One for all and all for one: inclusive design is for everyone
This is what a service looks like when it has not been designed inclusively.
Justin Levene, a paraplegic athlete, dragged himself along the floor through Luton Airport after his self-propelling wheelchair was left behind on a flight and he refused to be pushed through the airport in a wheelchair that he felt was degrading.
Justin Levene’s airport protest has been described in The Guardian as a ‘watershed for disabled people’.
“All I wanted them to do was put in self-propelled wheelchairs so that people can have independence,” he said.
The airport has since introduced 10 self-propelled wheelchairs and Mr Levene has dropped his legal action.
He said: “This was never about money, it was about trying get a change in policy.
“I am happy to drop my legal claim because Luton has taken on board my concerns and improved their disabled facilities for the better.”
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ll know this story has been repeatedly covered by every major news channel in the UK.
If ‘disabling’ designs ever were acceptable, they’re certainly not anymore. Society — not to mention the law — expects everyone to be able to use services autonomously and with dignity.
We don’t expect someone to be disadvantaged by design.
To be fair, it’s clear the airport thought its wheelchair provision was good enough. “On discovering that Mr Levene’s flight from Croatia had arrived without his wheelchair, in August 2017, our teams worked hard to find a solution, offering Mr Levene an assisted wheelchair as a temporary replacement. Mr Levene declined all offers of help,” a spokesperson explained, before Mr Levene’s YouTube video went viral.
What this highlighted was a lack of understanding of user needs. As Mr Levene said, “Someone who isn’t aware of what it’s like to use a wheelchair won’t understand how important your independence is to you. It was humiliating.”
Likewise, the service design hadn’t considered the full end-to-end user journey, as Mr Levene pointed out:
“This isn’t just about getting from point A to point B in the airport. It’s also about what happens afterwards. There’s no provision of a temporary chair for someone to use when they get home. Once I left the airport, I was then stuck in my house for 24 hours until my chair was returned to me.”
“When I asked what was I meant to do when I got home, they didn’t have any response because they hadn’t considered it.
Sometimes you just don’t know ‘til you know, which is why it’s important to ask.
What we do know is that trapping someone in their home for 24 hours because you haven’t made provision for users with access needs is unacceptable.
Luton Airport has since sorted this out but it has been a painful highly-publicised process that could have been avoided with inclusive design.
What is inclusive design?
Inclusive design is the process by which we conceive, design, test and produce products and services that work for everyone who needs to use them by making sure the design works for users with a broad range of access needs.
If a service hasn’t been designed for diverse users and isn’t ‘compatible’ with their access needs, some users will be excluded from using the service.
This isn’t just about making services accessible to people with disabilities. It’s about making services accessible to everyone by taking a diversity-aware approach to design.
Big data and human-centred design have given us transformational insights into the lived experience of service users and the more we know about them the more we know one size does not fit all.
Diverse humans need diverse designs.
The way a user interacts with a service is mediated through a mix of characteristics and conditions that may be permanent, temporary or circumstantial. To name but a few:
- Digital skills
- Digital access
- Digital tools
- Location
- Language
- Literacy
- Income
- Education
- Emotional state
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Disability
- Age
- Sex
- Gender reassignment or becoming a trans person
- Sexual orientation
- Race and ethnicity
- Religion
- Pregnancy and maternity
- Parenthood
- Time
- Lifestyle
- Motivation
- Busy / distracted
- Noisy environment
- Alcohol or drug misuse or dependency
- Homelessness
- Poverty
- Vulnerability
- Comprehension of content / purpose
- Trust in service security
- Confidence in the process
- Confidence in one’s ability to use the process
- Awareness of the service in the first place
Exclusion happens when we ignore diversity and design from a biased perspective.
Inclusive service designers know that designing for your own needs logically creates a service that is usable by you and people like you but the fact is many of us are built differently and live very different lives.
Inclusive design therefore seeks to identify users who might be excluded from service use, include them in the design process, discover their access needs, and design solutions that support them (and potentially everyone else) to use the service.
Step-free access to buildings is essential to wheelchair users but it also benefits stroke survivors, elderly people with limited mobility, parents pushing prams, people delivering heavy goods and anyone with a temporary condition such as a broken leg or flu.
Digital voice control and screen readers may be essential to blind or partially sighted users but they’re also useful to people with arthritis, a missing finger, an arm in a sling, limited dexterity, RSI, and those with limited literacy skills.
We all sit on a spectrum of related abilities and access needs. Designing for these therefore creates better services for everyone: one for all and all for one.
The big hitters understand this. Microsoft. Apple. Google. Amazon. They know if you want full population coverage, inclusive design is essential.
Microsoft are so excited about inclusive design they set up a website to champion it. On it, they say:
“There are 7.4 billion people in the world. Our ambition is to create products that are physically, cognitively, and emotionally appropriate for each of them. It starts with seeing human diversity as a resource for better designs.
“Physical, cognitive, and social exclusion is the result of mismatched interactions. As designers, it’s our responsibility to know how our designs affect these interactions and create mismatches.
“Points of exclusion help us generate new ideas and inclusive designs. They highlight opportunities to create solutions with utility and elegance for many people.”
Who needs inclusive design?
Inclusive design is particularly relevant to services that need to be used by the entire population and specialist services that are used by people with a high prevalence of access needs. For example:
- Government services
- Healthcare
- Transport systems
- Financial services
- Disability benefit services
In addition to it being the right thing to do, inclusive design will save time and money for service providers and users alike. Services that can be successfully completed by everyone will produce a significant reduction in effort, failure demand and call costs.
Legal requirement
The Equality Act (2010) protects people from ‘indirect discrimination’ which includes putting a policy, practice or rule in place which applies to everybody but puts someone with a protected characteristic at an unfair disadvantage.
