Inclusive Design For Great Customer Experience
By: Monica Tan
Tags: Customer Experience, Uiux, Design, Product Design

There is a lot of saying about customer experience that affects your business thoroughly. You know what? All of them are absolutely right. Customer Experience is the foundation your companies built on. It was the reason behind a successful business. Along with the increasing contact and interaction between you and your customers, it is critically important for you to serve all kinds of people.

Inherent bias in technology can be difficult to eradicate. Our technology tends to reflect the people who make them. Their perspectives and experiences determine how products are designed. Whether we are talking about smart cities or smart speakers, the systems that support our lives are the result of designers’ decisions. Inequality and exclusion are often unintended consequences of these choices.

Inclusive design works with customers who are usually excluded from design considerations. This creates innovative solutions that are suitable for everyone. Think of a smartphone or an electric toothbrush. Research shows that inclusively designed products and services tend to be accessible and useful to up to four times the number of intended customers. Now, it’s time to find the best way to achieve inclusive design so you can create a delightful customer experience.

To build more-inclusive technology, change your design process. It is one of many ways you can focus on cxm.

Robbie Lie, a UX Researcher and Data Scientist says in his article that,

By attending to the needs of the most marginalized customers, we create a product experience that satisfies the most market demand.

Inclusive design for him, truly has the potential to drive a successful business but also, social impact. When you design for the most marginalized users and also make accessibility a central focus, your products will become better and more successful.

But as it said, a product often mirrored its owner. And therefore, did not represent parts and divisions of society. This problem will not go away on its own. As digital platforms driven by AI, mixed reality, and voice interactions increasingly influence society, technologists need to recognize that the problem will only grow more pronounced.

According to an article by Felix Chang, a Strategy Director at Artefact, in Harvard Business Review, there are several actions that can be taken to create more inclusive products and services:

1. Design not for them, but as an excluded and diverse community

Form a community task force early in product development, actively strengthen relationships with community members, and use engagement methods and group creation throughout the process. Reward community members for knowledge, skills and time. Build the ability of community members to create their own solutions. When a product is released, it is flexible and customizable for use.

2. Cultivate a sense of belonging through representation.

Product leaders and practitioners must carefully consider representations at all levels of systems and products. Think about whether your product features or marks a particular community identity, aesthetic, or culture as a starting point for balancing. Avoid system defaults that assume people’s identities or force them to classify themselves unnecessarily.

3. Strengthen culture, training and processes.

Product leaders need to build and support different teams by developing competencies, tools, and processes that improve inclusion. Practitioners must actively identify and eliminate exclusion cases. Continuing education and training can help.

4. Assign responsibilities.

Product leaders must define measurable goals and inclusion plans for their products and teams. All members of the product team must share responsibility for their progress. Performance reviews should reflect the extent to which product team members advocate and explain inclusion. Digital platforms and the general public must be accountable to product leaders. App stores should promote inclusion-based product evaluation and comparison, and encourage public pressure to demonstrate improvements.

5. Normalize inclusion at the system level.

Product leaders and practitioners must consistently share best practices when creating and implementing design systems and coordinate work with comprehensive outcomes such as dignity and accessibility. Emphasizes inclusive case studies within the organization and across industries. Also, intentionally create a design system to increase inclusion. As your team considers changes in the way products are used, extend existing design system components instead of building and coding new components from scratch.

The idea of designing for equity, argues that the design process itself and how technology is created must be redesigned. If we want to ensure that no individual or community is harmed or left behind, we must intentionally design our products to be inclusive.

By reaching an inclusive design for your products or services, your targeted customers will be wider and your impact will be broader. These actions can create a more comfortable and meaningful customer experience.