Inclusive design for interaction designers

Author Benjy Stanton
Date 23 April 2023 (updated 25 February 2024)
Categories Interaction design Inclusive design Accessibility

What can interaction designers do to make services more inclusive?

Methods for designing digital services that are accessible to people with disabilities are well documented, but what if we take a broader view about how to include other groups that face barriers?

(Note, this isn't meant to minimise the efforts of web accessibility. But I'll try not to focus on that specialism in this post).

Reasons for exclusion could be related to peoples' protected characteristics, digital exclusion, and many other factors.

A list of groups that might face exclusion.

In the past, Clara Greo and Sonia Turcotte have used the phrase “oppressed and systematically disadvantaged people and communities in the UK”. Which I think is a better term than excluded groups.

Things interaction designers can consider to help make services more inclusive

Physical points in the journey
Multiple digital channels
Accessible formats
Multiple languages and bilingual services
Progressive enhancement and performance
Barriers and access needs
Co-design and co-production
Content and language

Physical points in the journey

For example; signs, physical products and printed documents.

Although the production of these parts of the service might be handled by other teams, an interaction designer may still be well placed to make sure these parts of the journey are simple, and consistent with the digital parts of the journey.

Multiple digital channels

For example; PDFs, emails, social media, videos, podcasts.

Similarly to physical things, the production of these other digital assets may be handled by a comms, publishing or a social media team, but an interaction designer can work with these teams and help advice on usability and accessibility best practices.

Accessible formats

For example; large print, easy read, British Sign Language (BSL) videos, Braille, audio.

Multiple languages and bilingual services

Designing services that are translated into multiple languages, or languages other than English, might mean the following need more work:

typography
layout
navigation
information architecture (IA)
content management systems

Progressive enhancement and performance

As the GOV.UK service manual says, progressive enhancement can "help users with device or connectivity limitations to use your service".

Create assets that are lightweight, cross-compatible and reusable on other channels.

Avoid designing journeys that require large downloads.

Barriers and access needs

Focus on excluded people and communities. Understand the barriers they face.

Co-design and co-production

Work alongside people, communities and content experts.

Lend your interaction design skills to help prototype how other types of content and channels could work before they go into production.

Content and language

The words we use in the service and in our teams matter. Be careful to use terms that don't exclude people.

For an interaction designer, this could mean something like renaming the branch you're working on from master to main.