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The Inclusive Design Imperative: Win And Retain More Customers Modernize Your Design Practice To Reach More Of Your Target Market by Gina Bhawalkar April 23, 2019

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways Experience design (XD) leaders can help their Inclusive Design Is Good For Business, But firms win and retain customers, break into new Few Firms Do It markets, and get employees more engaged, by Practicing inclusive design means creating prioritizing inclusion. To do this, you need to shift effective, easy, and emotionally positive your firm’s mindset and methodology: 1) Establish experiences for all customers in a target market. a foundation that drives home the “why” and But most firms lose out — they understand large fuels the desire to do better and 2) augment your swaths of their market poorly, neglect these XD practice with the right people, processes, and customers until late in the process, fail to involve tools. This report explains why and how. them in designing experiences, and/or treat inclusion as merely a compliance “check.”

Lay The Foundation For Inclusive Design Take a proactive approach by explaining to employees the business benefits of inclusive design and tapping into employees’ desire for purpose in their work — to ignite a passion to do better for all customers. In parallel, unify related relevant efforts under a common banner to give the transformation the momentum it will need to truly take hold.

Enhance Your XD Practice With The Right People, Processes, And Tools Propel your organization toward inclusive design by ensuring the team designing experiences is representative of all the customers you want to reach. Then equip them with processes and tools that will ensure they spot and reverse noninclusive design decisions early — before locking in on a solution.

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The Inclusive Design Imperative: Win And Retain More Customers Modernize Your Design Practice To Reach More Of Your Target Market

by Gina Bhawalkar with David Truog, Amelia Nickels, and Shayna Neuburg April 23, 2019

Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

2 Inclusive Design Is Good For Business The Billion-Customer Opportunity: Digital Accessibility 4 But Most Firms Get Inclusive Design Wrong — Or Miss Out Entirely The Six Key Steps To Instituting Good Customer Research 5 Shift Your Firm’s Mindset And Methodology Toward Inclusive Design The Six Key Steps To Instituting Good Experience Design 6 Establish A Foundation For Inclusive Design

Drive Home The “Why” To Ignite In Employees A Passion To Do Better For Customers

Fuel The Desire To Do Better By Formalizing Share reports with colleagues. Efforts Under A Common Banner Enhance your membership with Research Share. 8 Augment Your XD Practice For Inclusion

People: Tap More Perspectives And Establish Training

Processes: Integrate New Steps, Activities, And Metrics

Tools: Use Your Design System, Personas, And XD Technologies To Propel Your Efforts

Recommendations 18 The Three First Steps To Begin Designing For Inclusion

19 Supplemental Material

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Inclusive Design Is Good For Business

For most companies, there are many more potential customers than they realize in their target market whose needs are different from those of their imagined “average” customer.1 Firms that design for that diversity in their customer base can acquire and retain more customers. Doing this is called inclusive design, which Forrester defines as (see Figure 1):

Designing experiences that are effective, easy, and emotionally positive for all customers in a target market by factoring in its variations in age, ability, language, culture, gender, and other traits.

Practicing inclusive design makes business sense in any organization that aspires to:

›› Access new markets. Designing experiences inclusively expands your range of potential customers to include groups like the billion individuals worldwide with a disability, the ballooning aging population, and non-native English speakers.2 Eighty-two percent of shoppers with disabilities indicated they would spend more online if websites were accessible.3 National Public Radio (NPR) seized the opportunity and saw a 4.18% increase in unique visitors to its website after transcribing its library of This American Life episodes to better serve listeners with hearing impairments.4 When Comcast appointed Vice President of Accessibility Tom Wlodkowski, who is blind, it signaled a desire to tap into the market of millions of visually impaired consumers who couldn’t access Comcast’s programming. The result? The first talking cable TV interface, which earned Comcast acclaim from the visually impaired community and significant earned media from its Emily’s Oz ad that introduced the innovation.5

›› Avoid legal troubles. The legal precedents requiring that companies not shut out customers when designing products continue to accumulate. At least 2,250 lawsuits were filed against companies with inaccessible websites in 2018, based on the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III, according to an analysis from Seyfarth Shaw. And the upward trend of class action lawsuits is expected to continue in 2019.6

Can you get away with just creating separate experiences for certain segments? No, as firms can learn from the case of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), which was assessed a $200,000 fine for offering a separate website for people with disabilities rather than designing an inclusive website in the first place.7

›› Improve experiences through the “curb cut effect.” Inclusive design often benefits even the needs of the majority — something known as the curb cut effect.8 OXO founder and CEO Sam Farber earned $273 million when he sold the company he founded to produce a vegetable peeler he’d designed to be easier to grip, to help his wife suffering from arthritis — that turned out to work better for everyone. It fueled the meteoric growth of his startup that developed kitchen tools loved by cooks for how easy they are to hold and control.9

UnitedHealthcare’s employees are also customers of its healthcare. But one of its own execs, who had a child in need of a wheelchair, struggled to navigate his benefits to get one despite six months of trying. So he pitched the firm’s CEO on the need to fix the process, and the firm did. But its

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“Special Needs Initiative” turned out to help all consumers better navigate the system — not just families with special needs. And we’re surrounded by many more examples of inclusive design that we all benefit from (see Figure 2).

