BONUS: Emma Goddard - Inclusive Design: Benefits to Users and Organisations

Introduction

0:00I'm Chris Mears. And I'm Carla Lindarte. We're two UX designers. And we hate jargon. So we're here to help you untangle the world of design. Cut through the crap and talk about what really matters. Yes, solving people's problems. Welcome to Design Untangled. Hello, everyone. It's been a while since we've released an episode. So we Chris and I are

0:33very excited to be here today. And we're going to talk about something that I'm really, really interested in. And I don't really actually know much about that, which is a bit shameful. But we're going to talk about inclusive design. And today we have amazing Emma, who is she heads up the inclusive design team at Deloitte Digital. She also chairs the British Interactive Media Association for inclusive design. And she spent the last year as the head of inclusive

1:06design for the NHS test and test and trace can't say that. So Emma, welcome. And Chris, hello. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me and that lovely introduction. Yeah, I hope I said everything right, because I always make mistakes. So if I did, please correct us. Right. So Emma, really, really excited to have you. It's been a while since I wanted

Inclusive Design

1:32to talk to you about all of this. And let's start with something potentially a bit basic. But we can you explain to us what is inclusive design? And why is that different? Or is it different from accessibility? Yeah, sure. So this can be a bit of a confusing one, because they're very tightly coupled as concepts. And there is a lot of overlap between them. And in my view, you can't necessarily do one successfully without the other. But inclusive design, if we start with that is

2:06a practice or a methodology where you build solutions with people who have historically been excluded from participating in those solutions. So it's really a design methodology that puts people who are typically excluded at the heart of your design process. And therefore, the solutions that you create, consider the needs of all humans. So that's beyond just disability, it could be age,

2:38digital literacy skills, language, gender, all forms of exclusion, permanent or situational. So, you know, it could also consider people who are unwell, you know, if they've broken a leg, they've lost their glasses, it's just about designing with all of those situations in mind. So I see inclusive design more as the upfront conceptual design and how you shape a solution with excluded groups. Whereas accessibility is more an attribute of the things that we make based on a set of standards.

3:16So you might have heard of the WCAG standards, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And they're the standards that we meet in the products that we create. So that's weighted a little bit more on the delivery side. There's a lot of professional roles with deep expertise in technical accessibility, and in how to meet that criteria. But accessibility may not necessarily involve design contribution from excluded groups, you know, to make something accessible in the way that inclusive design would. Would you say that, I mean, in my experience,

3:54even talking about accessibility in a lot of places is quite a foreign concept to many organizations, would you say inclusive design is sort of more well known than accessibility or less? I'd say less at this point. And I think it's only relatively recently, relatively recent that they are becoming their own two distinct practices. So I think for a long time, accessibility has been,

4:27is very much kind of growing in awareness. And it's, it's skyrocketed over the last kind of five or 10 years in terms of awareness and understanding. And I think inclusive design was kind of lumped in with that. But actually, I think in the last, even just the last year or two, there's an understanding that inclusive design is a practice in and a methodology in its own right, separate to accessibility. And so I would say it's probably less well known in my experience. Yeah.

Getting into Inclusive Design

4:58And how did you get into inclusive design?

5:02So I went, when I was working in Sydney, about seven years ago, I went to a talk on accessibility specifically. And that was this huge light bulb moment for me. Somehow I got through four years of design education and a number of years working. And I wasn't ignoring accessibility, but I just wasn't really aware of it. I hadn't come across it. And at that moment, I really thought, this is what I want to do. I'd always been really passionate about quality and inclusion. This is how I want to

5:35channel my creative energy and, and what I want to do every day. Because I was a designer at that point, I was a UI UX designer. And then I think a couple of weeks after I went to that talk, and I had that huge epiphany, I moved to London. And by chance, the first project that I went on to was with an incredible client of ours. I can't mention them by name, but their customer base is exclusively people who have disabilities. And I worked with them for 18 months. It was this incredible, immersive experience in

