Building your inclusive design toolkit

Hi. Lovely to be speaking here. I think, I was placed at a very appropriate, point in the program. It was so great to hear Fatima's talk, especially. I related so hard to her story of someone you know, as someone who has had an actual screaming meltdown on public transport.

Excellent. I am in good company here. As you may have guessed, I am an autistic product designer, and I'm here to talk to you about my special interest. So brace yourselves. First things first. Oops. I decided to run an experiment, for better user experience for those of us who wish real life came with subtitles.

I forgot. I still have my sunglasses. Sorry. I have created a partial transcript for the talk. You can access it via the QR code or using bit.ly/inclusive-design- toolkit. I say partial transcript because, in true sitcom fashion, I decided to restructure the entire talk last night at 3AM.

Building in public, you will enjoy my last slide. In all seriousness, though, the text will be completed later today, and I will share all of the slides because they are an important resource that I'd like you to be able to access. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my experiment. Second, I'm going to be discussing fraught topics like racism, sexism, ableism, trauma, as well as mental ill health and experiences of vulnerability.

Inclusive design doesn't shy away from these topics. We actually face into them, but that doesn't mean that we should put our well-being at risk. So please look after yourself. If you need to step away or disengage, go for it. And if you have any feedback about how I might deal with these in a more sensitive way, please, I'm all ears.

Third, I use the word design a lot here. I know that there are often blurry lines between UI, UX, service design. I'm a product designer, so basically, we're greedy. We just say, we want the whole thing. Give it to us. And, you know, where does research even fit in? Gosh. Right after we had that research conference.

But when I talk about design, I'm not talking about just, you know, futzing around in Figma or a Claude design or Miro. I'm talking about the approach. I'm talking about the process, the thinking that goes into it, the questions that we're asking so that we can intentionally create user experiences. So in that sense, I hope inclusive design is useful to all of us here. Similarly, I'm going to be choosing pragmatism over perfection.

I'm a little bit self conscious because I know there's academics here, and I'm using so much imprecise terminology. But in the interests of hoping that we can get coverage and at least build a working understanding of concepts, I may conflate some terms. Again, all feedback is welcome.

Now let's begin. What's inclusive design? At its core, inclusive design is about asking more and better questions, but often we can get overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of the field. Now I'm going to note that I won't talk about why we should do inclusive design.

It's a very important discussion. Great talk. Not this talk. We're going to go straight into the how. And so we're going to talk about how we can ask more and better questions to include the diversity of human experience and identities in our work.

And in this regard, this entire presentation is a resource to hopefully enable you to practice inclusive design in a way that works for whatever project you're currently working on. So this presentation is part of a toolkit or a how to build your toolkit. I'm not going to throw it over the wall to you though. This talk is the handover instructions.

The slides are the resource. So we want to fulfill as many human needs as possible. We want to leverage, you know, the technology that is available to us. But the truth is that's more complicated than we may expect.

You may have heard from the talks earlier. And often, inclusive design gets conflated with certain things, so I will say right now, inclusive design is not an accessibility compliance checklist just with a few more items about gender added on. It's not one solution fits all, and it's not optional.

It is an intrinsic mandatory part of user experience. Well, in fact, you can't say that your user experience is good if it isn't inclusive because what are what do you actually mean? Is it only good for people who don't have disability? So we have a lot of standards like the digital inclusive standard.

Microsoft has created this wonderful site for inclusive design, and Apple is famous for its accessibility. But as UX practitioners, we're asking about why. We want to know the root cause, right, so that we can design inclusively. So let's actually start at the problem of exclusion.

Exclusion is our default, And if and here are some more terms that I kind of use as an umbrella for, as falling under the umbrella of exclusion. You don't have to read through all of them. I'm just very pedantic about these things.

Now if in exclusion were not by default, inclusive design wouldn't exist. It wouldn't be necessary. It would just be design. Accessibility would just be usability, you know, or part of functional specs that come with every product. All technology, built environments, digital products, and services would be created to accommodate all functional needs, not some ideal perfect able body.