›› Attract and retain talent. A whopping 47% of Millennials in the US — soon to be the largest group in the workforce — consider a diverse and inclusive workplace an important criterion in their job search.10 And they’re more likely to stay five or more years if they believe they are part of a diverse workforce.11 Couple these findings with the current sociopolitical landscape — gender imbalance in the tech industry, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and immigration injustices, all of which are concerns among younger workers especially — and a focus on inclusion becomes even more important to attract and retain younger generations of talent.

›› Avoid the cost of remediation. Fixing accessibility problems after product launch is more expensive than building inclusion into the design process to ensure the problems aren’t there in the first place. To avoid building up years of accessibility debt, emulate those who learned it the hard way.

A Fortune 500 financial services company that initially spent $20 million a year to remediate its digital experiences to conform to accessibility standards reduced the annual investment by 75% after developing the processes and training to just build accessibility into how it designs and develops experiences. It also saw its “first pass rate” — a measure of the percentage of accessibility issues caught early in development — increase from 40% to 95%.

FIGURE 1 BenefitsO f Putting Inclusion At The Core Of Your Experience Design Practice

Business benets • Access new markets. User-centered • Avoid legal troubles. Inclusive design practices • Achieve the “curb cut effect.”* design practices • Attract and retain talent. • Avoid cost of remediation.

*“Curb cut effect” refers to how innovations intended to serve marginalized people often unexpectedly improve experiences for nonmarginalized people. See Figure 2 for examples.

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FIGURE 2 Examples Of Inclusive Design For The Few That Have Benefited The Many

TV program captioning Created for people who are Now also helps anyone deaf watching TV in a noisy bar or gym

The typewriter Created by an Italian inventor Later also used by writers who to let a countess who was blind could see; also evolved into the write private letters herself keyboards of computers and instead of dictating them mobile devices

The sports huddle Created by football players at a Now used by teams college for the deaf to conceal everywhere so opposing strategy discussions in sign teams cannot hear discussions language from the other team of strategies

Audiobooks Created for visually impaired Now enjoyed by people who people, originally veterans are able to read books visually injured during World War I but like to listen to them, too, such as while driving

But Most Firms Get Inclusive Design Wrong — Or Miss Out Entirely

Even companies with well-established experience design practices fail to reap the benefits of inclusive design because they:

›› Fail to recognize the business benefits of inclusive design. Many firms overlook the positive financial impact of inclusive design. Instead, they treat it as exclusively a matter of corporate social responsibility, and as extra work that only companies with money to throw around can afford — like Apple, a longtime leader and pioneer in inclusive design.12

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›› Relegate inclusion to a step during development and testing — too late in the process. Most companies treat accessibility as a box to check before shipping experiences, when they should be weaving inclusive thinking into the entire design process. Digital agency Primacy warns against this risk. It has worked with clients who scan their digital experiences for accessibility violations quarterly but only after development and often find the same errors cropping up each quarter on different pages. According to Matt May, head of inclusive design at Adobe, the lesson is to “be wary of building up years of accessibility debt by enshrining exclusion from the beginning.”

›› Focus on compliance instead of good design. There’s a difference between creating an experience that merely adheres to accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and creating a good user experience.13 Too many organizations lose sight of the latter: They meet accessibility standards but fail to research marginalized customers to understand — and design for — how they use products.

Aetna, seeking to comply with a WCAG success criterion called “Bypass Blocks,” implemented a “skip navigation” link on its website, assuming this would prevent its large navigation menus from being an obstacle for people with impaired vision. But Aetna’s usability testing then revealed that “skip navigation” links aren’t useful for users who are blind until after they’ve learned the site. As a result, Aetna had to go back to the drawing board and redesign the website’s menus to be short and to the point, so users don’t have to rely on skip links or suffer through 40 tabs just to arrive at the main content.

›› Aim to empathize but fail to tap the expertise of people with firsthand knowledge. Many organizations create “empathy labs” — labs equipped to simulate for employees what experiencing the company’s products and services is like to a customer with a visual impairment, for example. While these labs can be useful for testing designs (like how an experience will appear to someone with colorblindness), they can produce undesirable results when used in an effort to arouse empathy — like employees pitying customers or walking away assuming something is a problem when it’s just a result of their own inexperience using assistive technologies. Instead, bring individuals from excluded segments into the design process to share their needs and experiences firsthand. In other words, “Inclusion has to involve people who have experienced exclusion,” according to Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch.