6:10inclusive research, inclusive design, how to design and build accessible products. And from there, it's really just my passion grew. And I think, talking with a lot of people with disabilities and research, understanding how I don't think I can swear on a podcast, can I how crappy the internet is for people, so many people with disabilities. So I just from there, that's really what I wanted to do. So I started out in accessibility, but over the years have really more moved, you know, shifted things to the left with

6:45the design process and focused more on how you can bring excluded people into the design process than actually the technical build side of things. Yeah, you can definitely swear in our podcast. So don't worry about it. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, 90% of the content is swearing. Yeah. Well, I was going to say how shit the internet is really for so many, you know, and there's all this, there's, you know, if a physical building was not accessible or inclusive, there would be outrage, you know, but they're just, it just, it feels like there's still nowhere near

7:20the awareness that there needs to be that most digital products are completely inaccessible to people with, so with disabilities, with many disabilities. And so, so yeah, I was, I felt passionate, but also angry, I think, at that point, when I had that light bulb moment, I guess. Yeah, well, you're not necessarily an excluded person, right? And, or are you? And how, so that moment, how did you actually found, actually found that that was your passion? And, you know,

7:55how do you get connected to that is a bit interesting, isn't it? Hmm. Yeah. So that is something that I'm conscious of. And beyond being female, I don't experience the level of exclusion or discrimination that a lot of other people do. And really the whole point of inclusive design is to bring those perspectives into your design process. But the way that I see it is that this is everyone's responsibility to fix, and this is the best way that I know to be an ally,

8:30to use, you know, my skills and, you know, what I can do within my organisation to advocate for these methodologies. So I don't think you do need to be, you know, necessarily someone who is particularly excluded yourself to advocate for this, you know, an analogy might be with the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, if people of colour were the only ones, you know, preaching the value of Black Lives Matter, then, you know, the movement might not nearly go, you know, where it needs to, or as far

9:02as it needs to. And so I think it's, yeah, it's, it's the best way that I know how to be an ally. And I think what's really important to just consider alongside that is that you really need to have diverse perspectives on your team, ideally in your leadership. And, and that can be tricky if your broader organisation is not as diverse as it needs to be. But I think failing that,

9:34that's where the inclusive design methodologies come in, where you bring those perspectives into the heart of your design process through your research and your testing and everything like

Inclusive Design Methodologies

9:45that. It's interesting, because throughout your career, you've had the opportunity to work, as you mentioned, on projects where, I guess, and I assume it allows you to, to learn a lot about it, because as you were talking about this, I've been in the industry for a very long time, and accessibility, it's always been like a tick box, right? Is, is the colour accessible, is this and that. But there isn't all, maybe I'm just ignorant around the topic, but there isn't like, lots of guidelines or things that you have to consider, especially if you're

10:17talking about a wider range of, of, you know, criteria, as you mentioned at the beginning, it could be, you know, someone who has had an accident or can't read properly, or, you know, there's so many different things to think about. So what, apart from obviously experience, what other kind of sources of information you constantly like, you know, reviewing, or how, how do you learn more about this? Because I think that there is still, as you said, a lot of designers

10:49out there who, they don't necessarily don't care, but just, just, there's not much information out there, is it? Or maybe it's just me being ignorant about it. No, yeah, it's, it's a really good question, because I think it can feel quite intimidating, because it is so broad as a topic, and you're talking about covering so many forms of exclusion.

