While looking to create a good website design that is available to everyone, improved accessibility is the prime thing that comes to mind. However, accessibility is an attribute of the final product. Inclusive design is often focused on the process of ensuring a user-friendly design.
Accessibility focuses on making a design friendly to most people with specific physical and cognitive limitations as it is much broader than that. Instead of just looking at one solution for a design problem, inclusive designs ask UX designers to look for ways in which someone can participate in the making of a seamless website and a digital product.
In this blog, we will see why are inclusive designs necessary and one of the most important forms of innovation. Let’s begin understanding more about inclusive designs.
Designing for Everyone:
Inclusivity is the process of including the needs of all users irrespective of their identities and abilities. The final goal of an inclusive design is to create products and environments that can work well for everyone not just the majority of users.
For instance, traffic signs are designed to be understood universally with simple symbols that anyone can understand easily regardless of their background and education. The use of typography with high-contrasting colours and road signage can benefit people with visual impairments. This is a type of inclusive design that makes sure everyone can navigate roads and public spaces easily.
More than anything, inclusive design is about empathy because it involves understanding and embracing the needs of people who are left out. It is about designing products that can address the needs of users and also create a better user experience. The fact is that inclusive design is not just a good-to-have add-on, but an essential aspect of creating an equitable and inclusive world. It is imperative for the success of businesses.
Why Is Inclusive Design Important?
The main point of an inclusive design is to ensure a complete range of human diversity. While accessibility is focused on accommodating different abilities between people, an inclusive design includes different perspectives including the ones of disability in the process of design.
People using digital products come from a vast range of backgrounds and also have diverse life experiences. The experiences impact the way they interact with the world around them including a website or an application. An inclusive design aims to accommodate diverse experiences in the final product and design process.
Inclusive design also involves a wide group of people in the design-making process both in the design team and in user testing. The final result of an inclusive design process is a universal design that most people can use properly.
Dimensions of Inclusive Design:
There are three primary dimensions of inclusive design. They are as follows.
Diversity and Uniqueness: Inclusive design ensures that people keep diversity and uniqueness at the top of their minds. The idea of a hypothetical average user is useful but the needs of an individual user become increasingly diverse.
Individual users can deviate from an average user in many facets of their goals and needs. Hence, solutions for the masses do not work well in most cases. Adaptive digital systems that can support flexible and individual configurations are capable of delivering an inclusive design outcome.
It is possible to achieve diversity and support design with an integrated and component-based architecture that is important for maintaining consistency across different products.
Inclusive Design Process and Tools: Groups include people with diverse perspectives excelling in decision-making, innovation, and the ability to make precise predictions. It is important for the inclusive design teams to be as diverse as possible and include people who have lived the experience of users.
Supporting an inclusive design process and making sure that the use of accessible and usable design encourages diverse participation in the design process is important.
Wider Design Impacts: Inclusive designers should be aware of the context and wider impact of all designs. Endeavours must be made to effect beneficial impacts beyond the ones targeted at the intended beneficiary of design.
Inclusive design leads to a cycle of inclusion and interconnectedness of users and systems. Understanding the broad and positive impact requires complete integration of inclusive design in product development.
How to Create Inclusive Designs?
The creation of inclusive designs is a very simple process. The first step is to set up a team with a wide range of perspectives. When the team is more diverse, the results will be a lot more comprehensive. There are many factors to be kept in mind when talking about diverse design teams including different people from socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures, differing abilities, genders, countries, ages, etc.
A team should be able to incorporate different perspectives from the beginning so that the designs that are created are way ahead and comes from a design team that shares similar backgrounds and abilities.
Once the iterations of designs are created, the designers should also incorporate user testing with a heterogeneous group. It is important to look for people who represent a wide range of end users of a product.
There are accessibility guidelines that can go far in making websites much more universally friendly. However, UX designers can take these guidelines a step ahead by considering the motivations behind them. Designers must remember that all digital products require an approach to see solutions differently but thinking about them can help in improving the inclusive design process remarkably.
Also, read: Top Reasons to Choose UX/UI Design as a Career Option
Conclusion:
A well-made design is important for creating a good user experience and inclusive design is one of the most comprehensive pathways to achieve that. When you use the inclusive design process, you can create products that work nicely for everyone instead of just people who are represented on the design team.
Instead of creating more adaptations for barriers that may exist within a product, UX designers can create better designs by simply removing as many barriers as possible. The result will be inclusive and engaging user experiences that can satisfy accessibility requirements.
