right handed people as it’s navigable from both the ends.

Using a good colour contrast, considering the use case where the user is using the mobile in a bright light, good contrasting colours would be really helpful in this case.

Hence, whenever you design, make sure you consider all these aspects.

This article is inspired by Prashanth Shanmugam, Microsoft.