Inclusive design is the design of a product or service that is accessible for people all abilities regardless of age, disability, and other factors. Inclusive design strives to put the concern of the user experience first and foremost when making design decisions. Accessibility is one of the factors that should be highly prioritized when planning a set of features for a certain product or service. A lot of the times the accessibility factor surfaces at the last minute and inclusive design helps to solve that problem.
Inclusive design is very important because it ensures that people, regardless of their situation and abilities, won't be discriminated against or be prevented from using a certain product or service a company provides. Since we live in the digital age, more products and service become digital and nobody should be left behind. With inclusive design, it enables you to reach a wide range of audiences and more diverse audiences that could be potential customers.
For the empathy exercises with my team, we were given tasks based on the disability and to perform those tasks in order to experience what each disability would feel like. For the first exercise, one of my classmates were instructed to put on some earbuds and play a video that replicated the sound of tinnitus. Then we tried to have a conversation with her by asking random questions. This exercise helps us understand what's like to have an auditory condition such as Tinnitus. Tinnitus is a ringing in the ears and/or head that does not go away depending on the person and severity. My classmate, Nueka, had some difficulty listening to the questions asked by her classmates. After listening to Nueka repeat the questions we asked her it was clear that it's difficult to hear and understand words clearly while having a ringing noise in the ear and/or head.
Another empathy exercise we performed was playing a browser-based game with mittens on in order to simulate what Arthritis is like. Luckily, my classmate, Rachel, had a pair of mittens on her so we were able to perform the exercise. Wearing the mittens while playing a game online is supposed to help us understand and resemble the limited range of motions someone with Arthritis experiences. While watching Rachel, she had had difficulty pressing one key at a time and instead pressed multiple keys at the same time because she had little control over what she was clicking.
For the last exercise, we were instructed to download a low vision simulator extension to our Google Chrome. This exercise is called the Use NoCoffee which has settings that help you understand what it's like to have a visual condition like color blindness or a blocked visual field. The feature allowed us to set it to different filters that were available. In order to test the Use NoCoffee extension, we resorted to one of my classmate Randy's Instagram page which allowed us to get a better understanding of the condition. There were different color filters or pervasive issues such as blur and contrast loss that we were able to experiment with. The feature that we focused on was color deficiency which in the photo above we selected the filter "tritanopia". The filter "tritanopia" turned my screen and its content very warm toned.
My biggest takeaway from this empathy exercise was how important inclusive design is. After performing all of the tasks and empathy exercises above it was clear how important inclusive design is when we're designing for a wide spectrum of audiences with different disabilities. The design of a product or technology shouldn't have to be hard for people to perform simple tasks and we as designers should take into account their needs and cater to them. I also didn't know about the many different types of disabilities people struggle with which limits one's capabilities. After the empathy exercises, I began to look out for inclusive design features everywhere without knowing. That's because of how important inclusive design is and how important it was for me to realize that. I was able to truly think about the user and their experience by putting myself in their shoes. With this project of designing for inclusivity and the empathy exercises, I am now able to grow as a designer and design for a wide array of audiences and address their needs.
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