Building inclusive UX
Inclusivity as an extension of accessibility: why we can’t rely on empathy alone
Our products can’t just talk inclusion: they have to walk it, too.
Empathy. It’s the foundation of successful human relationships and the backbone of every special needs household. My brother Jacob has cerebral palsy and, growing up, my family used “empathize” and “understand” like mantras. Empathy governed many of our attempts to make home life more accessible. We restructured our bathroom with wall-mounted soap dispensers. My dad attached a handle to the back of Jacob’s bike so he could run behind him and assist with his balance. When my brother began cutting his own food, my parents ordered cutlery with thicker, heavier handles.
And these accessibility measures went, by and large, unused.
Push-buttons alleviated shower bottle woes, but Jacob couldn’t catch the soap in his other hand. Jacob’s wavering attention span ruled out biking in straight lines at steady speeds, so my dad’s attempts to follow and rectify his center of balance were futile. And when we ordered that specialized silverware to assist his knife skills, the issue turned out to be plate stability. Not the cutlery shape.
You see, empathy was our beacon, our roadmap for determining what usability issues Jacob might encounter and how to fix them. We empathized to anticipate his needs and build solutions to streamline his experience — but these well-intended solutions sometimes missed the mark.
We faced the music: Empathy alone wouldn’t suffice.
We could use empathy to brainstorm and pursue different solutions, but that didn’t mean those solutions would actually work or even be used how we’d intended. Jacob’s formative years became a long-sustained game of trial-and-error: a real-life rendition of user testing. As outsiders, we quickly realized we could empathize with Jacob all we pleased — but he was the only person who truly knew his own experience, the only one who could actually explain or demonstrate the usability of each solution.
Soon after I transitioned into UX, I realized building inclusive user experiences works the same way.
Empathy functions as a mantra in the UX industry, too. It’s a buzzword. A holy grail. It’s the yellow brick road to accessible interfaces, the fast track to people-first design. Countless articles detail its importance in breaking down biases, promoting user understanding, and shaping a more intuitive user experience. And this popularity? It’s well-founded. Empathy enhances design thinking and makes many interfaces more human.
But, as my childhood experiences revealed, it doesn’t always make them more inclusive.
Empathy’s en vogue, but it’s only one building block of inclusive design.
In July, Twitter Design hosted a “Disability in UX” panel that evaluated empathy’s value in crafting inclusive UX — and its limitations, too. This isn’t the first time empathy’s been put in the UX hot seat. Twitter’s panel, comprised of disabled UX experts and users, shared their thoughts on how industry approaches to inclusivity generate a wide slew of shortcomings.
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) conversations are quick to talk about inclusion: the celebration of all races, beliefs, abilities (physical and cognitive), interests, and more. But no matter how much a product talks and celebrates diverse groups, it can’t be truly inclusive unless it’s accessible.
In the mission to create accessible experiences, panelists emphasized, solutions solely hinged on empathic design don’t deliver. While empathy may inform people-first design, it doesn’t accomplish it on its own.
Designing inclusively, it turns out, isn’t that simple.
“When you’re assuming that you can empathize your way to the right solutions, that sort of neglects what happens when you’re a non-disabled designer working with or trying to design for disabled people.”
— Alex Haagaard, “Disability in UX” panelist
What we’ve experienced with Jacob mirrors many other usability scenarios: our first attempts to solve accessibility issues aren’t always usable.
Inclusivity stands on the shoulders of accessibility. If your interface isn’t accessible, it isn’t inclusive.
When accessibility measures fall short, we fail our users. Unless we take action to improve these features, our product is actually exclusive. And until accessibility exists at the core of our entire product framework and design approach, our designs will still aim to “accommodate” different abilities instead of including them from the start. We can empathize with potential user issues all we please, but those empathy-based solutions won’t necessarily satisfy our users’ actual dilemmas.
