The Inclusive Innovation Playbook

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The Three P's of Inclusive Innovation

Inclusive Products

Earlier in the playbook we talked about why

inclusive products matter.⁠

Now let’s drill down into the ‘Products’ component of the 3 P’s model to explore the key elements required to create inclusive products.

At the heart of inclusive products is the idea of designing for diversity by creating inclusive user experiences and content with responsible use of data and technology.

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Image showing the 'Products' components of the 3 P's model.

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Conduct a self assessment.

Read on to learn more about the key ‘Product’ elements in the Diversily 3Ps model.

Give yourself a score out of 10 for each area.

Identify your priority areas for change.

Inclusive User Experience

Creating an inclusive user experience is paramount for ensuring that all individuals, regardless of their background or abilities, can engage with products comfortably and effectively.

Welcoming & Safe for All: Design products that create a welcoming and safe environment for all users, regardless of their background, identity, or abilities, fostering a sense of belonging and inclusivity.

Inclusive products make diverse users feel like the product was designed just for them.

Accessible & Equitable: Ensure that products are accessible and usable for all users, including those with disabilities, older adults, and users with different abilities.

Provide features, accommodations and support that enable everyone to engage with the product effectively and gain equal access to information and opportunities.

This includes providing options for larger text, high contrast modes, keyboard navigation, and ensuring compatibility with assistive technology such as screen readers and voice recognition software.

Equitable products give people what they need to be successful.

Agency and Personalisation: Products should be designed with personalisation in mind, and provide options for users to customise and have control over their experience.

This includes providing options for users to set their preferred language, units of measurement, and other settings that are relevant to their needs and preferences, such as adjusting the font size, contrast, or layout, and allowing users to create personalised profiles, settings, and shortcuts.

This might mean providing tailored user onboarding, support and feedback mechanisms for specific user groups with unique needs.

This will help ensure that the product provides the best possible experience for a diverse range of user needs.

Personalisation is the secret to creating a single product that works for people with different needs.

For example, without high contrast, your application will become unusable for some people with certain vision impairments. Without low contrast, it will become unusable for others who are neurodiverse. One size fits all will never serve everyone. Allow personalisation, either within your own interface or ensuring compatibility with supporting tools, to provide access to all.

Inclusive Content

Content plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience and communicating messages effectively.

Inclusive Language & Imagery: Using language and imagery that is inclusive and respectful of diverse identities and backgrounds, avoiding stereotypes and discriminatory language. The language you use can have a big impact on whether your products feel inclusive or not. Avoid using language that perpetuates stereotypes and harmful representations, and instead strive for language that accurately reflects the diverse world we live in and doesn’t leave some people feeling excluded. Images and visuals play a big role in shaping people's perceptions and experiences with your products. Make sure your imagery (photos, icons, emojis, profiles etc) accurately reflects the diversity of the world we live in. Avoid imagery that perpetuate stereotypes and harmful representations.This will help people feel like they belong and that the experience was designed for them.

Multimodal Content: Providing content in multiple formats (text, audio, visual, etc.) to accommodate different learning styles and accessibility needs.

Cultural Relevance: Incorporating cultural sensitivity and relevance into content, considering the diverse cultural backgrounds and perspectives of users. Consider the language and cultural preferences of users, and provide options for different languages and locales. This includes providing translations, and providing cultural-specific icons and images.

Responsible Data and Tech

Responsible data and technology practices are essential for maintaining user trust and safeguarding privacy and security.

Ethical and Transparent: Ensuring that data collection, usage, and technology implementation adhere to ethical principles and are transparently communicated to users.

Privacy and Security: Implement robust measures to protect user privacy and data security, safeguard sensitive information from unauthorised access or misuse. Ensure that products are designed with privacy and security in mind, and that users have control over their data. This includes inclusive data collection practices as well as standard protection mechanisms such as passwords, captcha's and providing options for end-to-end encryption. Allow users to report and flag content that may be harmful or triggering. This also involves ensuring that users cannot be ‘outed’ by using your products to expose personal information they would rather keep private, such as their sexuality or disabilities they may have.

Equity and Fairness: Designing data and technology systems with a commitment to fairness and equity, addressing biases and ensuring that all users are treated equitably and without discrimination. It's important to be intentional about countering bias in your systems and practices. This could include expanding your data sets, reviewing your processes, or training your teams on unconscious bias.

Design for diversity

As you strive to create more inclusive digital experiences that make everyone feel welcome, empowered and safe, it's important to consider the needs of all users.