Shift Your Firm’s Mindset And Methodology Toward Inclusive Design

How can organizations overcome these challenges and begin to unlock the benefits of inclusive design? By modernizing the organization’s experience design practice to place inclusion at its core. To do this as an XD leader, you must:

›› Establish a foundation for inclusive design.

›› Augment your XD practice for inclusion.

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Establish A Foundation For Inclusive Design

To bring inclusion into the design process, XD leaders need to start by creating the conditions within the organization that enable inclusive design to take hold:

›› Drive home the “why” to ignite in employees a passion to do better for customers.

›› Fuel the desire to do better by formalizing efforts under a common banner.

Drive Home The “Why” To Ignite In Employees A Passion To Do Better For Customers

Most employees aren’t even aware of the need for inclusive design until they see firsthand the impact of exclusion — then, it “clicks.” To open employees’ eyes to why inclusive design is important:

›› Highlight why good business requires inclusive design. Start by articulating the benefits — like access to new markets — and showcasing examples of inclusive design they benefit from in their own everyday lives regardless of their abilities. As Stephen Gates, head design evangelist at InVision, put it: “Get them to see that great design and accessibility go hand in hand.”

›› Tie into employees’ desires for a sense of purpose in their work. Beyond igniting the “scare factor” by explaining how inclusive design helps minimize legal risks, tap into employees’ desire for purpose by focusing on the altruistic benefit as well. Salesforce’s accessibility team motivates employees by focusing on how, in making one of its flagship products accessible to service agents with disabilities including visual impairments, the company “can increase employment opportunities for one of the largest communities of unemployed people,” said Jesse Hausler, director of product accessibility at Salesforce. As another one of our interviewees put it:

“You need to create the proper soil for this to grow, and a big part of that is tying it to the shared belief that we want to empower people and improve their lives in some way. Once that is part of the mindset, it’s much easier for inclusive design to spread and thrive.” (Tim Allen, design partner and head of inclusive design, Microsoft)

›› Tell the stories of employees and customers who’ve been shut out. Raising awareness among employees of colleagues and customers who’ve suffered exclusion is often the best way to spark action.

Adobe motivated its designers by inviting creatives with disabilities to share their stories onstage at the company’s worldwide design summits — about both challenges posed by Adobe products and also challenges like using webconference tools or finding a job. Deque, a company that helps firms spot accessibility problems and fix them sets up labs for its clients. For example, at its “accessibility stories table,” employees can learn from people with disabilities how they use their mobile phones. The UnitedHealthcare exec mentioned above who got the attention of his CEO did it through telling his own story.

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›› Spotlight praise from customers who have benefited from inclusive design efforts. Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch, recommends showcasing your company’s inclusive design “wins” through demos at events — always tying these wins back to the company’s brand purpose. Wells Fargo Advisors’ accessibility team collects emails with positive feedback from clients when accessibility problems are fixed, sharing it with the team members directly responsible for the fix.

Fuel The Desire To Do Better By Formalizing Efforts Under A Common Banner

After raising awareness and shifting the employees’ mindset, you’re ready as an XD leader to turn desire into action. The first step is to unify all related efforts under a common banner:

›› Connect to the groups responsible for new markets or innovation efforts. XD leaders should jump in early on greenfield innovation opportunities, where there more often exists a receptiveness to experimenting with new problem-solving approaches. Start the conversation about how to make products and services inclusive by design, like Apple did when it baked accessibility features into the earliest versions of iOS.

›› Link up with internally focused diversity and inclusion programs. Companies that focus on diversity and inclusion (D&I) see business results.14 At firms that have seen and seized this opportunity, XD leaders should tether their inclusive design efforts to these D&I initiatives since the latter already have executive attention and support. As one of our interviewees said:

“Everyone is onboard with diversity and inclusion efforts; they see them as valuable. Think about inclusive design as ‘this is how we live that out in our design process, how it manifests itself in the experience.’” (Derek Featherstone, chief experience officer, Level Access)

Australia’s NSW Department of Family and Community Services worked with its Diversity and Inclusion team and Disabled Employee Network, helping with efforts to make its website accessible. Express Scripts’ accessibility effort started as a grassroots one, but support from its “Express PossAbilities Resource Group” (employees affected by or who want to support people with disabilities) helped scale its efforts.

›› Identify inclusive design “bright spots” you can scale up. Many designers already champion inclusive design within their teams, at design events, and through Medium articles. And many employees have faced — or have family members who face — exclusion. So you’ll likely find employees already supporting the inclusive design cause in big or small ways. Find these examples, celebrate them, and turn them into knowledge and training for others.

