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Inclusive Practices
User experience and customer experience design have taken off in the last decade. This involves creating products or services that are user-friendly and intuitive to use, and creating positive interactions and emotions throughout the customer journey.
However, there is a missing part in the practices that are being adopted, which fail to look at the experience through a diversity and inclusion lens. To create truly great experiences, empathy and understanding of the differing needs and perspectives of different people is essential. This means paying particular attention to the needs of those groups that have been historically underserved or have experienced oppression and discrimination.
It isn’t just the right thing to do, but it can open up a host of new business opportunities.
That’s not all. Embracing inclusive practices fosters a greater sense of belonging and motivation internally.
Lifecycle stages
In order to consider how to make your innovation practices inclusive, it is helpful to understand the key stages of digital product or service development and how diversity, equity and inclusion considerations can be built in at each stage.
Step 1 - Strategy and investment
This first stage involves securing investment for your product or service, defining your vision and developing your strategy to deliver.
This includes testing the viability of the proposed approach and ensuring it is aligned with market needs.
To embed inclusion...
Define your principles & goals: Taking an inclusive approach from the start requires you to consider your mission and vision through a diversity and inclusion lens.
By connecting to your ‘why’ you can define your high level and for inclusive innovation. These will become foundational in helping you to steer your path forward.
Embed into strategy: In order to embed inclusive innovation into your strategy you’ll need to consider:
Commit time & resources: Inclusive innovation isn’t about talking the talk. It’s about walking the walk. In order to drive action you need to create accountability and commit appropriate time and resources to make it happen.
Step 2 - Research and discovery
This phase typically involves ideation, gathering information and conducting market research to identify potential opportunities.
This includes testing the assumptions and hypotheses about customer and market needs, problems and potential solutions.
To embed inclusion...
: To take an inclusive approach it's essential to seek out diverse perspectives and involve participants who are representative of your target audience. This could include seeking out participants with different abilities, ages, cultures, genders, and backgrounds.
: Research methods should aim to mitigate bias and power dynamics, expand perspectives of interest and enable representative insights. Inclusive and sensitive engagement methods should be adopted in order to create safety and solicit honest feedback. This may uncover needs or even new market opportunities you were previously unaware of.
: During this stage it is also critical to consider the future, potential impact of your product or service, especially for marginalised users.
For example, if your target audience is females aged 25-45, when conducting user research, be sure to include women who tend to be underrepresented or unheard, such a women from different ethnic backgrounds, women from poorer backgrounds, and non-binary folk whose needs and desires may differ from those you’ve already factored in.
Step 3 - Design and build
This stage involves designing and creating the actual product or service, including the user experience, the visual design, the content and technical implementation.
This includes testing the product or service to ensure it functions as intended and meets user expectations, performance and quality standards.
To embed inclusion...
Designing and creating the product or service inclusively requires considering the needs of a wide range of users, and ensuring that the product or service is welcoming, safe, and usable by all.
: Use accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure that your digital products and services are accessible to people with disabilities.
Inclusive design methods: Use inclusive design methods, such as , user-centered design, universal design or ‘design for extremes’. It's important to involve in the design process to ensure your solutions are built for diverse audiences. Create user personas or behavioural archetypes, with intersectional identities that represent different genders, cultures, backgrounds, abilities, and needs in order to design more inclusive experiences.
Inclusive design and content: Embed diversity by design and take an intentionally inclusive approach when building new features, defining user interactions, creating new or creating .
For example, create ‘empathy experiences’: Find ways for the team to more deeply connect with and understand the experiences of people who are different to them, underserved or marginalised.
When they ‘feel’ it they will be more deeply motivated to create accessible solutions. This could be introducing guest speakers to share their lived experience, simulations or using tools such as VR.
For example this Geriatric Simulator enables users to personally experience a variety of age-related physical challenges such as stooped posture and restricted range of motion.
Step 4 - Test & launch
This stage involves bringing your product or service to market and making it available to customers.
This includes testing the product or service in a real-world environment and making any necessary adjustments before full-scale launch.
To embed inclusion...
Internal inclusion assurance: Bringing your product or service to market requires review and validation that it is inclusive and meets the needs of a diverse range of users. Consider what internal checks and controls are needed to ensure a satisfactory inclusion standard is reached.
Diverse user testing: This includes testing the product or service in a real-world environment with diverse users and making any necessary adjustments before full-scale launch.
Inclusive marketing: It's important to ensure that your marketing and promotional materials are inclusive and resonate with a diverse range of users. This doesn’t mean extending your target audience, but ensuring you serve everyone within your target market equally well!
Inclusive brands don’t want to just reach people; they want to make all people feel seen and understood. Understanding that the human experience is diverse and has a wide spectrum of experiences is key. Inclusive marketing isn’t just about targeting niche segments or policy compliance. It’s about building genuine relationships with people that celebrate diverse values, respects them, across a wide range of human experiences.
Step 5 - Iterate and scale
Post launch you’ll need to measure success and refine your product or service on an ongoing basis. This includes responding to feedback and analysis of usage data to drive up customer satisfaction and expand your reach to more customers.
This includes continuously testing and improving the product or service to ensure it remains aligned with customer needs and stays ahead of the competition.
To embed inclusion...
Measure & assess: Continuously measure, monitor and manage DEI within your people, products and practices. Adopt DEI to help you measure how well you are doing, and set targets for success.
Analyse trends: It's important to monitor usage data to ensure that the product or service is meeting the needs of diverse users. You’ll need to consider the data you capture about your users to ensure you are able to understand variations in experience between different groups. Without segmenting your data you can be blind to your users true experiences.
Adapt & improve: Inclusion is an ongoing process, not a destination. It requires you to continue to evaluate, adjust and improve as the product or service evolves and scales in order to meet your .
These steps do not always happen in a linear order, and once a product or service is live, an iterative approach is typically taken to continuous improvement.
Fundamental to creating inclusive products and services is ensuring that diverse perspectives are represented in your end-to-end process. This means gathering input from at each stage. The earlier you engage people the better. They are more likely to feel valued, and you are more likely to be able to implement their feedback.
Conduct a self assessment.
In summary
Inclusive innovation requires inclusive practices, such as inclusive design methods, inclusive research and testing, and inclusive communication and decision-making processes. This includes involving diverse users and stakeholders in the process, conducting user research and testing with diverse groups of users, and providing training and resources. It also involves continuously measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of your efforts.
Equally important to the process changes, are your daily interactions and consideration for diverse needs.
By implementing these strategies, you can build inclusive innovation into your business and create products and services that are more accessible, usable, and useful for all users.
: Let us know what other tips you have for creating inclusive practices for digital product or service design and development.
If you’d like support embedding inclusion into your people, products and practices, to find out how we can help.
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