Develop Your Inclusive Mind
During a UX career fair, I spoke to a recruiter about how I was starting to write a book on inclusive design. He immediately brought up that someone at the tech company he worked at was kickstarting inclusive design within the company and suggested that I reach out to her.
Annika is part of the customer operations team, where they focus on supporting their users and ensuring that they get the best experience with the company’s products. On top of this, Annika is also involved in both making parts of the program more accessible (like making sure that components are still accessible after translating them into different languages) and working to improve the inclusive environment within the company.
“I’ve been really interested in making the product something that anyone and everyone can use,” Annika explained. “So I have kind of done various things here and there to try and gain awareness internally about matters of inclusivity and accessibility . . . awareness-building has been at the center of the work I’ve been doing.”
When using the design program, Annika wanted to make sure that “anyone and everyone can have the same experience and everyone can get what they want out of [the product].” This interest in improving accessibility so that everyone can participate in using the company’s product made her look at the bigger picture, which is: How can she raise awareness about accessibility so that more people will start to implement it in their work? Annika pinpointed what she needs to do to have a bigger impact on making the company’s products more accessible: cultivate an inclusive mindset.
“I recognize the biggest need is of awareness and just like a mindset shift, and I think this goes beyond any specific company, but just in general for society,” Annika said. “In order to create something that everyone can use, we really need to get outside of our own heads.”
To make the work of the company more inclusive, Annika was not only checking the accessibility of different features of the product, but was also working to make a change in the mindset creators have about inclusion through conversations and sharing experiences. This is why we need to share the message about inclusive design, and it is something that we need to see implemented more through the culture of creating.
Being more inclusive overall through all of this mixing and matching of intersections leads to really cool solutions in all different types of products, whether they be physical or digital. By practicing how to develop an inclusive mind in examining these intersections of pain points, people can design more inclusively. This strategy may be hard to implement but will result in creative and usable solutions, from correct dosages of medicine to online communications.
In this article series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, Our Exclusive Society: Pathways Toward Inclusion by Design. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect you can reach me via email rhrodney97@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter @RachelHRodney1. Also, you can also find my book on Amazon — here is the link to buy it.