A designer at WillowTree, while working on an iOS design project, learned how complicated app layouts challenge users who enlarge text size through their device settings. He found a better design solution by thinking critically about what data was most important for the user and how it could scale effectively to larger type sizes. WillowTree scaled this lesson to its team of more than 30 designers, incorporating guidance into the accessibility checklist that all new designers are trained on.

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›› Don’t be afraid to impose a “mandate” to compel employees to act. Declaring that “all of our websites need to be accessible by the end of the year” or “we need to be compliant with accessibility guidelines to avoid the costly mistakes of our competitors” can be an effective forcing function in terms of getting the necessary people, processes, and tools for inclusive design in place quickly. And just as you probably have a customer service policy or GDPR guidelines, it’s equally important to cement your commitment to inclusiveness in the form of a written accessibility policy:

“You can’t just declare a statement of support — leaders need to hold the organization accountable. This is why good outcomes can result from a leader saying, ‘I want all our websites accessible by the end of the year’ — it makes the team answer questions like ‘Do we have the right people on the team to do that?’” (Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch)

Augment Your XD Practice For Inclusion

Once you’ve sparked the desire among employees to create inclusive experiences, how do you begin to convert that desire into action? Designing for inclusion doesn’t mean throwing your current XD methodology out the window — it requires evolving it by bringing new people, processes, and tools into your XD practice that help you live up to the principles of inclusive design (see Figure 3). And if you’re among the 71% of firms that tell Forrester they’re beginners in the design competency, build inclusion into your practice from the start rather than retrofitting it later.15 Here’s what to do in these three domains:

›› People: Tap more perspectives and establish training.

›› Processes: Integrate new steps, activities, and metrics.

›› Tools: Use your design system, personas, and XD technologies to propel your efforts.

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FIGURE 3 Principles Of Inclusive Design

Recognize exclusion Solve and extend Learn from diversity

Identify your biases and who Design for marginalized people Engage people with a wide they’re making you leave out. from the start, knowing that this variety of perspectives in the Engage often-excluded people often unexpectedly bene ts design process to better to understand what works and many nonmarginalized people, understand and address the what doesn’t. too (“curb cut effect”). needs of those who have faced exclusion.

Be consistent Offer choice Create one experience

Adhere even more rigorously to Recognizing that people have Don’t force a separate established design patterns and different preferences and experience on some of your standards so experiences feel abilities, provide different ways customers — create one familiar and are easy to learn. to engage with the experience. versatile enough for everyone to use.

Source: Inspired by Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit and inclusivedesignprinciples.org

People: Tap More Perspectives And Establish Training

Inclusive experiences require a team that: 1) includes a representative set of perspectives that match the diversity in your customer base and 2) is adequately trained. This is why XD pros should:

›› Build diversity into the design team so it’s representative of your customer base. “Learn from diversity” is a well-recognized principle of inclusive design — it’s not just about designing for marginalized segments; it’s about designing with them. XD leaders should strive for a team makeup that reflects the diversity that exists within the organization’s customer base. This can’t happen overnight, so XD pros should start by recruiting employees who have varied perspectives.

Take a lesson from Microsoft, which invited employees with low vision and mobility challenges to self-identify and participate in engineering hackathons — serving as experts on exclusion and signaling to all their colleagues that inclusive design is a Microsoft priority. Or learn from Comcast, which, as mentioned earlier, made a concerted effort to hire people with disabilities, leading to innovations like the first talking cable TV interface.16

›› Establish a dedicated role and build a network of champions. Inclusive design requires a person to lead it — from organizing training and coaching designers on how to spot accessibility issues to holding external vendors accountable, companies serious about inclusive design name someone to lead the charge.

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Adobe, Aetna, Microsoft, Wells Fargo Advisors, and others have dedicated leaders responsible for their firm’s accessibility or inclusive design efforts. At the top of the agenda for these roles: building a network of internal experts to evangelize and train their teams in inclusive design, like Express Scripts’ “Accessibility Champions Group” — a group of employees formally trained on accessibility and committed to bringing their expertise to their teams.

›› Conduct universal and role-specific training. Educate employees in the core elements of inclusive design but also in what needs to change in how they perform their own day-to-day job tasks.

Aetna’s nine-person digital accessibility team holds monthly webinars covering the basics — like the company’s accessibility policy and an introduction to the W3C spec Web Accessibility Initiative — Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). But the company also offers more advanced “perspective webinars,” where individuals with disabilities discuss what challenges them and what delights them when using websites, and then answer questions from Aetna employees.

