Ep 21: What is inclusive design?
Shownotes
In this episode, Joyann breaks down what inclusive design entails and where it fits within marketing.
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Useful links:
Microsoft Inclusive Design Suite.
Social Media Accessibility: Inclusive Design Tips for 2023.
Transcript
00:00:23:13
Welcome to the Marketing Made Inclusive podcast. I am your Joyann Boyce and voice on this podcast with you to discuss all things inclusive marketing from persona creation campaigns, and even some of the mishaps we see in the media. Tune in and let me know your thoughts on how we can make inclusive marketing the industry standard.
00:01:02
Hi, everyone. Welcome and welcome back to the Marketing Made Inclusive podcast. I'm your host, Joyann Boyce. Thank you for joining me again this week. I want to talk around inclusive design. Now. If you've heard of the term before, you're probably wondering how does that relate to marketing? And if you haven't. Let's break it down. So essentially, inclusive design is all around making products for everyone, and we're going to talk a little bit about the origins, some of the key players.
00:01:55
But also we're going to get back to marketing because, you know, that is the main context of this whole podcast Marketing Made Inclusive. Anyways, so let's start with where it started and who originated it. So taking it back to like the 1980s or 1970s, the term was first coined by an architect named Ron Mace. I may mispronounce that. At the time he called it Universal Design, and it's been known by other names as well because it's like Design for All, obviously Inclusive Design, which we know it as now and Barrier Free Design. All of those in terms of his perspective was to design a world that was universal for everyone, that was able to be
00:02:19
present and be able to be used by everyone. So Mr. Ron in his architecture mind developed a few key principles of inclusive design. One of them was equitable use, flexibility in use, as I say, using it. Simple and innovative.
00:02:59
Tolerance for error, low physical effort, and then looking at the size and space for the approach in use. Now, these principles very much apply to architect, architecture and buildings and the way we see things, but we also have to think about them in the way that we use things digitally and engage with them. So his whole thesis, his whole motto was that rather than creating a range of options to fit individual people is more about designing for everyone, no matter their age,
00:03:26
gender, ethnicity is all about inclusivity. And, you know, that's my kind of approach and motto. So he was thinking about a product and a physical product at that. And how does that meet its needs, because one of the key things with inclusive design is that a lot of the times is considered in the physical form, but we have to think about the world in a nonphysical form, especially when we're designing for everyone.
00:03:58:
Now, I first came across the phrase during my research of thinking how to make marketing more inclusive for those within the disabled community and really thinking about how can things be adapted. And the things I kept seeing time and time again was a lot from the design and the inclusive design approach in terms of how to design physical products or software to be used by those with disability.
00:04:28:
What I really wasn't seeing at the time was a focus directly on marketing, and that is debatable because there was a lot of content around making websites accessible and it's debatable if you include that in or under marketing. But one of the first resources I found was Microsoft's has a full inclusive design suite or package. It's actually inclusive DOT Microsoft DOT Design.
00:04:54
So many dots were included link in the bio, but that kind of made me really start to see how Microsoft implemented designing for people of different abilities, and they have committed to making sure that's integrated across their products. Honestly, on reflection, I think that's probably why Microsoft and other reasons is used so much within the workplace because it was adapting these things quite early on.
00:05:20
And even if you have news of Microsoft aspects, you can even think about Apple. A lot of the things that we've gotten used to in society like voice notes and voice texts and reading back, came from that inclusive design and making things more accessible. And Apple, I think, was one of the pioneers in making that making it so it is aesthetically pleasing, too.
00:05:51
Sometimes Microsoft could be a bit clunky and we've seen this, going away from that tech and software as well because it reminds me of a campaign I saw where Tommy Hilfiger and they created a line of adaptive clothing which said I was fashion that was adapted in a way to make it accessible for disabled individuals. People could have and be amputees or wheelchair users.
