The Case for Inclusive Design

Chakkaradeep Chandran
Product Manager Journal
4 min readMar 10, 2016

I was fortunate to be part of an internal training on Microsoft’s Inclusive Design where my team (PMs, designers and developers) took off a week from our daily jobs and practiced the journey of what inclusive means to Microsoft & how we apply in our products we design and build.

Microsoft Inclusive Design

Microsoft Inclusive Design is a set of practices you can apply to any existing design process.

When we design products, especially software products, we have a tendency to exclude users (personas) with range of abilities in our design process. By including users with range of abilities in our design process, we can achieve success with products that not only work for a set of users, but for everyone, including the users with range of abilities.

What is disability

In the context of health experience a disability is any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being.

World Health Organization

Credit: Microsoft Inclusive Design Manual

Lets consider few examples:

  • Short-term disability: arm injury, jet lag, eye surgery, distracted driver etc.,
  • Long-term disability: blind, deaf, one arm etc.,
  • Situational disability: eye fatigue, body ache, low light etc.,

As you can see, disability is everywhere. Inclusive Design ensures that the thought process and user experience scales to these users with wide range of abilities.

Seeing is Believing

There is nothing that can help us validate our products than actually talking to subject matter experts and seeing them use it. That is exactly one of the activities we did in the training.

Credit: Microsoft Inclusive Design Manual

We met with various users with range of abilities, talked to them about how they use technology, PC/Mac, smart phone, apps etc., to complete their daily tasks.

These are users who have full time jobs, just like you and me.

They have responsibilities, priorities and deadlines, just like you and me.

They expect the products, apps etc., are simple and effective to complete their tasks, just like you and me.

It was an eye opener for me to see how they use the products, and realize how our designs have excluded them all this time.

It was evident that if we had fostered empathy and included users with range of abilities in our design process, the product would have been designed efficiently for all users.

For example:

Task X takes 5 steps with 2 dialogs and a prompt in your laptop.

This is a fairly OK experience and given the speed of how some users do this task, they might even not notice the dialogs and prompt.

Now, imagine you injured your right arm and you can only use your left arm.

  • Do you think you can complete the same task as quickly as you would do with both your hands?
  • Do you think the design considered such scenarios?
  • Do you think, by applying inclusive design, you can come up with a better user experience?

Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit

Microsoft has released the following resources to help you and everyone be inclusive, foster empathy and design great products:

According to a report published by National Service Inclusion Project, just here in the USA we have:

  • An estimated 48.9 million people, or 19.4% of the non-institutionalized civilians, have a disability.
  • An estimated 24.1 million people have a severe disability.
  • An estimated 34.2 million people, or 17.5%, have a functional limitation.

And most importantly:

  • 82% of the general population are employed
  • Among all people with disabilities of working age (29.4 million), 52% are employed
  • Among people with severe disabilities (14.2 million), 26% are employed

I am really proud that Microsoft is focused on designing products for everyone by applying the inclusive design to our existing design process.

I want to thank the Microsoft Design team for giving me and my team the opportunity to participate in this training and constantly push us (during the training) to think inclusively. I can’t wait to see how we make our products easier, better for all users.

Design for all of us begins with design for each of us.

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