Service Canada requires all staff to take a “The Richness of Our Differences” course to foster understanding and also provide role-specific training to frontline service agents. The course includes modules on topics such as how to interact with people with disabilities and how to respond to clients experiencing different emotional states. Public resources like 18F’s “Accessibility For Teams” guide and the inclusive design posters from the UK Home Office Access Needs Team are good starting points for creating your own checklists (see Figure 4).17

›› Begin to instill the mindset during employee onboarding. Use new hire onboarding as an opportunity to establish that inclusion is a core part of how your company approaches XD.

Take a lesson from Wells Fargo Advisors, whose accessibility team sends a welcome email to new designers with videos from recent usability test sessions — like a customer navigating the site with a screen reader — along with links to internal resources on accessibility. Its goal? Get designers thinking about accessibility from day one, and arm them with resources to learn from.

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FIGURE 4 Dos And Don’ts Of Inclusive Design — Posters From The UK Home Office

Source: Home Ofce UK

Processes: Integrate New Steps, Activities, And Metrics

In addition to getting the right people and training in place, update your human-centered design process with key new steps, activities, and metrics to make creating inclusive experiences (and proving the impact) the way you always design.

›› Start at the margins of your target audience — the 20% — when ideating. Bringing inclusion into your design process requires challenging long-held assumptions, like the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle). Many in the world of design have conflated it with the bell curve, leading them to presume that if they design for the 80% who are “normal,” the solution will work

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well for everyone.18 In reality, focusing on the margins not only opens doors to new markets but also yields the desirable side effect of innovative solutions that even those who are not at the margins benefit from, too.

Microsoft’s Xbox team focused on the social and emotional needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers as its starting point to come up with innovations for its gaming console. Involving gamers from this population in its design sprint led to features like emojis on the virtual keyboard that hearing-impaired gamers can use to convey emotion they couldn’t before. These features will likely appeal to all Xbox gamers — another curb cut effect.19

›› Spot and stop exclusion in design critiques and reviews. Recognizing exclusion is key to inclusive design. But how do you do it? One way is to ask new questions during your design critiques — like “Will a non-native English speaker understand that phrase?” or “Have you checked the contrast of that color combination?” — to catch barriers before they sneak into the product (see Figure 5). Designers at Aetna do “out-loud prototyping” to evaluate early designs that are too low-fidelity to test with customers who use screen readers. Designers read out loud the text in the UI design, making a point of sounding out acronyms — like OB (obstetrician), which a screen reader may mispronounce “ob” — to identify problems and discuss solutions, like just spelling the word in full.

XD pros should also do an “accessibility review” of their work — checking for stumbles like insufficient contrast or using color alone to convey information — before handing off their designs to development. According to InVision’s 2018 Design Maturity Survey, designers at 24% of companies do accessibility reviews, but that number jumps to 54% at companies with the highest level of design maturity.20

›› Capture inclusive design considerations in your design artifacts’ annotations. Firms serious about inclusive design focus on seamless handoffs from designers to developers. WillowTree creates “accessibility flow charts” highlighting what text should be read for different elements when users turn on voice-over. At TandemSeven (a Genpact company), designers annotate wireframes with notes on the order in which UI elements should be read by a screen reader for the best experience. This is important for keyboard interactions, too:

“Keyboard interactions must be designed — like where will focus move when the user takes an action? By being clear and explicit, designers don’t leave developers guessing. That’s when you end up with 55 keystrokes just to check out.” (Derek Featherstone, chief experience officer, Level Access)

›› Establish success metrics for inclusive design. When the motivation is to avoid legal risks, companies think about documenting the impact of inclusive design efforts from day one. But even at companies practicing inclusive design for the many other reasons it’s a good idea, XD leaders should prepare for the day they’re asked to justify their inclusive design efforts. This starts with identifying the metrics that align with the benefit you’re seeking — like how many new customers you acquire if the goal is to access new markets or how many percentage points the defect rate drops if the goal is to avoid the cost of retrofitting exclusion.

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Leaders at Service Canada measure customer satisfaction among clients, ensuring data is available for people with visible and nonvisible disabilities. In doing so, they discovered a 20-percentage- point spread between this group and other, more satisfied customers — a clue that they had more work to do. Additionally, they focus on measuring the effectiveness and ease of the experience, as well as indicators of whether customers feel respected in their interactions with Service Canada. Accessibility solutions firm Deque helps companies set up a measurement approach focused on factors like the number of WCAG violations, unresolved complaints from customers in marginalized groups, or problems caught upstream in design rather than downstream in production.

›› Create forums for ongoing education and knowledge sharing. As technology advances, so too does innovation in inclusive design. Take your practice to the next level by establishing forums for designers to explore emerging topics. Adobe set up an Inclusive Design Exchange (IDX) group for designers to identify topics of interest — like bias in AI — research them, and bring summaries back to the group for discussion.

