Many times we can easily participate and other times we cannot. When we can't use something easily, we try to adapt to make these interactions work, That's why lefties adapt to using right-handed mice, kids stand on their toes to wash their hands, but unfortunately, creativity is often lacking. enough that you can make these interactions work.
We have all gone through moments in which we have not been able to participate in a certain activity either with someone or with an object and have felt excluded.
Design is largely the cause of these exclusions, many times due to assumptions about who we design and other times to use our biases and preferences as a starting point.
When our solutions can be used, touched, heard, and seen by ourselves, they tend to work well for those with similar circumstances to us, but we also leave out many others who want to participate.
This is amplified when we design digital products. Today the modern designer or engineer is expected to create experiences for hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. On that scale, a misstep can have an amplified effect.
This is where inclusive design can help us reduce the exclusion gap. Below I share the principles of inclusive design and how they can help us in this mission:
1. Acknowledge exclusion
To take a step towards inclusion, we must understand our own biases, when we become aware of them we can use them to our advantage and encourage our creativity.
One bias that we have is our concept of disability. The World Health Organization defines it as an unequal interaction between a person and the environment in which they live. There can be situational, temporary, and permanent disabilities. This means that we have all had some kind of disability throughout our lives, having had a knee injury and not being able to use the stairs of a building, when we cannot hear someone's voice because there is a lot of noise in the environment, etc.
2. Learn from diversity
In order to improve our results we must change our processes, starting with letting these vulnerable communities participate in the design process from the beginning, working with them and not for them. Knowing their experiences, their motivations, and the way in which they adapt can give us a better vision to create more flexible solutions.
3. Solve for one, extend for many
Designing an experience for a group of users can benefit a much broader audience. For example, subtitles were originally created for the hearing-impaired community, but today it is a tool for daily use. People reading the screens in busy airports, watching movies with subtitles, or children learning to read thanks to this very invention. Taking different contexts into account helps us rethink how we can extend the reach of our solutions.
The benefits of inclusive design are many. We increase the innovation of our products, we generate a greater reach of these, and above all, we create opportunities so that each person can contribute to the world in a significant way.