Inclusive Design: How to Put Yourself Into One’s Shoes

5 min readJun 18, 2021

While creating something, designers often rely on the ideas they know. The generation of ideas and their evaluation is based on their personal experience and insights. Is it a wrong approach? It is neither good nor bad. It is one side of the coin. But how to start designing products accessible for everybody? The answer is to use an inclusive design.

Inclusive design is about enabling people with specific impairments to use a particular product in various environments. It teaches designers how to put themselves into different pairs of shoes.

In this article, we will talk about tools for inclusive design, its principles, and reasons for starting working on it right now.

Reasons for Practising Inclusive Design

The inclusive design unites. We all are different people with various needs and abilities. Inclusive design is a response to this diversity.

Creating a design that everyone can use, regardless of their abilities, is a great opportunity that brings people together. For designers, the inclusive design adds many user experiences and makes them closer to their users. In turn, users become more loyal to the company, and it helps them stay connected.

Inclusive design is excellent for SEO (search engine optimization). Designing websites with inclusive design in mind can increase visibility and reduce maintenance costs. SEO is essential if you want your website to rank higher in search engines. Thus, Google considers such crucial factors as a website’s speed, keywords (text on your website should match specific queries for a higher ranking), outbound links (where your website directs users). And Google likes inclusive design — it becomes an additional guarantee for increased website traffic.

Inclusive design enforces sales and increases the customer base.

Only in the USA, 26% of the population live with disabilities. This number shows active people who are ready to become loyal customers. You just need to take care of their user experience.

Design without an inclusive manner is like blocking the door for one in every four customers trying to shop. That’s why we need an inclusive design — it widens the burdens.

Difference Between Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Accessibility and inclusive design often go hand-by-hand. However, some features differ. An important distinction is that accessibility is an attribute, while the inclusive design is a method.

Inclusive design is a methodology that enables designers to use the full range of human diversity from different perspectives. Designing inclusively isn’t about making one thing for all people. You’re designing in various ways so that everyone can participate in an experience and belong to it. Before starting to create an inclusive design, you need to answer these three questions:

Who do we design for?
Who gets excluded?
Why does it matter?

If you can’t answer one of these three questions, take your time and change the strategy. A proper inclusive design is a final answer to the mentioned questions.

Accessibility is a professional discipline aimed at achieving inclusive design. Accessibility in design is about the qualities that make an experience available to everyone.

Inclusive design practice should make the products more accessible. Ideally, accessibility and inclusive design work together to create genuinely usable experiences and open to all.

Inclusive design is a great goal we need to reach. We can do it by following the principles that make the design process more accessible and serve as guidance to achieve this goal.

Inclusive Design Principles

Inclusive design principles mean designing for the needs of people with permanent, temporary, situational, or changing disabilities. With their help, anyone involved in the design and development of websites and applications — UI/UX designers, developers, illustrators, product owners will get a broad approach to understanding people’s diverse needs.

#1. Provide Comparable Experience

As people read and operate with interfaces differently, each interface should offer users a comparable experience in value, quality, and efficiency.

#2. Consider the Situation

Situations matter. People can be at work, at home, on the move, etc. Your task as a designer is to consider all the possible conditions and make sure your interface delivers a valuable experience to people regardless of their circumstances.

For example, a concept of inclusive service branding called Kosen is designed to help people with vision disabilities travel easily and have full-scale business trips. By using this app, people with visual impairments can stay and move in unfamiliar places conveniently.

#3. Be Consistent

Be consistent in design patterns, page architectures, editorials, etc. It would be best if you said the same things in the same way, and users should do the same things in the same way.

#4. Give Control

Ensure people can change platform settings such as orientation, font size, zoom, contrast, etc. Provide people with efficient and diverse ways to find and interact with content.

#5. Offer Choice

Everything can be done in more than one way. By providing layout and task completion alternatives, you offer people a range of choices that suit them and their current circumstances.

#6. Prioritize Content

Help your users focus on one thing at a time by prioritizing the content. Don’t build complex interfaces — people need to find the core features quickly.

#7. Add Value

Each element of your design should add value to the user experience. Consider such valuable features as voice, geolocation, camera and vibration APIs, etc.

The discussed above principles make the core of inclusive design. In the following passage, we present the tools that help you look at your products differently.

Tools For Creating Inclusive Design

Of course, it is crucial to use proper tools if you want to build an inclusive design. We at Cadabra Studio use a wide range of tools that help us make a high-quality and exceptional inclusive design. Check out this table below with a tools list.

Design instruments

Material design contrast tool
Stark (Sketch plugin for contrast/color blindness)
Color blindness simulator
Color oracle

Instruments for testing

Guidelines

In terms of more specific examples, Cadabra Studio created many projects in the healthcare sector. RemedyLogic is one of them. It is an AI-powered medical diagnosis system that improves medical decision-making processes and helps doctors reduce diagnosis errors.

Here we paid a lot of attention to the inclusive design since a healthcare website must consider all possible user groups. And tools mentioned above helped us achieve this goal. Contact us to get more information about inclusive design in healthcare apps.

Design For Everyone

As a former President of Inclusion International, Diane Richler once said: “Inclusion is about creating a better world for everyone.” Our company always keeps it in mind. While designing new products, we always do deep research to verify if our assumptions concerning accessibility are correct.

Designers at Cadabra Studio view diversity as an opportunity for innovation. We strive to follow one of the Microsoft inclusive design principles: “Solve for one, extend to many.”

We are open to new projects with inclusive design. Contact us and subscribe to our Medium channel to read our new articles.