11:12But I think in a way, inclusive design is a lot more simple than accessibility, because really at the core of it, all it means is bringing as many excluded groups into your design process as you can. So making your research as diverse as you possibly can. And so I think it's, it, and you can't, you know, you can't necessarily solve for all forms of exclusion, you know, that there might be

11:44a process depending on what you're trying to solve, or what you're trying to do, where you identify, you know, a number of different groups, or you decide that you want to run an initiative, you know, purely around digital literacy. You can work with the type of feedback that is coming back through user research, or other feedback mediums to help prioritize the areas that you want to tackle, you know, within inclusive design, or, or to help you form a roadmap, you know, maybe it's something like a continuous inclusive discovery, where you can,

12:18constantly have people from different excluded groups, you know, involved in your design process, or you could look at it where, you know, you prioritize and you tackle specific groups as part of a broader roadmap. And you think, okay, we're going to focus on disability, and, and bring those people into our design process. And then we might move on to other forms of exclusion. So I think it's, in a way, it's, it's simple, because it really is just about involving those people in the design

12:51process, and making sure that their voices are heard, and you're not designing for them, you're co-designing with them. So it's, it's really about that research element, I think, is, is what it comes down to. But yeah, there are considerations around prioritization and things too. Um, so just picking up on that a bit, um, I know, like, ideally, this wouldn't be the case, but some organizations, it can be very difficult to get even any budget to do just research with

13:22anyone, let alone kind of specifically trying to recruit for excluded groups. So how can designers and researchers and anyone else working on products, try and sort of sell in the idea that this is something that is something that organizations should be doing, basically?

13:40Yeah, so I think there's a number of things that you can do. One of them is that, I mean, there's a huge number of benefits to inclusive design, you know, beyond the fact that it's, it's the right thing that we should be doing, uh, to create inclusive experiences that allow everyone to participate in, you know, whatever experience you're designing. But there's a whole host of benefits that people, a lot of people are totally unaware of, and it's about kind of bringing them to light. So, you know, for example, being able to reach a broader audience, 23% of the UK

14:16population has some form of disability, uh, positive reputational value, you know, there's this huge increased focus on ethical business practice, uh, avoiding legal risk often can help as an argument. Uh, I find that, um, that can, um, prick people's ears up when you, you, uh, you know, outline the, the risk of, of having uninclusive experiences, particularly in the US, because they have a, a more of a litigation culture than what we have here. Um, but also it reduces costs, uh, if you

14:52invest in inclusive design and accessibility upfront that significantly reduces your, you know, costs of inevitably having to retrofit, retrofit things down the line. So there's all of these benefits and really there's a huge number of articles online that outline, you know, all of these things and anyone can pull together a really basic business case and take it to, you know, no matter who you are, you know, you, you might've just entered the workforce and, and you've seen that, you know, processes or your research is not as diverse as it needs to be. Anyone can pull together this type

15:29of information. It's really widely available and put that in front of someone who's making decisions and say, you know, this is worth investing in. Here's how we can save money by doing it now and not, you know, retrofitting it later to be inclusive. So I would say, make the case would be my, my, um, my number one tip for this. So following up on that, um, and this might get a little,

16:00a little bit more detail, but if you were to, let's say you, you kind of, you know, you do your case and your client or your organization kind of buys into it. I'm just thinking more in terms of like research planning and, you know, as you, as you have like a particular budget, would you recommend to, cause there's a bit, obviously when you have a research plan in place, you have a screener, you have like, this is your kind of user types or target consumer or user. Um, do you know,

16:35you normally just go for people without those disabilities or, you know, you go for whoever is available. So how do you make sure you incorporate inclusive, um, you know, inclusivity, if I say that into your research plans? Um, so is it that you, I don't know if you bring in like, you know, people of color for certain sessions or how do you do it? Like just obviously, as I said, it might be a bit detailed, but it would be good to kind of provide an example perhaps of a project

Research and Recruitment

17:06that you've run recently to just to give people like, um, a guidance of how to do that within the actual research process. Yeah, sure, Carla. So, I mean, I think at a basic level, when you are designing your research, it's really important to include specs there that are, um, that you discuss. Well, I think actually, sorry, moving even earlier than that, when you choose the agency or your recruiting

17:37method, you should consider how you are going to make sure that the people that you're going to reach are going to be diverse. So if you are using an agency, it's having that conversation with the agency and saying, you know, do you have the ability to, um, provide diverse participants? You know, do you, uh, do you have, you know, people with disabilities, do you have people of color, um, within your pool of participants that you can provide to us and make sure that's part

