Inclusive design: creating digital products for everyone
As designers, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our digital products are usable for everyone. This means creating designs that are inclusive and accessible to people of different genders, races, abilities, religions, cultures, and more. We may not always be aware of the full spectrum of people who use our products. To create an inclusive design process, we must ask critical questions about the people we are designing for and how they’ll interact with our product. These questions will shape and guide us through the entire design process to create a product that is both pleasurable and accessible for everyone.
Defining accessibility
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines web accessibility as the following:
“Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools.”
It’s about ensuring everyone can use your product, not just some people.
There are two parts of accessibility:
The design process must be inclusive of different groups, which means that you need to listen to what they need and provide them with resources to make their tasks easier.
The design must be usable for different types of people in a wide variety of situations or contexts. This means creating an experience that doesn’t require special accommodations or know-how for someone to navigate it successfully.
Asking the right questions
When starting a design project, it’s important to ask questions that will help you create an inclusive and accessible design.
Who is your target audience?
What challenges do they face?
What are their needs, limitations, and abilities?
It’s also necessary to acknowledge the diversity of people who will use your product. It is essential to consider everything from age, religion, culture, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability type, and much more.
By asking the right questions at the beginning of a design process, we can better understand how all people interact with our designs. For example:
How does someone with a visual impairment interact with a design that relies on color contrast to differentiate between different sections?
What do differently-abled people think about a website that doesn’t have any form of navigation or skip link?
Do deaf people find it challenging to navigate through video content without captions?
Design for all
There are many ways to design for all. Designing for all doesn’t always mean designing the same way for everyone, but making sure that people can use your product in their own way.
For example, you could make a mobile app with voice-over functionality so people who are deaf or hard of hearing can easily interact with it. Or, you could create a website that is more accessible to people with disabilities by adding text instructions and captions.
It also means not assuming everyone will be using the product in the same way. For instance, if you’re creating a mobile app, you should provide buttons in different sizes for different finger sizes or offer different languages for users in other countries. Alternatively, if you’re creating an advertisement, your copy should be clear enough so someone who doesn’t speak English can still understand it.
Designing for all is about creating products that are accessible to everyone, regardless of who they are or what abilities they have. It’s about being inclusive and understanding what might exclude certain users from enjoying your product.
Test your work with a diverse group of people
An essential part of creating an inclusive design process is to test your work with a diverse group of people. Utilizing diverse, well-sampled groups of people will ensure that your test group represents the broadest range of potential users. In her book, Building for Everyone, Annie Jean-Baptiste describes in-depth her process for building diverse, inclusive user testing groups to ensure everyone is represented.
So, how do we know we’ve created an inclusive design? We want to make sure that our product doesn’t exclude people based on their cultural background, race, gender, age, ability, and more.
Testing our designs makes it easier to identify potential areas of exclusion and fix them before releasing the final product or service. By doing so, we can create something pleasurable and accessible for everyone!
Conclusion
We all want our digital products to be accessible and inclusive. We also want to be inclusive when we create digital products. To make sure that your designs are inclusive, it is vital to think about your users and the context they will experience your designs or application. Also, designers need to be deliberate about who they are designing for. To create inclusive work, we need to be intentional about design choices and test our work with a diverse group of people. With these guidelines, we can create digital products that are accessible, inclusive, and work for everyone!
Further reading and resources:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/
https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-usability-inclusion/
https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
