What is inclusive design?

1. Overview

Inclusive design is a methodology for designing products that include as many potential users as possible. It particularly focuses on the needs of users who have historically been excluded, such as those with disabilities.

Inclusive design isn’t an exact recipe for success. Instead, it’s a framework that you can apply to your design and development processes, either by itself or in combination with other design approaches. Inclusive design has evolved over time through the work of a wide range of thinkers, designers, and creators.

Our inclusive design principles for this course are:

• Games are for everyone.

• Identify potential exclusion.

• Don’t act on assumptions.

• Proactively address barriers.

• Give your players choice.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn more about these principles. We’ll also share additional resources to help you learn more about inclusive design and other design methodologies.

2. Games are for everyone

We’re all different, and we all have different needs. If you don’t design for that wide range of needs, many potential players could be excluded from your game.

When you think of your target users, it’s very easy to think of someone just like you. After all, as a creator, you’re working on ideas that excite and interest you! Inclusive design means taking a more expansive view of your potential players and prioritizing users who have been historically excluded. This includes players with disabilities and members of marginalized communities.

Designing for a wide range of different users can sometimes feel overwhelming, particularly when you’re at the start of your journey as a creator. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit is a great inclusive design resource, and it includes some helpful guidance on meeting this challenge in its manual (page 11):

“Designing inclusively doesn’t mean you’re making one thing for all people. You’re designing a diversity of ways for everyone to participate in an experience with a sense of belonging.”

Note: The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).

3. Identify potential exclusion

Exclusion is when someone is blocked from participating in an experience. There are many different types of barriers that can cause exclusion, and you need to identify potential barriers in your game.

The social model of disability

This course uses the social model of disability. Models are frameworks for understanding a particular topic.

In the social model of disability, disability is the outcome of mismatched interactions between a person and the world around them. These mismatched interactions are caused by barriers and result in exclusion. Disability is not caused by any medical or health condition that a person experiences.

Barriers that cause disability include the following:

• Social barriers, such as prejudice and bias

• Environmental barriers, such as spaces, systems, and products that haven’t been designed with a wide range of different users in mind

• Information and communication barriers, such as communications that are only available in one language or do not have alternative formats to meet a wide range of needs

The best way to learn how users who experience disability might be excluded from your game is to work directly with those users. When you do this, you’ll be able to identify potential mismatches between the needs of those users and the experience that you want to create.

The medical model of disability

An alternative (and older) model is the medical model of disability. This model frames the medical conditions that a person experiences as the cause of their disability, rather than mismatched interactions with society and the world around them.

Models can be useful, but they are often an oversimplification of how individuals and organizations actually work in practice. You may encounter perspectives that blend elements of both the medical and the social model of disability.

4. Don't act on assumptions

Assumptions can be very harmful, and they lead to poor design. Let’s explore how assumptions can impact a production process through an example scenario.

Scenario: I made you a cake!

Imagine that you decide to make a cake for a friend. You choose a flavor and type of cake that you think is delicious and also demonstrates your best skills as a baker. But when you present the cake to your friend, there’s a significant problem: they don’t like the flavor you’ve chosen and they’re actually allergic to one of the ingredients.

Outcomes: User and creator

There are two sets of emotional and practical outcomes here: one set for you as the baker (the creator) and another set for your friend (the user).

You feel:

• Frustrated by not achieving your goal.

• Defensive of your choices — “but everyone likes chocolate!”

• Hurt by what you view as the rejection of the cake you have made.

Your friend feels:

• Disappointed that they have been given something they cannot eat.

• Frustrated that they were not consulted.

• Pressured to conceal or minimize the fact that they can’t eat the cake, in order to ease your hurt feelings.

This isn’t a very positive outcome for either of you. So how could you have done better in this situation?

Improvement: Consult your user

You could have avoided this issue completely if you had checked your friend’s requirements before beginning to make the cake. This would have been the most efficient approach.

You could also have checked your friend’s requirements after you had begun baking, if you didn’t remember to check at the start. This isn’t an ideal solution — it’s likely to result in wasted time and resources. However, it’s better to pivot partway through making something than to ignore your user's needs.

Conclusion: What does this mean for you as a creator?

We all have biases, whether we’re aware of them or not, and these inform our assumptions. As a creator, put your users first: ask them what they need and really listen to what they tell you about their requirements and experiences. This will help you to create games that truly meet the needs of your players.