18:09of the conversation upfront. Um, and then if you were to carry on with an agency, making sure that it's part of your, uh, your requirements or your screener that you want a certain, for example, and thinking about the different lenses of exclusion. So you want a certain percentage of those participants to have disabilities. Uh, you want a certain percentage to be of, you know, non-white, uh, backgrounds. You want a certain percentage to potentially even be

18:41non-English speakers, um, that can complicate your research. You know, you might need translators, uh, and making sure that it's part of your screener and what you hand over to them as a hard requirement and you discuss it early on. And I would over-index on, you know, the number of people who, who might be typically excluded because what I've seen is that when you have different perspectives in your design process, it really is this incredible catalyst for new ideas and

19:12innovation. And it inevitably, uh, leads to solutions that are better for everyone, you know, not just those people who are excluded. So, um, I would over-index and aim really high on the percentage that you're asking for, uh, in your recruitment and that, that shouldn't impact the cost. If, if you're doing that, um, necessarily in, in, in some cases, if you're looking at some groups, it might take them more time. Um, but it's really about thinking about it, you know, at the

19:43beginning, when you choose your agency or recruitment method, and then when you create that screener, uh, and then it's about, uh, you know, making sure that you, uh, prepare as best you can to make sure that that session is kind of safe and well-designed and, and you're able to meet that participant's needs as well. Yeah, that sounds, yeah, that sounds really good. So it's kind of like you define what the kind of inclusive or inclusivity or inclusive design means to you and your project

20:19and what the criteria is. So you kind of have that upfront, right? And then that is then embedded into pretty much every research, um, initiative that you have throughout the project. So that makes a lot of sense if, if it's done in that way. So as you said, it does, it shouldn't really change budget. It's just basically making sure that that criteria is part of that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think it's, it's just making sure that all the research that you do,

20:50that is baked into it. But then if you wanted to go above and beyond that, you know, you might do a specific, uh, piece of research with different excluded groups to kind of build up your, your knowledge on those groups. And then that could be used as a basis for future design. Um, so, you know, you might decide to specifically do a week of research with people with cognitive disabilities, uh, or a week of research with people with low digital literacy, and then you're building up, you know, your

21:23organizational knowledge of those groups. You can, um, ideally hold on to that insight and those needs, and that can form, you know, a basis of information that you can also design from in future and, and, and that you can share out, you know, across your teams and your organization. Uh, and so you can kind of build up your knowledge that way of, you know, how different groups interact with your, your products as well. But the, yeah, the absolute essential is that all the research you're doing does have that

21:54diversity kind of baked in. Yeah. Cool. And I just wanted to revisit something you touched on quickly

Temporary Exclusion Examples

22:00at the start, which is about the idea of temporary exclusion. So yeah, some people may not think of themselves as excluded, but if you've ever had a child and had to get around town with a pram and, you know, get through shops or whatever, that is a severe pain in the ass to put it mildly. Um, so I'm just wondering if you've seen maybe some good and bad examples of like how inclusive design has either been thought about or not been thought about in the physical world as well. I think that'd

22:33be quite interesting to touch on. Yeah. So, so yeah, you, you raise a really good point that it's, it's, I think the parent one is interesting and it actually comes up quite a lot that, you know, having a baby in one arm while you're trying to do something with the other means that, you know, you don't have kind of, you know, both your hands to do a task or, you know, you need to get around with a pram, for example. Uh, I think that, I mean, we're all very complex humans and our needs are changing

23:04constantly every day. And, uh, yeah, that is one form of, you know, temporary, uh, exclusion that, that you might experience depending on your environment. And there's, there's this model that inclusive design prescribes to this model of disability, but I think it applies for other forms of exclusion as well. Um, it's called the social model of disability and the social model of disability says that someone is only disabled by their environment. It's not their impairment that