And this would be happening at the very start without needing assessments, remediation, and less real, a lot of arguing, hours about null states. There are mountains of statistics that point to groups of people being excluded due to their identities.

I'm not going to throw the numbers at you. You're welcome to look them up there. For example, you can start at the gender pay gap or disability employment rates, But I will try and actually give you examples of how we can shift our thinking and how we can actually unearth the default assumptions that exist even in our own in our own thinking as design practitioners. It's because it's so pervasive that it shows up in our thinking, our processes, even our tools.

So, let's try a quick thought experiment. What does a successful business leader look like? The first image that flashes into your head. If you're a fantastic, you know, give me the first few descriptors, words, adjectives. What's their gender, what are they wearing, how old are they. I'll show you my result.

Ta da. Surprise. A default my default successful business leader is a middle aged white man wearing a suit with traditional masculine presentation. Coincidentally, this was the first image result I got from Pexels. So magic. I I will wager that many of us had a similar thought. Design doesn't occur in a vacuum.

Our ideas and we ourselves are products of an environment that excludes by default. And this type of thing actually came up a while ago with Gen AI because it kept producing images like this when, you know, you gave it similar prompts. It didn't represent the diversity in business, much less leadership in the real world, which is completely, unsurprising because it was trained on our data.

Now being able to identify and examine exclusion, even when it's happening within our own thoughts, is fundamental to inclusive design. Otherwise, we're just following guidelines that someone else wrote. We are just completing checklists, just longer checklists with gender and, you know, disability somewhere there.

We're not actually understanding where they come from, what they mean, and how they apply to our work. So, what I'm going to try and do in the next twenty minutes is kind of give us a little bit of the knowledge that can inform that understanding. So exclusion. Right? How does it happen?

Are we just actually terrible people? No. Exclusion happens through systems, and people are systemically excluded on multiple basis for a number of factors, like this list over here. And they are so deeply rooted in our systems that we can say, oh, I don't see race.

Oh, I am very open minded. I'm my best friend is gay. But you are an individual. Exclusion is rooted in the system. And by the way, both of those things actually prove the opposite. But looking here, which ones do you recognize? Which ones do you relate to? Which ones have you experienced?

And I wonder if there is anything here that surprises you because I would suggest that what you didn't expect to see in that list would be really good candidates to look into more after this talk. So I wanna give you an actual working example of how exclusion shows up in the design of user experience, and I'm going to go for something that should be fairly easy, right, and should be fairly accessible because it is something that many people do or need to do. Let's register a business name.

So the first image on the left is a screenshot of the business.gov.au website. The center image is the ASIC page about business name registration. Both of these talk about how to register your business name. Both of these point to the website on the right, the far right, which presents an extremely suboptimal user experience.

And because it is so tonally and fundamentally different from the previous two websites, actually undermines trust. And when I talk about trust, I'm referencing how users not just feel, but how secure or how much they can believe that what they are doing will, number one, get them to their goal, but also number two, protect them and their data.

This does not protect trust, and this design actually excludes on a lot of bases. For example, responsive layouts were overlooked, so, different screen sizes people who don't have computers, I'm sorry, but you are going to have a bad time.

Accessibility was overlooked, so people who use assistive technology can't actually access it properly. I tried navigating it with my keyboard and I got lost. This site does not consider or try to minimize cognitive load, which is not just to process information, but also to figure out where to go. Like, if you take a closer look, I'm sorry that I can't zoom in right now for you, but the quick links is a smorgasbord.

It is extremely confusing, and I do not actually understand why it is there. And going back to trust, think about the context of this. This is the ASIC. There are a ton of scams targeting this exact website, impersonating it so that it can they can get money from people who want to register businesses. What is one of the things that we are taught to look for in scams?