FIGURE 5 Example Questions To Ask During Design Critiques To Spot And Eliminate Exclusion

Is this type large enough How will this design for an aging adult to “sound” when read by a read? If not, will it scale screen reader? correctly when zoomed?

Will that term be What’s the heading understood by a hierarchy for this page? non-native English speaker?

Will that link name make Will people of different sense when read without ethnicities feel included surrounding text (e.g., by in this campaign? a screen reader)? Have you tested the contrast ratio for these color choices?

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Tools: Use Your Design System, Personas, And XD Technologies To Propel Your Efforts

Expand your existing experience design toolkit to empower teams to design and develop for inclusion. Start with four areas:

›› Update your design system so it prioritizes accessibility. Baking inclusive design into your design system — the standards, components, and best practices that guide your firm’s design efforts — helps make inclusive design happen by default. For leading firms, design systems and practicing inclusive design go hand in hand.

When establishing Fluent Design, its design system, Microsoft housed the team responsible under the same leader as the Inclusive Design Team, Tim Allen, who says this is “a reflection of the importance of how we design and what we design.”21

At Salesforce, designers and engineers teamed up to create accessible, reusable components based on guidance in their Lightning Design System. They include WAI-ARIA attributes, define how keyboard interactions should work, and provide guidance about which UI element the focus should be on after a user takes a specific action. In doing so, Salesforce seeks consistency in the experience — a key principle of inclusive design. Adobe’s team takes a similar approach: When creating components in its design system, Spectrum, it documents what is required of the system for accessibility. Bonus: It’s a training tool, helping designers “flex their inclusion muscles.”22

›› Foster empathy with inclusive design archetypes and the persona spectrum. Expand how you use personas to incorporate representations of marginalized customer groups. Primacy developed “inclusive design archetypes” — layered over an organization’s existing personas, the archetypes serve as a stimulus in the design process, challenging designers to ask questions like “How would this work for someone with a language barrier?” and identify areas where the idea falls down (see Figure 6).

Microsoft’s persona spectrum embodies the principle “solve for one, extend to many.” It challenges designers to show how a solution designed for individuals with permanent challenges, like having only one arm, can scale to broader audiences, like people with a temporary challenge like a broken arm or a new parent holding a baby in one arm (see Figure 7).

›› Use research platforms to test experiences with people with disabilities. Most XD pros conduct usability studies at multiple stages of design to identify and remedy problems. Expand your tried-and-true method to also conduct them with marginalized customers. XD pros who use UserZoom can take advantage of the vendor’s partnership with AccessWorks to recruit people with disabilities to participate in these studies.23 UserZoom points out that in addition to identifying problems, conducting these studies helps its clients make accessibility concerns vivid. Companies can show videos of the studies to designers and developers to muster support for prioritizing accessibility problems languishing in the backlog.

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Accessibility testing does require investing time and money. So if budget is a barrier, The Paciello Group suggests starting small by adding just a couple of people to your usability tests — like someone with a visual impairment and someone with dyslexia — rather than organizing a full- blown accessibility test. WillowTree recommends tapping into groups like the “Blind” subreddit (discussion forum on Reddit) or groups in your region(s) that serve the blind and visually impaired, noting that this segment wants to use your products and is willing to give feedback.24

›› Equip team members with relevant open source tools and plug-ins. Take advantage of free tools aimed at surfacing problems early in the design process. Does your XD team use Sketch or Adobe XD? Ask them to install the Stark plug-in to check color choices for contrast problems and simulate the experience for different forms of colorblindness.25 Encourage developers to download tools like the “axe” browser extension from Deque, which scans code for accessibility issues and provides guidelines to remedy them.26 And content authors can take advantage of built-in document accessibility tools like Microsoft’s “check accessibility” feature in Word and Adobe’s accessibility features, to spot and eliminate accessibility problems in documents before publishing to customers.

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FIGURE 6 Inclusive Design Archetypes

Source: Primacy

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FIGURE 7 The Persona Spectrum

It helps others with similar Educate teams to design goals experiencing for people with temporary or situational permanent disabilities. restrictions.

Challenge teams to It leads to a better design within constraints. solution for everyone.

Source: Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit

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Recommendations

The Three First Steps To Begin Designing For Inclusion

Bringing inclusion into your organization’s XD practices may seem daunting in light of how much change is required. Here’s how XD leaders can get started:

1. Develop and tell the “why” story for inclusive design for your organization. First, determine which benefit will resonate most with your leadership — like expanding your range of potential customers to the growing aging population. Then, do the same for your employees — it might be embracing diversity both internally and externally. Next, compile data and examples, like the ones in this report, to build your “why” story, and begin to socialize it through lunch-and- learn discussions, internal blog posts, or planning sessions. Seek out existing inclusive design advocates in your XD and development organizations, and give visibility to their efforts as illustrations of even the modest inclusive design efforts already underway.

