Inclusive Design
“Diversity is our worlds greatest asset, and inclusion is our biggest challenge.”
~Jutta Treviranus, Founder of Inclusive Design Research Centre (OCAD)
This week during my Masters in UX Design course, I found myself down a rabbit hole, filled with exclusion. I was browsing on LinkedIn when I saw a post from Ben Woods, sharing a post via Darren Hood, referencing Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Principles.
In moving through the site, I came across a film they produced which opened my eyes not only to the world of accessibility, but also to the importance of User Research and how designing for edge cases can help improve everyone’s user experience.
The film follows several stories that embrace and empower inclusive design, including the makers of “Pill Pack” as well as a Greek designer tasked with a project aimed at helping the elderly, specifically his grandmother, cope with retirement.
One story that really stuck out to me was about Skype translator and captioning. Originally designed as a visual aid for people with hearing disabilities, designers saw the significant value of putting speech recognition with machine translation and brought it into the classroom to help students interact and communicate with other students all over the world. Not only was the captioning helping students with hearing and speech disabilities, it was breaking down cultural barriers.
The important takeaway was that without Skype taking into consideration how people with hearing disabilities can utilize their technology and products, students all over the world may not be effectively communicating with each other even though they area speaking different languages. It took inclusive design to make that a reality!