Designing for everyone: embracing universal design
#181 - Sep.2024
I was anxious.
After months of hard work, it was the first time we would demo our product with our final users. Our team was confident and feedback, so far, was positive.
This one customer started using the tool. It had everything he expected for a supply chain management tool. Except for one thing.
I saw his face. He was struggling with the main dashboard and the color indicators of each transaction. To me, that was the best feature of the product.
"César, how can I track the status of each transaction", he asked. "Well, that's why we added these round color dots. Red, yellow, green...", I answered. He paused.
"Is there any other way I can check these statuses? I have a bit of a challenge: I'm color blind, so these colors don't make much difference to me.", he answered in frustration.
I was shocked. There was no other option. Just the color dots. This was a miss in our design and a big learning for our entire team.
These situations are far from being an exception.
As designers of products and services, our goal is to keep solutions customer-centric. We anticipate needs.
But are we designing for everyone?
I needed to learn this the hard way. Experiences like the one above have become a reminder that what we consider customers is, many times, limited to our assumptions.
We forget that empathy is not putting ourselves into others' shoes. With ourselves, we also take our conditioning, perspectives, and biases. We need to try our best to remove ourselves from the equation and see through the user's eyes.
As designers, we need to amplify the coverage of our products.
Making a product universal to everyone means making it accessible, usable, and clear for the greatest extent of people, regardless of their condition and abilities.
That is hard work. But, yet, it is so needed today and for our future.
We already live in a world surrounded by digital products that help us run our lives. Tools for communication, planning, shopping, access to private and public services, etc.
Far from being a convenient channel, many of these applications are becoming a basic service for people. They use many of these services daily to work, to connect with their relatives, and to develop their social life.
Yet, while technology keeps evolving, we continue to see many gaps. Applications and services are designed without considering the full spectrum of users. Over-indexing on how the technology should run, but not how customers will use it.
These gaps get even more complex if we consider new technology such as AI. We face new challenges for inclusive design, keeping information biases and privacy as core principles.
Think about this:
- Average life expectancy is increasing. More elderly people around the world are actively using technology to run their lives.
- Over 30% of the world's total population are yet to become internet users.
- Around 16% of people across the world experience significant disabilities.
How are we considering these people when we design a solution?
Making our solutions universal is no longer a nice-to-have, but a foundational need for today's digital economy.
But, where to start?
Universal design
It's important to understand what universal design means. Universal design, at its core, is good design.
Is about designing a product or a service so that it can be accessed, understood, and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of age, size, ability, or disability.
It considers the diversity of needs and abilities of customers so that the experience that you offer meets these needs.
The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design (CEUD) defines 7 principles for universal design:
- Equitable use. Make it useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
- Flexibility in use. Accommodate a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
- Simple and intuitive use. The design is easy to understand. Should be easy regardless of the UX, knowledge, language skills, or concentration level.
- Perceptible Information. Communicate information effectively, regardless of the conditions or sensory abilities.
- Tolerance for Error. Minimize hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
- Low physical effort. The design can be used efficiently and comfortably, with a minimum of fatigue.
- Size and space for approach and use. Users can approach, reach, and use the product, regardless of the user's body size, posture, or mobility.
These principles can become part of your design tenets. You can use them to evaluate existing solutions or create new ones.
Note that many of these principles are a natural outcome of creating empathy with users. They highlight the value of listening and anticipating the second-order effects of our decisions.
Embracing universal design
One practical tip to embrace universal design would be: to make it a core principle from the beginning.
More than just acknowledging these principles, make them actionable within your design process. I've found it effective to turn them into questions and add them to your product artifact. This way, we ensure these questions are covered early in the lifecycle and they work as a reminder for the team.
Another way of embracing universal design is by rethinking your research strategy. As I mentioned before, many times the perception of who are our customers is based on our assumptions. We assume that our customers have certain needs and we move forward with our research. But are we considering diverse user groups in our research? How are we ensuring that all needs are covered in our design? Rethink your strategy and amplify your coverage.
Technology can also be a good ally. AI can become your brainstorming partner. You can ideate on customer groups that you should include in your design to make it more diverse. You can also leverage AI to create more inclusive digital experiences (voice recognition, adaptive interfaces, etc).
Finally, I would recommend turning these principles into part of your core processes. You can automate many checks of accessible design and turn it into a recurrent process for your development pipeline. Similar to an integration test, you can run these checks at each iteration to ensure that new features are compliant with your principles.
I'm far from considering myself a master of universal design. I believe no one can. When we design for people, needs always evolve.
Is a continuous discovery and learning.
We design for people. People with all their nuances, characteristics, needs, and constraints.
Making a solution for a restricted set of customers is limiting the potential of the value we can deliver.
Open the boundaries. Make your solution universal.
People are counting on us!
