Practicing Inclusion Before I Knew About Inclusive Design
There is one particular project that will always stand out in my career journey. I even wrote a case study about it for my portfolio because it showcased my breadth of skills as a designer. However there’s one aspect that I felt strongly about then, but I didn’t have the words to articulate it into something more meaningful, more impactful.
The project was called Immersive Shopping, and the core technology centered around being able to use a 3D camera to scan yourself. The user goal was to better understand the fit of clothes by previewing them on yourself (either with a more futuristic virtual mirror, or on a body model based on your scan).
It’s easy to brush off a clothing shopping project as superficial. However in talking with people during the research phase, I had the realization that it’s not about the clothes, but about how people feel about themselves. About confidence. About insecurity. About how clothes can transform how you understand yourself.
At the time I talked about how this wasn’t a shopping project, but a human project. That humans were central to the project, not the technology. And we needed to be intentional and respectful to people throughout the user journey. We did everything within our control to push back on technology requirements that would exclude people.
Unfortunately, we were excluding people, and kicking the can down the roadmap to support them later. Not only were we excluding people, but we were excluding the people who would benefit the most from this type of service. The people who need the most help in understanding how clothing might fit their body. People with plus sized bodies. People who have an amputation. People with scoliosis. People who are pregnant or postpartum. People who identify as non-binary, or their bodies don’t fit neatly into a choice between male or female. There were lots of people who we were excluding without true buy-in from our stakeholders that we would work towards including them later.
I was frustrated. And I didn’t have the skills or support to do more than what felt like complaining about our exclusion during project meetings.
Would “Inclusive Design” Have Helped?
I didn’t know about “Inclusive Design” back when I was working on Immersive Shopping. I believe that knowledge would have empowered me with the tools and frameworks to have more meaningful discussions with the team, stakeholders, and partners.
I was introduced to Inclusive Design through Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit. The definition I use today to explain Inclusive Design is that it is a process. It is how we work as designers and researchers to make our products more inclusive, by asking the key question “who might we be excluding?” throughout the research and design process.
What impact would Inclusive Design have had on Immersive Shopping? Maybe we would have changed the scope definition of our pilot. To focus on a “simpler” article of clothing while putting more technology effort on supporting a larger range of bodies.
Inclusive Design also would have sped up the discovery of key features. There was one relatively late addition to the project where we added text to describe the fit of clothing. We added this because the original tech solution of showing a heat map of tightness is hard to interpret.
If we had been practicing Inclusive Design from the start, we would have realized early on that we need to be describing the visuals for people who are blind or have low vision, because they shop for clothes too! Maybe we would have ended up with the same fit description feature, however we would have had more time to design and test this feature. And by including it earlier as a tech requirement it would have given more time for the technologists to solve the challenge of interpreting data from a 3D model to a text description.
Inclusion Without Inclusive Design is Incomplete
I was practicing inclusion without Inclusive Design. If I had the skills and tools from Inclusive Design I would have been a better designer. I would have felt supported by an entire community of designers who practice Inclusive Design. To bring more weight to the conversations about who we were excluding. To have had the frameworks to identify who else we were excluding, and how we could make a better experience for everyone by being more inclusive.
A Note About the Cover Image
I didn’t want to include an image for this article, because I felt like it didn’t need one. But with prompting from Medium I took a stab at a few search terms in Unsplash. This article is a reflection, so I searched a few terms related to that, and with the term “look back” I found cliché images of car side view mirrors. But you know what: that’s the perfect visual metaphor.
Image alt text: car side view mirror with a mountain vista in view, with the road and more vistas visible behind the mirror in the direction the car is headed.
I am in motion, moving forward in my career. And looking back at specific moments in my career puts those projects into the context of where I am headed. They exist not only in the past, but can be interpreted through new lenses I have available to me now. And within that lens they are an active part of my career today, informing and guiding me.
From UX Designer to Inclusive DesignOps
My career journey has taken me from being a User Experience Designer who was passionate about inclusion before she knew about Inclusive Design, to becoming an Inclusive DesignOps Program Manager, where I am on a mission to help all User Experience teams across Intel adopt Inclusive Design and Research practices. This shift caused by learning the “upper case” words for things I am passionate about parallels my journey from being a Computer Science student who cared about how “intuitive” an interface is, to learning about Human Computer Interaction as a discipline and having that completely change my career trajectory from being a Developer to becoming an Interaction Designer, to an User Experience Designer, and now embracing the intersection of Inclusive Design and DesignOps.
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Inclusive DesignOps Program Manager
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