While empathy introduces us to specific use case scenarios and encourages us to step outside of ourselves in addressing these situations, it doesn’t ensure the accuracy or usability of our design decisions. We need to reach beyond empathic design in order to build inclusive designs that actually deliver.
So how exactly do we accomplish this?
Enough talk of inclusivity — it’s time to walk it, too. Let’s get to know our users beyond just their personas. Here are some strategies you can use to make your design process, thinking, and results more inclusive.
Add some tools to your inclusivity kit.
Designers can strengthen their understanding of inclusivity by reading, conducting research, and consulting online resources. A11y Project supplies books, podcasts, videos, and technical tutorials to facilitate a stronger familiarity with accessibility and its best practices. The Web Accessibility Initiative outlines web accessibility standards, facilitates inclusivity-based discussions on GitHub, and offers its own course: Introduction to Web Accessibility. Medium hosts hundreds of articles about accessibility thought leadership and industry best practices.
Websites like Inclusive Design Principles (IDP) provide in-depth looks at inclusive design. IDP breaks inclusive design into seven core principles:
1. Provide comparable experience
2. Consider situation
3. Be consistent
4. Give control
5. Offer choice
6. Prioritize content
7. Add value
This blueprint provides a starting point for building a more inclusive product or interface: and it all hinges on accessible design. Giving control and offering choice are paramount to crafting inclusive user experiences — these steps account for our outside perspectives and personal biases by encouraging multiple solutions for a given usability issue.
Providing a spectrum of solutions allows users to pick and choose the features that best suit their goals and needs. Prototyping, researching, testing, and interviewing all contribute to defining what these solutions might be, and how we can best put them at our users’ disposal. With this agency, users shape their own experience with the tools and methods most applicable to their unique set of needs.
Change your mindset.
One of the most challenging aspects of designing for accessibility is veering away from a prescription-based mindset.
Breaking away from a 1:1 problem-to-solution ratio was one of the hardest adjustments we made as a special needs family, but doing so allowed us to more accurately observe, evaluate, and adjust our strategies to Jacob’s needs.
Designing inclusive experiences works the same way — we might know how we intend users to interact with our products, but we can’t know exactly how they actually do unless we observe these engagements. Accessible design is iterative design: each stage requires new input, and actual users should be one of the loudest voices.
Disprove your own assumptions.
When we rely on empathy to make design decisions, they can be misinformed. Our assumptions about the way users engage with and navigate our products won’t always carry.
In this case, curiosity won’t kill the cat: it’ll only strengthen your understanding of your users and help you adapt your accessibility initiatives to be more receptive to them. Workshops, panels, blogs, and other forms of user outreach help us build authentic connections with our users and further our mission toward a more inclusive UX.
Equate accessibility to usability.
If your product isn’t accessible, it isn’t usable. Accessibility should be a design dealbreaker from the start, from conceptualization to long after our designs go live.
What makes a design accessible or inaccessible will evolve along with our user base. Since accessibility and inclusivity aren’t static, our evaluation of usability shouldn’t be either. Global mandates and standards are just the baseline — truly inclusive designs expand beyond legal checklists and pull from real-world user experiences to strengthen their accessibility features. Putting the people in people-first design is key: A given design solution might satisfy an accessibility standard on paper without actually making anything more usable.
Facilitate an ongoing dialogue with your users.
Combat false on-paper wins by holding your team accountable off the page. Engage with users on a regular basis — especially when features grow or change, or new ones are introduced. Open communication with our users signals that we value their experiences all the time, not just during formal research or testing.
Inclusive design is an ever-evolving goal.
We make our interfaces as inclusive as possible by making them accessible as possible: and that threshold expands with new research, deeper insight, and advanced technical capability.
The journey toward inclusive design grows and shifts with our products and their users. Fortifying our toolkit beyond empathy allows us to sharpen our approach to finding accessible solutions. Striving to surpass accessibility standards drives our journey toward truly inclusive design. With the right strategies, we’ll press ever closer.
But our work is never done. And that’s a good thing.
Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.