23:39disables them. So for example, a wheelchair user or someone with a pram is not disabled until they reach an environment that hasn't been designed with, with their needs in mind. Uh, whereas the medical model, which is, is, you know, completely outdated and we're moving away from that is that, um, the impairment is the problem and that someone needs to, um, you know, work around, make their environment work for them. Uh, and I think that, you know, example of, you know, having a kid and

24:14getting around with a pram around shops and things is, is a good one because, you know, for example, curb cuts in, in the road. So originally curb cuts were designed for, uh, people in wheelchairs specifically. And that is a really, you know, incredible example of inclusive design and how that has gone on to improve experiences for everyone. So, uh, everyone uses the curb cuts and, and, you know, people with prams, people with trolleys, you know, kids on tricycles, that's

24:47extended to, uh, to everyone. So, so I think that would be, that would be one, one example of, um, of where I've seen inclusive design extend to temporary forms of exclusion. So people with prams, um, in the physical world where it hasn't worked out so well, I don't do so much work in the physical world, more, more the digital. Um, and really I only have seen positive examples

25:25of this. So if you think about digitally, you know, for example, um, designing with people who have cognitive disabilities or autism will lead to the simplification of written content. And actually everyone, uh, needs simple content. You know, no one wants to be reading like overly complex, complicated things. Um, you know, it works better for children. It works better for, um, people who might speak English as a second language, but it also just works for people who are like a really stressed and anxious and busy, which happens to all of us, which you could consider, um, you know,

26:01temporary exclusion, uh, or, you know, making your tap targets bigger by co-designing with people who have Parkinson's, um, actually works for everyone. You know, again, if you're stressed and you're anxious and you need to do things on the run, um, or maybe you're booking a late night Uber and you've had a few too many drinks, like there's, there's so many scenarios where I think, um, I've only really seen positive where, you know, you design for exclusion and then it extends to benefit everyone

26:32when they experience those moments, um, of temporary exclusion, as you said, Chris. Yeah, that's super, super interesting. I was actually going to ask that as well. Um, and you've already answered my question, but it was around, um, you know, how do you make sure that as you're designing for, um, you know, inclusive, uh, sorry, excluded people, um, you don't forget about, you know, um, the rest of the population, but it actually, with examples that you've given is actually a very, very positive way of seeing it, right? Because everyone wants simplification. Everyone's,

27:07everyone wants to be, especially on the web, to be able to, um, you know, understand things and simplify things. So it's a really, really good example. So thank you for that. Um, we are running out of time now and I would love to keep talking to you about this because it's super, super interesting. Um, something that we normally ask everyone, our guests, um, normally, um, at the end of the podcast is, is there any recommendations in terms of, you know, a book to

27:38read or someone to follow or, um, a video to watch or something that, um, you would like to share with the audience so they can learn more about this or keep, you know, on top of what's going on in terms of inclusive design? Um, please, uh, if you, if you have something to share, it'd be great. Yeah, I do. I would recommend, I would recommend, uh, there's a book by Kat Holmes. Kat Holmes, uh,

28:09was the head of inclusive design at Microsoft for a long time and she did incredible things there. So that's another, um, that's something else to follow is, is, is Microsoft and their inclusive design toolkit and everything they're doing inclusive design. They've been kind of light years ahead for a long time on both inclusive design and accessibility, but Kate, uh, Kat Holmes wrote a book called mismatched and it's, you know, that's really based in that social model of

28:41disability that it's mismatches between a person and their environment that causes exclusion. Uh, and she really covers all of the principles of inclusive design, uh, and, and, uh, it's, it's a really great book. So I, that's what I would recommend. Cool. Awesome. We'll pop those in the show notes so people can check them out. Um, so all that remains is for us to say, thank you very much for coming on today. It's been great. Thank you, Emma. It was really, really interesting to talk to you. Thank you so much again. No worries. Thanks for having me.

29:21Search and subscribe to design untangled using your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Follow us on the web at design untangled.co.uk or on Twitter at design untangled.

29:35Thank you.