2. Assemble an inclusive design toolkit to empower teams already embracing the “why.” Prepare to equip the employees who hear your message with resources and tools to begin making inclusion a core consideration in their work. Take advantage of already available resources like the Microsoft Inclusive Design toolkit, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and the design critique questions in Figure 5 of this report.

3. Include users at the margins of your target audience in an upcoming research study. Open employees’ eyes while also demonstrating the value of including groups like people with disabilities in developing (through cocreation) or evaluating (through usability studies) design ideas. For your first go at it, keep things simple from a logistics and cost standpoint by posting flyers or notices internally, to recruit employees with disabilities who are willing — and, you’ll likely find, eager — to participate.

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Supplemental Material

Companies Interviewed For This Report

We would like to thank the individuals from the following companies who generously gave their time during the research for this report.

Adobe Level Access

Aetna Microsoft

Deque NSW Dept. of Family and Community Services

Express Scripts The Paciello Group

Kat Holmes, Author of Mismatch Primacy

InVision Salesforce

© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 19 [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378 For Customer Experience Professionals April 23, 2019 The Inclusive Design Imperative: Win And Retain More Customers Modernize Your Design Practice To Reach More Of Your Target Market

Service Canada UserZoom

TandemSeven, a Genpact company Wells Fargo Advisors

UnitedHealthcare WillowTree

Endnotes

1 examples of segments whose needs are different from the imagined “average” include the one in 12 men and one in 200 women who are colorblind, the one in five US residents for whom English is a second language, and the rapidly growing aging population that in the US has grown from 35 million in 2000 to over 49 million as of 2016. See the Forrester report “The Billion-Customer Opportunity: Digital Accessibility.”

2 The population of potential customers firms can reach through inclusive design is not only large but consists of groups with money to spend — the global population of people with disabilities has over $1.2 trillion in annual disposable income, a number that balloons to $8 trillion when you include their friends and family who prefer to support organizations whose products are accessible. See the Forrester report “The Billion-Customer Opportunity: Digital Accessibility.”

3 source: “Click-Away Pound Survey 2016 - Final Report,” Click-Away Pound (http://www.clickawaypound.com/ cap16finalreport.html).

4 nPR committed to transcribing its entire archive of recorded programs for This American Life in 2011 in response to new regulations around broadcast media from the US Federal Communications Commission. A subsequent study that NPR commissioned concluded that offering the transcripts returned significant business benefits in addition to meeting legal obligations. Source: “This American Life,” 3Play Media (https://www.3playmedia.com/customers/case- studies/this-american-life/).

5 source: Lauren Appelbaum, “Accessibility Through Innovation is Model of Success,” Respect Ability, October 25, 2017 (https://www.respectability.org/2017/10/accessibility-through-innovation-is-model-of-success/) and Deborah Kendrick, “Comcast Accessibility: More Than Talking TV,” AccessWorld, January 2014 (https://www.afb.org/afbpress/ pubnew.asp?DocID=aw150107). Note: Tom Wlodkowski’s title at Comcast is now vice president, accessibility and multicultural — technology and product. Source: “Tom Wlodkowski,” LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-wlodkowski-b13964b5/). The ad features a 7-year-old girl who is blind describing what she sees in her mind when she watches The Wizard of Oz having only heard of the movie. Comcast built her version for her, allowing her to experience the movie in a new way — an example of Comcast’s commitment to making entertainment just as fun and powerful for someone with a visual impairment as it is for anyone else.

6 source: Minh N. Vu, Kristina M. Launey, and Susan Ryan, “Number Of Federal Website Accessibility Lawsuits Nearly Triple, Exceeding 2250 In 2018,” ADA Title III, January 31, 2019 (https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of- federal-website-accessibility-lawsuits-nearly-triple-exceeding-2250-in-2018/) and Craig T. Papka and Robert J. Simandl, “Trend of Class Action Lawsuits Alleging Company Websites Discriminate Against Disabled Individuals Expected to Continue in 2019,” The National Law Review, January 9, 2019 (https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ trend-class-action-lawsuits-alleging-company-websites-discriminate-against-disabled).

7 The US Department of Transportation fined SAS $200,000 in November 2018 for attempting to offer a separate assistive version of its website for people with disabilities in an effort to comply with the Air Carrier Accessibility Act. Source: “Scandinavian Airlines System: Consent Order,” US Department of Transportation, November 16, 2018 (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/resources/individuals/aviation-consumer-protection/325416/ sas-consent-order.pdf).

