Designing to the Extreme
When I delivered my first public talk at a Pakistani university back in my early career days, I often worried about how my voice would not carry to most undergraduate students sitting in a noisy auditorium.
I could sense bad resonance in the auditorium all around me. Instead of raising my voice, I let my audience adapt to my voice. Some of them got up to stand closer, others moved their seats to the center or near aisles, away from the background noise.
Ten years later, I am still in awe of the capacity of human beings when they are able to adapt to bad or mediocre design. With digitalization around us, design should get better, right? Maybe. That still depends on who designed a particular product and for which segments of population.
There is a difference in physical and digital spaces. With physical spaces and concrete objects, it is easy to visualize how a certain building infrastructure or let’s say how an ATM machine could not be accessed by persons with physical and sensory limitations. In the realm of digital space, products such as websites, apps and audio-visual products, it is hard to visualize how some of our users face ‘digital barriers’. To understand potential pain points, big digital companies include a variety of users to their informal or impromptu discussions when they design and develop products. For example, a colleague and their team asked me for feedback for an app they were making at a digital company. The app used audio messages to chat with friends and family members with one tap on a circular icon on the app.
For most users, the app can be a useful tool for communication when text messaging is time-consuming or during driving for urgent message relays. But for me and many others users, the app was essentially inaccessible — I could not use the app because my low hearing meant I needed a visual format for spoken conversations. While my colleague and their team thought of ways to make their app more accessible, it was clear that a segment of users of the app could not include people with sensory limitations (hearing and/or speech) who usually prefer video or messaging chats over audio ones. Nonetheless, it was empowering to include me in the app design and prototyping loop as they could experience firsthand some of the digital barriers I was having.
There is a certain limit to the idea that a single design or product can be equally accessible for every kind of user. In short, unless the design or product incorporates most elements of human-centered or inclusive design, issues with accessibility which are overlooked or considered as an afterthought are bound to happen. For example, at some workplaces, the entrance to buildings may have ramps but the upper floors which perhaps house a gym, gaming arena or a prayer room may not. Similarly, companies create digital products which contain video contents but may not have options for close captions or subtitles. In this aspect, I am often surprised with the notion of inaccessibilityat workplaces. What should be easily accessible to the majority of users suddenly becomes difficult to access due to lack of accessible feature(s).
In my opinion, as well as those who design with accessibility as a forethought, it is often cheaper when accessibility is incorporated in design while the whole idea or project is still being mapped on a scrap of paper. It is more expensive when a product has already been created and then needs to be revamped or restructured to include elements of accessibility.
“Accessibility is not an edge case. If you had 1,000 employees and 1 was a wheelchair user, you’d provide an access ramp. We don’t get to deprioritise based on % of users — this is not about product/market fit, it’s about inclusive services that work for everyone.”
— Kylie Havelock, Senior Product Manager, Canadian Digital Service
Users bring an array of diverse personas that user researchers and designers carefully collect and analyze. Regardless, we ourselves do not think we should be assimilated into one discrete persona. We just want to be who we are in the digital world without the need to adapt to designs but have the designs adapted to ourselves. We want designs that are functional, aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use: that fulfill our needs.
The trouble is, we who represent the minority (read: persons with unique needs) are often forced to assimilate and adapt to the majority (read: mainstream population), the most common personas defined by researchers and designers, and lose our authenticity in the process. We are forced to adapt to mediocre designs and compromise with the only options available. Struggling and frustrated, we feel our valuable insights should and could have been taken into consideration in the product development.
“How come we never have the time or the money to invest in making sure we are solving the right problems to begin with, but we have all the time and money in the world to fix it once its built?”
— Fredrik Scheide, VP Design Telenor Group
Maybe we disregard what is ‘normal’. Maybe it is also time we disregard the segments, ‘majority’ and ‘minority’, and think of every kind of user that can fit our personas. Creativity demands that we think as far as we can along the diversity frame and ponder: What are some of our users who maybe are left behind in all this digitalization?
Technology itself can be a big barrier to effective inclusion if adequate support or accessibility options are not there. On the other hand, technology has the power to transform lives for many users just like Microsoft has continued to innovate for many of its users including gamers who are differently-abled.
“There is something called “Designing for extremes”. That means, if you are designing for extremes, the middle takes care of itself. Accessibility implicitly applies limitations, and those limitations spawn creativity. The best designs require limitations.”
— Fredrik Scheide, VP Design Telenor Group
An example of ‘unassimilated’ users who do not want any mediocre designs impact their work would be e.g. people who choose to walk to work. On the other hand, people who are forced to ‘assimilate’ and use the same mediocre design and try to make the best out of it, would be the people who wheel into work, or use some kind of sensory aids for examples. They do not understand the town hall meetings, or video contents on web portals due to lack of options for enabling close captions and different screen sizes, or lack of color contrasting, font sizing features, etc. These users would often make do with compromises such as try to understand some parts of spoken conversations during meetings or use app features according to their abilities and not being able to use the most important features.
It is here that Inclusive Design comes in. Design that is inclusive speaks to all kinds of learners and thinkers without common obstacles. The idea is to expand our thinking to incorporate a wide array of users along the spectrum. “Is our product accessible to majority of our users?” or “Did we listen to stories/perspectives from people with disabilities or other unique needs during user research and prototyping?” Often, we would find our intuition becoming sharper as we put in more features that can be accessed by a wide variety of users. In short, features become more universalized.
Adaptability is a two-way street. Adapting design to become inclusive carries elements from both functional and aesthetic perspectives but also fulfill the needs of our diverse users. The key question begs:
“If you release a digital product that someone can’t even access, how would you ever get their feedback about how inaccessible it is?”
— Yvonne Romano, Senior Digital Designer, Designit
As forethought for product designers and managers, it would be a wise idea to invite users/customers with unique needs or who are differently-abled, (with varying learning and cognitive styles) to the research hub. There could be an interesting reflexive dialogue on design pointers related to typography, style, speed of landing pages or flow of content, color, contrast, visibility, mobility, tactility, responsiveness, user interactions, impact factor of web and app design on users’ behavior to mention a few areas. One could consider that a design that is too ubiquitous rarely serves most users’ needs. By positively thinking ahead in terms of user experience, we can be grateful to ourselves for jumping on the accessibility notch — collectively, as a team.
This article is the first part of series tied to accessibility and digital designs. More coming up.
> Inclusion is not a one-person’s job. I am thankful to be at Telenor where great colleagues and champions of digital design encouraged me to understand product designs in a nuanced manner.
> Special thanks to Fred Scheide & Sinisa Sasic for their thoughtful insight and editing support from A to Z, and all good things in between. Another thanks to digital teams for lending me their app screenshots.