It is much easier to be invisible in a digital world. Creating inclusive experiences is about making all of your users feel seen and understood.

When you design with one minority group in mind, you often end up creating solutions that are better for everyone.

Read about the

steps Google are taking⁠

to create inclusive products, such as evolving their emoji to better reflect the world, improving skin tone representation and adding features to protect transgender people to name just a few examples.

Consider wider impacted people

Experience design extends beyond just users and customers. You need to consider anyone who interacts with or is impacted by your company. This could be family members or connections of your actual users or people whose lives are affected by other people using your product or service.

For example, services need to support the carers of the elderly or infirm to be able to easily manage their affairs on their behalf.

Creating inclusive products means designing for diversity.

There are an infinite number of ways in which people are different from each other. Inclusive product designers will identify the factors most relevant to their target audience. This might includes aspects such as:

Identity: Consideration of various aspects such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, nationality, age, and socioeconomic status.

Culture: Recognition of diverse cultural backgrounds, traditions, languages, and belief systems.

Ability: Awareness of differing abilities and disabilities, including physical, cognitive, and sensory abilities.

Beliefs: Acknowledgment of diverse religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and values.

Geography: Consideration of geographical location and its influence on needs, preferences, and access to resources.

Communication & Learning Style: Awareness of differences in communication and learning styles, including verbal and nonverbal communication preferences and preferences for content in different formats (e.g video vs text) vs diagram) or use of different communication channels (e.g. phone vs message).

Family Structure: Recognition of diverse family structures, including nuclear families, extended families, and chosen families.

Health: Understanding of different health statuses, including physical and mental health conditions.

Wealth: Awareness of diverse financial backgrounds and economic circumstances.

Experience: Understanding of various life experiences, including education level, employment history, and lived experiences.

Don’t leave anyone behind!

It is also important to consider the lowest common denominator. By considering the needs of those with infrastructure, technology, or bandwidth limitations, you can create products that are accessible and usable for everyone.

Inclusive product considerations

Keep things clear and simple

Clarity and simplicity can help ensure that products are inclusive and accessible for all users, including those with limited literacy or cognitive abilities. This includes using simple and easy-to-understand language, providing clear instructions and labels, and minimising the number of steps required to complete a task and breaking complex tasks into manageable steps. It also includes using clean and consistent layout and design, and providing visual cues and feedback to guide users through the product.

Clarity and simplicity help users to quickly understand and navigate your product, which can make it more usable and efficient for everyone, which increases the product's chances of success in the market.

Consider physical differences between users

When designing products, it's important to consider the physical differences between users, such as size, skin colour, dexterity, height, voice, strength, hair type, sensory abilities as well as gender and sex related differences.

Even when our focus is on digital products and services there may be some overlap with the physical world, either in terms of real life experiences, products or user interfaces. This means not just thinking about accessibility but also thinking about how other factors may influence your users experience.

There are countless examples of products where this has not been factored in, such crash test dummies modelled only on the male form, VR Headsets that don’t work for people with Afro hair or biased facial recognition software.

Provide guidance for users

Recognise that people have different needs and preferences when learning how to navigate and use a new digital experience. This could be influenced by a huge number of personal characteristics and learning styles or factors such as confidence, context and motivation.

Moments of exclusions can be avoided by ensuring your users have sufficient support and guidance. Guidance could include providing context, indicating progress to task completion, sign posting, or providing instructions. Great experiences provide guidance just at the point it is needed, give users options and provide guidance in multiple formats to suits different preferences.

Create equitable solutions with targeted products

As you develop your inclusive mindset and think about ways to enhance your products and services to serve a more diverse audience, you may also identify targeted opportunities to better serve specific groups, in order to create a more equitable world, or simply better serve the historically underserved.

For example, Fidelity have a dedicated page for

Women and Money⁠

, recognising that they need to understand, share and address the many unique challenges women face when moving from saving to investing. They may offer the same underlying financial products but the client engagement model differs.

For example, Google created an AR tool to help the Muslim community worldwide to find the Qibla. This is the fixed direction toward the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, and the direction that all Muslims face to pray. Google focused in on a specific need held by Muslims wanting to pray in unfamiliar places.

For example,

Daylight⁠

is a queer-owned and queer-run business aligned around a single mission: giving their members the financial tools and products they need to live their best lives. Daylight has been designed around the unique needs for timelines, families, goals, and futures that work for their members.

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Feedback please⁠

: Let us know what other tips you have for creating inclusive products or targeted solutions.

If you’d like support embedding inclusion into your people, products and practices,

Contact Diversily⁠

to find out how we can help.