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8 The phrase “curb cut effect” refers to the fact that putting accommodations in place for people with disabilities helps others in unexpected ways. Its name originates from curb cuts, the original motivation for which was to help war veterans in wheelchairs transition smoothly from street crossings to sidewalks. But curb cuts made life better for others, too — like children on tricycles, caregivers pushing strollers, and people temporarily on crutches.

9 The OXO good grips peeler, an iconic example of inclusive design, has been inducted into MoMA’s permanent collection and maintains a rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 on Amazon. Source: Mark Wilson, “The untold story of the vegetable peeler that changed the world,” Fast Company, September 24, 2018 (https://www.fastcompany. com/90239156/the-untold-story-of-the-vegetable-peeler-that-changed-the-world).

10 Source: Sarab Kochhar, “Nearly Half of American Millennials Say a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace is an Important Factor in a Job Search,” Institute for Public Relations, December 4, 2017 (https://instituteforpr.org/nearly-half- american-millennials-say-diverse-inclusive-workplace-important-factor-job-search/) and Adam Vasquez and Heather Wadlinger, Ph.D., “B2B Report Millennials,” Merit, March 2016 (http://sacunas.net/reports/Millennial-B2B-Report_ Sacunas-web.pdf).

11 The 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey reveals that Millennials working for employers perceived to have a diverse workforce are more likely to want to stay five or more years than those who say their companies are not diverse (69% to 27%). Source: “The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2018,” Deloitte (https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about- deloitte/articles/millennialsurvey.html).

12 The following article offers commentary on Apple’s focus on inclusive design. Source: Steven Aquino, “When it comes to accessibility, Apple continues to lead in awareness and innovation,” TechCrunch, May 19, 2016 (https://techcrunch. com/2016/05/19/when-it-comes-to-accessibility-apple-continues-to-lead-in-awareness-and-innovation/).

13 To learn more about WCAG, visit the following website. Source: “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview,” W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/).

14 See the Forrester report “Innovation In The Age Of The Customer Requires A Culture Of Diversity And Inclusion.” 15 Our 2018 survey of CX professionals found that 71% of firms are at the beginner level for the design competency. See the Forrester report “The State Of CX Management Maturity, 2018.”

16 Source: Lauren Appelbaum, “Accessibility Through Innovation is Model of Success,” Respect Ability, October 25, 2017 (https://www.respectability.org/2017/10/accessibility-through-innovation-is-model-of-success/).

17 Source: Accessibility for Teams (https://accessibility.digital.gov/). As featured in “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision”; visit the following website. Source: “Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to present ‘The Senses: Design Beyond Vision,’” Cooper Hewitt press release, February 27, 2018 (https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2018/02/27/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-to-present-the-senses- design-beyond-vision/). These posters can be found at the following website. Source: Karwai Pun, “Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility,” Accessibility in government Blog, September 2, 2016 (https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos- and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/).

18 The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, was originally created by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. More generally it’s been interpreted as meaning that most things are not distributed evenly. Over time it has been conflated with the bell curve — the notion that the middle portion of a distribution curve commonly represents about an 80% majority of the population, and therefore the 80% are the users to focus on when designing. Source: “Pareto Principle,” Laws of UX (https://lawsofux.com/pareto-principle). For commentary about the challenges of the 80/20 rule in design, visit the following website. Source: Katharine Schwab, “How To Design For Everyone, In 3 Steps,” Fast Company, February 9, 2018 (https://www.fastcompany.com/90160000/how-to-design-for-everyone-in-3-steps).

19 Source: “Inclusive Design,” Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/).

© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 21 [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378 For Customer Experience Professionals April 23, 2019 The Inclusive Design Imperative: Win And Retain More Customers Modernize Your Design Practice To Reach More Of Your Target Market

20 Base: 2,229 companies. Source: InVision 2018 Design Maturity Survey. 21 Source: “Fluent Design System,” Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/design/fluent/) and “Inclusive Design,” Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/).

22 Source: “Lightning Design System,” Salesforce (https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/). 23 Source: “Access Works - Usability and Accessibility Testing,” Access Works (https://access-works.com/) and “UserZoom Partners with AccessWorks,” UserZoom blog, June 22, 2017 (https://www.userzoom.com/blog/userzoom- partners-accessworks/).

24 If you have a presence in the United States, you can find organizations in your state or city that serve the blind and visually impaired here. Source: “About the AFB Directory of Services,” American Federation for the Blind (http://www. afb.org/info/about-the-afb-directory-of-services/5).

25 Source: Stark (https://www.getstark.co/). 26 Source: “axe: Accessibility for Development Teams,” Deque (https://www.deque.com/axe).

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