UX Glossary · I
Inclusive design
Designing for the full range of human diversity, so fewer people are excluded in the first place.
Inclusive design aims to make one product work for as broad a range of people as possible, by treating human variation as the normal case rather than the exception.
The distinction from accessibility is one of framing. Accessibility is usually measured: does this meet WCAG AA. Inclusive design is a method: who did we exclude when we made this decision, and can we not?
The persona spectrum
Microsoft’s Inclusive Design toolkit introduced a framing that has stuck. Any ability constraint exists in three forms:
- Permanent: one arm
- Temporary: a broken arm
- Situational: holding a baby
Designing one-handed operation for the first group serves all three, which is a much larger population than a disability statistic suggests.
Solve for one, extend to many
The curb cut is the standard example: mandated for wheelchair users, now used constantly by people with pushchairs, luggage and delivery trolleys. Captions were built for deaf viewers and are now used by most people watching video in public.
In practice
The practical test is who is in the room. Inclusive design fails most often not through bad intent but through a research sample that quietly excluded the people who would have surfaced the problem.