Jon Rumsey
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Inclusive Design Notes
Notes with key takeaways from reading Inclusive 101 Guidebook by Microsoft Design.
Table of Contents
Overview
- Using our own abilities as a baseline upon which to design apps and web sites for the world to use actually results in exclusive designs.
- Inclusive design is intended to promote higher customer (or site visitor) counts, opening our businesses and projects to more customers.
- Products should by phsyically, cognitively, and emotionally appropriate for users.
The bias of our own abilities as a design starting point will succeed in capturing more users that match the design baseline.
Exclusions
- There is no "normal".
- All five senses can, and usually are, involved in the user experience of our apps and web sites.
- Reduces the total potential visitors (conversions) possible from a smaller pool of users that can use the product.
- Raising barriers is easy to do, but they should be avoided to expand access to a larger potential custom base.
Inclusive Design Defined
"A design methodology that enables and draws on teh full range of human diversity" [Inclusive 101 Guidebook, pg. 11]
Accessibility:
- Qualities that make an experience open to all.
- Professional discipline aimed at achieving (the previous bullet point).
[Inclusive 101 Guidebook, pg.12]
Principles of Inclusive Design
Recognize Exclusion
- Situational impariments, activity limitations, and restrictions on participation. Mismatches between environments, situations, and society.
- Disability is no longer considered a personall attribute.
- Disability is now considered as context-dependent, with complex problems occurring at points of interaction between a person and society.
- Points of Exclusion should actually highlight areas of opportunity to enable utility and elegance.
- Could be temporary (very bright light) or permanent (missing a limb or fingers).
- Could be situational: Noisy environment, short-sightedness, sensory overloading.
Disability is mismached human interactions, not a personal health condition. [Inclusive 101 Guidebook, pg. 21]
Learn From Diversity
- Humans adapt to diversity.
- People become the central focus from the start of the design.
- Designers cannot imagine a users emotional context (what gives them joy or frustrates them?).
- Learn from adaptions and consider the context around the device, input, and usage.
- Use empathy and avoid substituting disabilities. Instead learn how people adapt to the world around them and get their actual perspective on the matter.
"Increased Mobility of Technology is Equal to Increased Moments of Disability" [Inclusive 101 Guidebook, pg. 30]
Solve For One, Extend To Many
- Focus on what's universally important to all.
- Everyone has varying motivations and abilities.
- Experiencing exclusion through our designs is not uncommon.
- Inclusive design can benefit a person with a permanent point of exclusion (blind) and a temporary exclusion (driving a car).
- Adding constraints to the design process benefits people with permanent, and situational limitations, therefore has added utility and value!
The Persona Spectrum:
- People missing a limb will encounter similar limitations as a person cradling their baby in one arm - limited motion and capability.
- Situational impairments coincide with permantent points of exclusion.
- Including both situational and permanent points of exclusion in design can increase audience by an estimated 20 million users.
- Use Persona Spectrum to understand related mismatches.
- Fosters empathy.
- Design scales to a broader audience.
Statistics are cited in [Inclusive 101 Guidebook, pg. 40]
Mindset to Making Inclusive Designs
How to implement inclusive design:
- Start with a user-centric abstraction.
- Include the mindset of target users.
- Use methods that enable inclusivity.
- Utilize tools to test and evaluate usability and inclusivity in the design.
Benfits of Inclusive Design:
- Increased access.
- Reduced friction.
- Increase emotional context.
The Toolkit:
- Teaches how to recognize exclusion.
- Describes methods to learn from diversity.
- Gets you started solving for one and extending to many.
- Use to evaluate existing processing and evolve them to improve inclusivity of our designs.
Inclusive Design Toolkit in Practice:
- Adds to existing iterative design processes.
- Enables design elements that open usability of the design to a wider audience.
- There is much more to learn.
- Considering inclusive design from the ground-up will be a general practice for me, personally and professionally.
- Why would I want to exclude users from my web sites and applications by not using inclusive design techniques?
- Developing solutions for myself and others should be easily extendable to people with permanent or situational points of exclusion.
- When possible, gather real user feedback on my designs for iterative improvement at all stages.
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