📓 Meetup Notes: Outliers Matter-Including Users with Disabilities in UX Research with Sam Chandrashekar and Geordie Graham

Part 3 of our meetup live-blog from Inclusive UX Research 🙌

Sam Chandrashekar and Geordie Graham sharing tips on how to include participants with disabilities in UX research

Sam and Geordie gave us great tips on getting comfortable with including people with disabilities in UX research. They explain who people with disabilities are, why we should include them, and how we can include them.

Who are we trying to include?

Sam started by having us imagine that we have a lunch appointment tomorrow with a person who is blind. Would we still be comfortable moving forward with the appointment? Many people put their hands up in the audience, but once Sam asked if we would be comfortable with getting them seated, reading the menu, and describing the food to them, hands shot down.

After, they showed us a fun, but informative, video on how to interact with people with disabilities in a respectful manner. People with disabilities are people first. They need same things as us, such as respect. For example, watch the person signing and not their interpreter or their companion. Finally, actions that you think might be helping, might actually be doing the opposite— so it’s better to ask first!

Why should we include people with disabilities in our research?

There are three reasons:

1. To challenge assumptions 💡

Some of the assumptions we may have are that: all users see colour the same way, read text the way its displayed, can see the screen, use a mouse, can hear, and can understand easily. However, this is not true.

Users who are colour blind see colours differently. Users with low vision change their text size and colour for contrast. Users who are blind can only hear what’s on the screen. And users with cognitive challenges might feel overwhelmed.

2. To expand the scope of our research 💡

People with disabilities have diverse needs, and when we try to meet these needs, we include more people. Disabilities can be temporary or situational, meaning anyone can experience a disability any time.

Designing for disability covers a broader set of use cases. For example, designing for a person with one arm, while also designing for a mom holding a baby in her arm (while completing tasks with her other arm). Or designing for people who are hard of hearing, while also designing for people with ear infections or for people who are in loud environments. Designing for speech impairment, while also designing for people with throat infections.

3. To Help broaden our perspectives 💡

Do we really include people with disabilities in UX Research?

Generally, UX research covers only 80% of the target population. People with disabilities are usually in the 20%. If we exclude these people thinking they’re outliers, we’re losing valuable data and our research is incomplete. By including them, we’re broadening our research, which boosts our creativity, and increased innovation.

Sam then shared tips on how we can include them. We can do this by:

• Spending time with people with disabilities and learning about them
• Observing them using their technologies and, if possible, your products
• Listening to them speak about pain points as well as pleasure points (fun fact 💡: Geordie coined the term “pleasure points” during his Master’s thesis research on Accessible User Research)
• Learning how to meet disability-related needs during a UX session

Afterwards, Geordie took over and gave us tips on how to set up, conduct, and complete inclusive user research sessions, which included:

• Asking communities for their input when in doubt
• Providing all consent documents in advance in an accessible format (WCAG 2.1 compliant email or electronic documents)
• Compensating in-person participants more for their time. It could take them extra time to research how to get to the location, so pay them more! Especially if you’re going to make them to do extra work to see you!
• Providing a large work area to accommodate any adaptive tech the participant may need to use
• Making sure there is enough space if the participant has a service animal and that they are not talked to or touched, unless you’re invited to.
• Introducing facilitators and observers and describing their roles, especially if a participant is hard of hearing or seeing. If you don’t do this, they might be more focused on noises and movements in the room rather than the task at hand
• Budgeting time to ensure the participant’s adaptive tech is working
• Announcing that the user testing session has ended and thanking the participant for their participation
• Offering to assist the participant with getting back to a transit stop or their point of pick up

Finally, they ended their talk with this quote:

Diversity is…being invited to the party

Inclusion is…being asked to dance

Accessibility is…being able to get in the front door

- Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai, CAO, CNIB

Catch up on the other talks from the Inclusive UX Research meetup below 👇

Designing for older adults: What does it mean to you? — Lia Tsotsos

Who is at the table? Co-design methods and learnings — Sepideh Shahi, Cheryl Li and Dana Ayotte

To be accessible, start with process — Alwar Pillai

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