5. Proactively address barriers

Just being aware of potential barriers and the needs of your users isn’t enough — you need to convert that awareness into action. Making your game more inclusive and more accessible isn’t an add-on, it should be at the heart of design and development. When you proactively address potential barriers, you create a better game that more people will be able to enjoy.

Everyone experiences mismatched interactions and exclusion sometimes, and user needs aren't always permanent. The solutions that you find to address barriers for players with permanent needs can also benefit many players with different, related needs too. Consider curb cuts: the ramps between footpaths and roads. Curb cuts mean that wheelchair users can navigate streets with greater safety and ease, but they can also benefit other people, such as those who use other mobility aids or someone who is pushing a stroller.

Let’s apply this to games. Subtitles for character dialogue are a critical requirement for many players with permanent user needs, including those who are hard of hearing. However, they could also benefit users with situational or temporary needs too, like a player in an environment where they need to keep the audio muted or who has difficulty understanding a character’s accent.

Extend your learning

The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit’s Persona Spectrum includes related user needs for a range of different permanent, temporary, and situational scenarios. You can explore the Persona Spectrum and other guidance on pages 34 to 44 of the manual.

6. Give your players choice

You can’t always design one thing that meets everyone’s needs without any customization. It’s important to make sure that the core experience and default settings of your game meet the needs of as many users as possible, but choice is a key tool to help you meet the needs of a wide range of players.

It’s impossible to know exactly which barriers any one player might encounter without asking them. When you build in options that meet a wide range of needs, you give your players the power to customize their experience of your game in a way that works well for them. This sort of customization includes adjusting the size of the user interfaces, configuring the game audio settings, or removing time pressure from a game.

Universal design and inclusive design

You may encounter the term universal design during your exploration of inclusive design. Universal design is an approach that aims to design things that are usable by as many people as possible, whatever their needs, without needing adaptation.

Sometimes people use inclusive design and universal design almost interchangeably. However, these design approaches aren’t identical; they’re different ways to address the challenge of creating experiences that as many people as possible can participate in.

One high-level way to break the difference down is as follows:

• Universal design aims to create experiences that work for as many people as possible with minimal adaptation.
  

• Inclusive design aims to address the specific needs of a wide range of users. This often involves creating experiences with greater flexibility for users to adapt the experience to their individual needs — through customizable game settings, for example.

In this course, you’ll apply an inclusive design approach to your game design and development, but there’s much more you can explore if universal design is interesting to you as a creator.

Extend your learning

If you want to learn more about universal and inclusive design, try Deque’s UX Virtual Panel: Accessibility vs. Inclusive Design Vs. Universal (YouTube). This panel talk is a nuanced exploration of the different design approaches, featuring digital accessibility specialists.

7. Reflect on your experiences as a user

We all have needs and preferences as users. When those needs aren’t met, it can be an incredibly frustrating experience. It can be helpful to reflect on your own experiences as a user before beginning to create something for others in order to remind yourself of the value of putting your users first and working to meet their actual needs.

Tip: You might find it useful to record your reflections in this step so that you can return to them later if you want to. You could also include the reflections in your devlog.

When your user needs weren’t met

Take some time to reflect on an experience that didn’t meet your needs as a user. This experience could be a game or something completely different (for example, using an online form or visiting a shop to make a purchase).

Use the following questions to help guide your reflection:

• Which of your needs were not met?

• How did it make you feel when your user needs weren’t met?

• Were you able to achieve your goals even if the overall experience didn’t meet your needs? If so, how hard was it to do so?

• How did you feel after this negative experience? Did you take any particular actions or change your behavior in any way?

When your user needs were met

Now reflect on an experience that met your needs as a user really well:

• How did the experience meet your specific needs? Did anything particularly impress you?

• How did it make you feel to have your needs met?

• How much effort did you have to make to achieve your goals for the experience?

• How did you feel after this positive experience? Did you take any particular actions or change your behavior in any way?

As you identify potential barriers for players in this course, keep these reflections in mind — your design choices will have a significant impact on your users. That’s an important responsibility!

8. Next steps

In this tutorial, you’ve taken some time to explore the basics of inclusive design as an approach, and you’ve reflected on your own experiences as a user.

Next you’ll consider inclusive design in practice, in the context of a setting that’s integral to the Out of Circulation vertical slice: a community library.