Does the site look janky? Does this site look janky? Yes. Yes. Thank you. And so all of this, you know, it it would impact someone with no experience of exclusion or no traits that are excluded because it's just horrible design. But it especially impacts people with lower literacy and tech literacy. Like, can you find the form that I am meant to use to search?

It also would impact immigrants or people less in familiar with less familiar with Australian institutions and systems, because how do government work? And especially people with particular reason to be wary of scams or or who have experienced financial vulnerability or who just have a lot of uncertainty in that space.

This is the exact thing that is a little bit scary to look at, especially with that giant orange banner up the top. And think of new business owners. This is the first time that you're doing this, and then you suddenly get dragged here. And that does have significant overlap with other excluded groups, For example, women and people in rural remote areas, people with disability who tend to, struggle to find stable employment and thus must must start their own businesses essentially and self employ.

But wait, there's more. I tried actually using it because I did need to register a business name. And I want to note that apart from how we present information and whether we design for assistive technologies, we can also exclude by designing the most rigid and unforgiving experiences, For example, when it comes to passwords.

So this password field, I tried clicking on the little help indicator, and it gave me three lines that really got my lizard brain to panic. Because how does that even work? I I am a reasonably well educated person, but I just my brain just shut down when I looked at it.

And you'll note well, actually, you can't see it, but when you input your password, it actually doesn't show you what you've typed. It and it doesn't give you an option to show everything you've typed, so you have to remember all these arcane rules. Somehow hope that your password, you know, satisfies them, and then you have to remember it and do it twice without making mistakes.

And this is this is an example of a potential failure that people cannot recover from. And when I say recover from, I mean people being able to or willing to try again. I am reasonably confident with technology, so I did try again.

But wait. There's more. This is what I got when I when I registered. You know? I filled in all of my information. I got the password right, the, you know, email verification thingy, and I clicked on the link. I tried to log in, and it gave me this terrifying error message. Imagine what someone who has spent so much effort because it's unfamiliar, because they are really and rightly worried about getting scammed because they're not familiar with technology.

But they they would spend a significant amount of time on this, and then they try to log in, and this is what they get. How many people do you think would give up out of frustration? By the way, there's a little help button there. I tried it. It is extremely useless in the sense that I just got more confused.

I am tech literate, so I was able to troubleshoot it, and I was able to figure out that the problem was not actually my username or my password. It was because the site was undergoing scheduled maintenance. So I had to Google, and I found it buried somewhere in the ASIC site, the schedule of the maintenance.

And then I was able to figure, oh, it's not my fault. But think about how these patterns would impact people who are already disadvantaged. And when I say exclusion, we are talking about barriers that have real world impacts. So we are making it more difficult for people who are already excluded to complete a crucial task for gaining economic advantage.

So how are we designing actually directly translates into, who are we designing for? And this is where we can get really we can really learn to clarify our intentions, and this is a practice. When we actually think of it in terms of humans, of people, right, because at the end of the day, it is actually people who are affected by this, and it is people that we are designing for.

We think that we may say we think. We may even say that we're designing for everyone. But this long list is a list of the specific people for whom that experience would work. So people with full vision. Great. People who don't need assistive technology.

I'm sorry, screen reader users. People who are familiar with Australian systems. People with good literacy and numeracy, just compounding disadvantage. We can try to avoid over discrimination, but unless we can actually ask the sharp specific questions we need to ask, we're just going to end up with experiences that are difficult, distressing, and downright impossible for many people to successfully use.

And that is harm. I actually initially drafted this slide as we can harm people, but thank you Mike Monteiro for saying it with more swear words. We do harm people. I'm not gonna say that we destroy or that we have blood on our hands. That's Mike's thing.

But we do cause real harm. And translating it again in terms of the people who are disproportionately impacted by this harm. This is a list of the people, some some of these groups who may recognize from earlier. So what can we do about it?