The characteristics which are protected from this discrimination are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
Financial institutions can and do face court action for neglecting to supply accessible formats like Braille to blind users. If you don’t integrate the right inclusive business processes into your service design, it’s easy to get this wrong.
Good inclusive design will make sure you get it right.
The alternative can be extremely costly.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled employment tribunal fees unlawful and indirectly discriminatory because a higher proportion of women would bring discrimination cases. According to the BBC, “the government will now have to repay up to £32m to claimants.”
This year, the Department for Transport published its commitment to equal access in its Inclusive Transport Strategy which sets out the Government’s plans to make our transport system more inclusive. This applies to planes, trains and automobiles, and the pedestrian environment.
This month, to ensure fairness for vulnerable people in the financial sector, the Treasury Committee launched a new inquiry into consumers’ access to financial services which will focus on the interaction between vulnerable consumers and financial services firms, as reported by the FT Advisor:
“The committee seeks to scrutinise whether certain groups of consumers are excluded from obtaining a basic level of service from financial services providers. It will also examine whether vulnerable consumers pay more for financial services products than others.”
It’s worth bearing in mind the Equality Act places an additional legal duty on public authorities called the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This requires public services to not only consider how their decisions affect people with protected characteristics but to also provide evidence of this. This applies to:
- Government departments and ministers
- Armed forces
- NHS
- Local authorities
- Police
- Educational bodies like schools and universities
- The information commissioner
The PSED also applies to privatised utilities like water companies, British Gas and Network Rail, and subcontractors like a private security company running a prison and private hospitals providing care on behalf of the NHS.
Good inclusive design will provide evidence-based assurance that the PSED has been met.
GDS assessment
Government services have to work for everybody. Users don’t have a choice of which service to use. They can’t shop around. It’s gov.uk or the high way. That’s why GDS are making sure services delivered in the public sector are “as inclusive as possible so that no users are excluded”. They describe their expectation like this:
“A fully inclusive service is one that can be accessed and successfully completed by all its users. They will be able to interact however they need to, regardless of their personal characteristics, situations, capabilities or access needs.”
In September, GDS published new inclusive design tips and guidance within the Gov.uk Service Manual called ‘Making your service more inclusive’.
All government services will be expected to follow this guidance moving forwards and we can expect to see this come up in assessments more and more in the new year 2019.
EU legislation — website accessibility
A new law came into effect in September which requires public sector websites to be accessible.
The ‘Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018’ states all public sector websites must comply with WCAG standards by September 2020 and mobile apps by June 2021.
The law covers all levels of government and includes councils, colleges, universities, the police and the NHS.
Recent testing of 270 UK council websites found that only 60% of homepages were accessible to people with disabilities. That means four in 10 local government websites are currently not accessible to people with disabilities, including those using assistive technologies, according to the latest survey under the Better Connected programme.
The rate and scale and scope of transformation taking place across the public sector means public scrutiny of public services has never been more intense.
Ministers, judiciary, press and public want assurance the shiny new modernised services will be legally compliant and deliver value for money for all taxpayers.
How’s it done?
A good inclusive design looks at every aspect of the service — the business processes, user experience, technology enablers, data architecture and operational delivery — to make sure it meets the access needs of diverse users from end-to-end of their service journey.
It helps if you have a nice big library of design patterns for multiple channels and processes to get you off to a good start. While it’s important to verify designs with users with access needs, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time from scratch.
There are a range of accessibility dos and don’ts that can be applied to content, paper, phone and the built environment as well as the digital component of a service, to provide ‘assisted digital’ routes as well as ensure the largest possible take-up of the digital service.
Likewise, we can apply a store of design features that support users through the handoff points between different channels, and build in the processes, data, protocols and capabilities required to mechanise delivery of inclusive service elements such as reasonable adjustments and accessible formats, to help keep users with access needs moving along their full user journey.
Inclusive design means expanding our human-centred design approach to include people with the broadest possible range of access needs and all 9 protected characteristics and verifying our designs by testing them with those users.
It also means applying the standards and methods associated with digital accessibility to all channels for truly seamless end-to-end service journeys across digital, paper, phone and face-to-face aspects of the service.
A good inclusive design offers flexible pathways and multiple experiences of the same process so it can be used by people with as many different access needs as possible.
Inclusive design is cheaper and more effective (and produces cheaper, more effective services) if it’s baked in from the start. Inclusive design methodologies should be applied to your service vision, as-is and to-be states, experience strategy, user stories, user journey maps, service process maps, user research, content, interface design, tech enablers, data, KPIs, capabilities, optimisation plan, the lot.
However light touch, it’s essential users with access needs are built into your future operating model. Whatever your service, you’ll have an obligation to provide equal access under the Equality Act, and if you’re a public authority you’ll need to consider how your service design will impact certain groups and provide evidence of that consideration in order to meet the PSED.
If you’ve already started the process, conduct an audit from an inclusive design perspective of the artefacts you’ve produced so far, iron out any issues and fill in the gaps.
If you’re just getting started, find out everything you can about your users, identify the causes of service exclusion, include people with access needs in the process and co-design flexible multi-channel solutions that work for diverse users.
Remember the average user is a mythical beast, and, the more we get to know the needs of real service users, the more enigmatic the ‘average’ user becomes.
Of the UK population…
22% have a disability
16% are functionally illiterate
17% live in poverty
17% have a “common mental disorder” (36% of which are undiagnosed)
14.9% do not currently use the internet and a further 14.3% are limited users
For 7.7% English/Welsh is not their main language
10% do not have access to the internet at home at all
When we consider these exclusion factors alone (and there are many more) it seems self-evident that we will need to take an inclusive design approach if we want to provide services that really can be used by everyone.
