Parallel worlds connected by design: Inclusive Design and Product-Led Growth

We live in a parallel world of accessibility, going about our daily lives without seeing or interacting with it. Like many other people, I’ve seen accessibility symbols in many places but never really paid much attention to them until I had to wait for a very long connecting flight. I spent the rest of my waiting time thinking about it and delving into the parallel world of accessibility all around me at the airport.

This curiosity quickly turned into an obsession over the next couple of weeks, taking pictures of accessibility signs wherever I saw them. A significant amount of progress has been made in designing accessible and inclusive spaces that foster inclusivity, community engagement, promote social interactions, and enrich the overall quality of life.

However, this level of progress and purposeful design for accessibility is not well represented in digital product design. As technology and digital products become more embedded in our lives, it’s critical that they are inclusive and accessible to all.

Inclusive and accessible design is about crafting solutions and designing products and experiences that everyone can participate in and enjoy, regardless of their background, age, or abilities. Accessible design ensures that people with disabilities can use digital products effectively, while inclusive design is about creating digital products and services for everyone without the need for special adaptations. In addition to designing for disabilities, inclusive design considers the situations a user may be in, along with their different capabilities, needs, and aspirations, which can be either temporary or permanent.

As designers, we often design products and experiences targeted at our ideal user, a unified persona crafted with the aim of providing them a common experience when using our products. Designing with inclusivity in mind assumes no typical user exists, and instead, we are designing to remove blockers. This approach aims to include people with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities and enable them to effectively enjoy our beautifully crafted products and experiences.

A disability is not just a personal health condition; it’s a complex phenomenon that reflects mismatched human interactions between features of a person’s body and the flawed world designed for exclusion. Traditional user-centered design principles leverage personas to frame the wants and needs of our target audience and then craft solutions based on these personas. The persona is often seen as the ideal use case we are designing for, creating design solutions that embrace their individuality in the shared experience we create.

However, there’s a significant problem with personas. Unconscious biases can manifest in the personas we create, resulting in solutions and experiences based on our experiences, what we know, and our abilities as the baseline. Even though we may solve the needs of our persona group and create amazing experiences, we unintentionally make things difficult for others.

Recognizing how our designs create physical, cognitive, and social exclusion is the first step in creating inclusive design and experiences. This helps us reframe our thinking and generate new ideas to tackle problems and design inclusive solutions for disabilities.

I once participated in a design thinking session where we tried to empathize with users by modelling situational limitations to arrive at viable solutions. While this approach works on some level, it’s not enough to arrive at inclusive design solutions. As designers, we need to spend more time learning and understanding people’s experiences and how they adapt to everyday situational limitations.

By doing this, we are able to craft solutions and experiences that are universally important to everyone. As Microsoft puts it, “Solve for one, extend to many.” The beauty of designing for inclusivity is that while we think we are designing for a specific group, the resulting designs actually benefit a much larger group of people.

For example, captions on videos were created for the hard of hearing community, but I’ve realized that I watch a large proportion of videos on my phone without sound and often instinctively skip videos without captions. By designing for someone within a group with permanent disabilities, we indirectly design for three different groups of people: those with permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities.

The WebAIM Million 2023 Accessibility Report shows an increase in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) errors, with an average of 50.8 errors per web page visited by people with disabilities. In 2018, the after-tax disposable income of working-age adults with disabilities was approximately $490 billion, with $21 billion in discretionary income, and a global spending power of US$13 trillion. This exclusion of people with different accessibility needs translates to high revenue losses for businesses. As a business, incorporating inclusive design into your product-led growth strategies is no longer optional but should be a core tenet of your business.

There is often a misconception that the subset of people with disabilities is too small to justify the cost of designing for them in terms of time and monetary value, and that designing for inclusion makes the design interface ugly. This couldn’t be further from the truth. People with disabilities make up almost a fourth of the world’s population and represent the world’s largest minority group.

People with disabilities do not exist in isolation but are surrounded by a network of family and friends who see the value in products designed with them in mind. With this wider network, a vast consumer market for high-quality services and products emerges, as they are often looking for and supporting businesses that create accessible digital products. Through inclusive design, we can unlock this network, exponentially multiplying the reach and impact of our products and experiences.

In today’s ever-evolving business landscape, embracing inclusive design is no longer just a choice; it’s a strategy for sustainable, inclusive product-led growth. Inclusive design isn’t about designing for a niche market; it’s about expanding your reach to the widest possible audience. Creating digital products that are accessible to users from all backgrounds and abilities opens doors to immense opportunities.

Thinking about product use in edge cases and challenging assumptions forces us as designers to be more creative and thorough, resulting in robust products that delight a wider range of users. Adopting inclusive design principles doesn’t result in a compromise on aesthetics or functionality; it enriches our product’s appeal and usability.

By considering diverse user needs, we reduce exclusionary errors and ensure compliance, all while increasing user satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. Improved market reach, compliance with legal requirements, savings on costs, and increased revenue are just a few reasons why inclusive design is a driver for product-led growth.

So, the real question is not why you should invest in inclusive design but why you wouldn’t.

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PS: Next time you’re out and about, look out for accessibility symbols, and when you spot one, take a picture – you’ve just been granted access to the parallel universe of accessibility. The best part is there’s no light wand thingy to erase it from your memory (I kinda know how they work now, at least the theory of it).

Welcome to Learn Accessibility! https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/welcome

Inclusive Microsoft Design. https://inclusive.microsoft.design