Hey there. I'm Shabi, an interaction designer here at Google. My role focuses on scaling accessibility across Google's design systems. After high school, I wasn't really sure what kind of career would be a good fit for me. I was interested in technology, but I didn't have any technical knowledge, so I was afraid I wouldn't do well in the field. But eventually, I realized what a huge impact advances in tech had on society and my life. I wanted to harness this power to positively affect the lives of people around me, especially those who tend to be marginalized or forgotten. As an intern in UX design, I worked on products for people with chronic pain. I realized how important and impactful it is to consider the needs of people with disabilities, and how much I wanted to create products to help them. So I continued researching and empathizing with those who are disabled to understand how I could uplift them with my work. It's a passion I'm looking forward to sharing with you during this program. So far, you've learned about user-centered design, which concentrates on meeting users' needs. As we mentioned before, there are many UX design frameworks, and those frameworks change over time. In this video, we'll talk about three more ways to put the user first in your designs: universal design, inclusive design, and equity-focused design. Let's start from the beginning. When designers began considering how to include an even broader range of people in their designs, they called it universal design. Universal design is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the widest range of situations. Think of it like a one-size-fits-all approach. Designers propose one solution for everyone. The problem is that when you focus on creating one solution for everyone, the designs lose their effectiveness. It's often difficult to achieve any goals with your product when you have so many intended users. It's like when you go to a store that sells a hat in just one size, the label might read, One-size-fits-all, but the hat still won't fit a lot of people. Universal design had the same problem. Even though it had the intention of being inclusive, it excluded a lot of people. It turns out one-size-fits-all isn't a great solution. As UX designers realized that universal design didn't meet the needs of every user, the approach to including people began to change. Designers started thinking about the concept of inclusive design, which focuses on finding solutions to meet different needs. Inclusive design means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability, race, economic status, language, age, and gender. Inclusive design includes researchers and designers from traditionally excluded populations in the process, so they can provide their unique perspectives during all phases of the design process. If universal design is a one-size-fits-all solution, then inclusive design can be described as solve for one, extend to many. With inclusive design, you solve for one type of user, and the benefit of that solution can extend to many other types of users. Our goal as designers is to build experiences that are accessible to users with the widest range of abilities. In other words, no one should be excluded from using a product that we built because we didn't consider their needs when building it. In inclusive design, there's no such thing as normal. There's no average person or target audience that we should design for. For example, when designing we focus on the needs of people who are blind and deaf even more than we consider the needs of those who rely on their sight and hearing to communicate. Then as we build more versions of a product, we design for additional excluded groups, like those with physical or cognitive disabilities. Designing products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities is called accessibility. Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design. We'll explore accessibility in more detail later. But keep in mind that the idea of "solve for one, extend to many," only benefits the group the design was created for and existing users. Many groups are still left out. Over time UX designers realized that inclusive design wasn't always enough, and that's where we find ourselves today as equity-focused design becomes a new industry goal. Equity-focused design takes the idea of inclusive design one step further. It asks designers to focus on designing for groups that have been historically underrepresented or ignored when building products. The goal of equity-focused design is to uplift groups that have been excluded historically. In order to design with equity as a goal, we first need to know the difference between equality and equity. The two words sound similar, but they're actually two different concepts. Equality means providing the same amount of opportunity and support to all segments of society. In other words, everyone gets the same thing. Equity means providing different levels of opportunity and support for each person in order to achieve fair outcomes. To better understand the difference between equality and equity, check out this illustration. The illustration on the left represents equality because every person gets the same box to stand on, but because each person has a different height the tallest person has a better view. The illustration on the right represents equity, because each person is given what they need. The shortest person is given the tallest stack of boxes to stand on. Let's explore how this relates to design. Equity-focused design is a newer concept in UX, and one that we often discuss at Google. Instead of building products for groups of people who are currently being excluded, which is the goal of inclusive design, equity-focused design seeks to build products that meet the needs of specific individuals in groups who have been excluded in the past. So what does this look like in the real world? Start by identifying a product you want to build. Then, think about the groups that have not been served by this type of product in the past. Finally, build your design while keeping the groups who identified as underrepresented front and center. It's important to keep in mind that equity-focused design doesn't solve all problems, just like inclusive design and universal design don't either. The key point is that these are all different approaches to solving issues of underrepresentation and designing for a more equitable future. These issues are massive, but vitally important. Often, schools and companies consider accessibility, inclusive design, and equity-focused design as methods to consider during the design process, but not as a requirement. But I'm a firm believer that every designer should know the basics of accessibility and why creating products for those who are underrepresented and excluded is a must. As you continue through your career, you'll gain more practice and understanding on how to implement these ideas. We'll get to some more applications of this soon.