00:06:07
And how could they still access Tommy Hilfiger’s brand? Now, if the creation of the products, the services and the clothing is all being designed in an inclusive way,
00:06:23
therefore there's an expectation for marketers to market these things, not just as products, but all products in an inclusive way to reach the people that they made for. And at times that could
00:06:38
it can make a marketer think that, you know, because this product was made for those with disabilities, then it has to be marketed in that way and then they forget how to implement it on everything else.
00:07:21
But realistically, I think if you could implement principles of inclusive design into your day to day marketing aspects that can really help to make your brand stronger, make you reach a wider audience. So I'll start with website based things. Website accessibility and designing again, these are from my perspective and from my learning is thinking about things like colour contrast, font size, alt text, and how your websites can be navigated.
00:07:44
Now the marketer in the team or in a company may not have control over that, but they can be the ones who can implement that from an aesthetic perspective. In terms of if I'm driving traffic to this web page, how is this going to be received and how can we make that so? It is inclusive, but aesthetically pleasing too.
00:08:47
Sometimes it can be challenging, but then there's another element of it for me where there's a practical parts of the website and creating all text and making sure your hyperlinks are fully accessible. But the other side, I want to kind of go into the kind of graphic design which is not necessarily the same, but I see within the marketing context, graphic design and logo creation coming in under inclusive design as well, because there's a lot of illustrations, graphics that's meant to represent society that don't include the representation of darker skin tones, disabled individuals, different body size, a lot of that content and that design content is not inclusive.
00:09:21
I'm kind of jumping all over the place. I'm hoping that you're following me a little bit here where as a marketer approaching inclusive design, there's two elements to summarize. There's two elements you can take. The practical and the things you do not have control over or may not have control over. I'm not assuming to know what your set up or team is like, and those are around how the product itself is made and making sure you are aware of how the product itself has been designed and who it's for.
00:09:57
So you can market to the audience. Another aspect is understanding that just because it's made for a certain audience may not, it doesn't mean that it has to be solely market to them. There could be a wider reach, but not being discouraged or limited by that aspect. And then there's the design in terms of aesthetic. So illustrations, colour contrast, even text, and just the aesthetic aspect of it.
00:10:22
A lot of the time, especially marks of the small company, we are in control of a lot of their aesthetically campaign social posts and we don't always consider things like colour contrast, font size to make it inclusive. And then we also consider when we use illustrations and what illustrations we're using to represent people and individuals. And how is that inclusive?
00:10:51
This was a lot off the top of the brain. I tried to give a little bit of a history lesson and thank you to Ron from the 1970s, 80s for for implementing that. But I really do see that inclusive design can be continue to be expanded within the marketing sector and developed for our use cases. I've had clients before where they don't necessarily have control over or input into the product.
00:11:22
They kind of get it, they get what they get and they have to sell it. I'm not saying that's the best environment for teams and so forth, but that's the case for a lot of people. You get what you get and then you have to sell it. But being armed with the knowledge of how things should be created and being armed with the knowledge of how your audience might use or access, something could have you to be able to push back on those who are designing and building the thing and then within your control, being aware of how
00:11:30
fonts and colour contrast could impact users with different abilities and using your website can
00:11:54
just mean that your content and your marketing is reaching an even wider audience. Yeah, I'm hoping that we can delve more into this subject area because it is so meaty. Has been established for such a long time. It's been established a lot longer than inclusive marketing has, and there's so much across elements of the principles within inclusive design to inclusive marketing.
00:12:21
And so much we use not every day that we're not even aware of. However, I want to leave you on that note. Make sure to check the link in the bio for any links I've mentioned. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Hub is amazing resource to really understand the depths and the infrastructure of this. Thank you so much for joining me for another week of Marketing Made Inclusive.
00:12:35
And remember if we all make a little step to make our marketing more inclusive day to day, we can create content that truly represents and engages with the society we live in. Thank you so much for listening or watching.
00:12:42
Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you can keep up to date on everything we're doing on our breakdowns of the latest inclusive marketing news.
00:12:46
And I hope you have an amazing week. Speak to you soon.