Well, for one thing, we can examine our assumptions and go from there. That is something we're already practicing in this talk. We can embed this critical examination into our design process as part of, you know, ideation, thinking about the problem space. We can explicitly name these assumptions.

We can practice questioning, and we can consider the impact of our failure to design inclusively. And, of course, whenever possible, we want to do inclusive user research and consult and collaborate with people who are experts in those domains that we consider priority because there are a lot of domains.

We cannot be experts in all of them even though we are greedy product designers. There are also more things that we can do to make inclusion not just a concept, but actually translate it into something that can make a difference to the lived reality.

So it can incorporate intersectionality. The first time I talked about intersectionality, everyone was scared because it sounds academic. It did originate in academe. It was formulated by professor Kimberly Crenshaw. She wanted to examine the experience of black women in The USA, and theories of just race or just feminism did not give a full picture because the oppression experienced by black women is unique to that intersection of identity.

That's a lot of academic words. Let's draw pictures. Here is intersectionality as applied to myself, just as a limited example. It's basically Venn diagrams, and I am in at the intersection. I'm a queer, disabled Filipino woman among other things.

And the thing that you'll note is that we cannot actually separate these things. Otherwise, I will cease to exist. I will not I I can't actually exist just in the disabled space or in the woman space because that's not all I am. And that is why an intersectional lens is really important because, otherwise, we're going to reduce people to categories again, which is another form of compounding, you know, marginalization.

Instead of thinking of people as whole humans, we just think of them as labels. But we can't actually detach these are not bundles of detachable labels. You have to take the whole thing, and so you have to understand that complexity. We also need to center lived experience.

So this is essentially I think this is something that should be quite natural for user experience, practitioners to do because it's kind of our thing, when we do qualitative research. We listen to the people who aren't excluded, and we honor the weight of skin in the game.

We don't idealize, you know, neutrality or objectivity as though that is the measure of truth. We don't dismiss the voices of excluded people no matter how emotional or angry or passionate they can get. I once had a user interview where the participant said, whoever designed this shouldn't be a designer.

That user interview lasted two and a half hours, and it is still one of my favorite user interviews and my favorite pieces of feedback that I got because this person was so angry about the damage that my design could cause people. And so they actually went on to talk about it, and I learned so much.

It's also about this rallying cry that's often seen in disability rights, which is nothing about us without us. Because historically, and it continues to the present day, people who are marginalized or excluded get decisions made for them.

We don't get to decide how we receive mental health care. The government, who I don't know how many of them are familiar with the experience of being sectioned, decides. I wanna conclude by sharing that I will always advocate for lived experience. This is a full declaration of bias.

I have lived experience of multiple intersections of exclusion. I've lost my home and my job due to homophobia. I've experienced financial vulnerability, domestic abuse, the horrors of immigration from a developing country to one of the richest countries in the world, a six year journey to get my ADHD and autism diagnosis.

Whoo. And I don't know how many incidents of racism, sexism, ableism, including that screaming meltdown on the tram. Also, I was discharged from mental hospital just a month ago, my sixth admission since 2025. Now throughout all those times, I wasn't thinking, gosh, I sure wish that this service was designed with lived experience.

What I act just actually just felt was this really strong need to be treated as though I mattered, as though my life mattered, as though I were a fellow human being. The face of lived experience is human, and this is why I encourage you to put it at the center of your inclusive design work, embed it into your design practice because it's more needed now than ever. I had 23 slides to go.

They are massive walls of text, but I was prepared to not have time to go through them all. They are me digging deeper and asking specific questions that have to do with those facets of exclusion that we talked about earlier. There are also links that are a mix of resources and random interesting things. So I very, much encourage you, Please check it out.

I will upload this slide to the Bitly link right after this talk, and then I will fill in the fake transcript so that I can pretend I was more, eloquent than I turned out to be. But please think about how your assumptions shape your design, and please do consider how we might listen and design in a way that affirms people's humanity.

Thank you.