10 Ways to Design More Inclusive Products
By: Danny Sapio
Tags: Design, UX, Product Design, UI, Visual Design

Without certainty, we can only create designs that are perfect for a blue sky scenario. One in which the user fits exactly into the mold that we’ve used to create the product. This inevitably leaves holes in the experience for the people that don’t fit our typical user.

If we owned a restaurant, we wouldn’t force a customer to eat onions if they didn’t like onions — so why should users be required to have videos autoplay in their feed if they don’t want them to?

We should allow our users to customize how they interact with our product to their liking. Customization is key to not only crafting a more inclusive product, but it’s a core principle for better experiences and usability.

We can achieve this by providing options to customize the design and experience in the settings. I go in-depth about customization in my article, 10 Ways to Make a Fully Personalized UI.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Ability to customize font sizing & styles

Switch to dark mode/light mode or adjust the color theme

Toggle haptic feedback on and off

Adjust notification settings for each type of notification

Customize gestures or keyboard shortcuts for common actions

8. Avoid industry literacy

Everyone reading this article lives in some kind of bubble. Whether you’re a fisherman or a product manager — industry terms have become second nature to you after time in that bubble. When designing a product, we need to audit the language that we use to ensure we aren’t excluding anyone from our product.

For example, if we’re at a fancy restaurant and one of the menu items says, “Gravlax with hovmästar sauce and lemon.” It would take some Googling to find out that this is a Swedish cured salmon dish. If you’re from Sweden or a foodie, then you may be familiar with the dish — anyone who isn’t is out of luck.

Due to the range of expertise that our customers may or may not have, we should use language and create products that better reflect the needs of both novices and experts.

If our product caters to both doctors and patients, then it’s important that our search capability accepts a wide range of queries. The formal name for “TIA” or “transient ischemic attack” is what most people would call a “mini-stroke.” If the website only had TIA listed, then it wouldn’t be inclusive to those without this level of expertise.

If you’ve ever run a user test, you’re familiar with the jargon that we techies have become accustomed to. Hearing users interact with our products and calling the loading indicator a “spinny thing” or the hamburger menu “the stack of lines” is an indication of how far entrenched in the tech world we are.

9. Design for left and right-handed users

As mentioned previously, when we design for one set of users, we solve for many. A good example is the experience of using products for right vs. left-handed users.

About 10% of the population is left-handed (approx 700 million). If we can solve usability issues for that 10% of users, we will also improve the experience for a person with one arm or a temporary arm injury.

If there is an important action in our application that is done repeatedly — liking a post, for instance, then why not give the user the ability to decide where that action is placed that’s most comfortable for them?

Provide an option to customize the placement of important actions in the settings. Or better yet, place actions in a neutral position so users can tap where they’d like.

If the designer is right-handed, then the product may favor right-handed users. Let some lefties try it out and see what their feedback is.

10. Don’t break conventions