Quick practical tools for assessing visual inclusion

About this Hands-On

An ageing society and increasing awareness of disabilities has led to increasing interest in inclusive design. Inclusive design is the design of products or services to meet the needs of a wider range of users, particularly considering those with varying capabilities and needs.

However, it is often difficult to put inclusive design into practice, particularly on projects with constrained budgets and time. Another issue can be persuading key stakeholders of the importance of improving a product or convincing them that a proposal does make things better.

This session will introduce participants to some simple, practical tools for quickly and cheaply assessing how visually inclusive a product or image is. These tools give quantitative estimates of how many people in the UK population would be unable to see the product or image sufficiently clearly to be able to use it effectively. These estimates are helpful for comparing different options and for convincing stakeholders of the need for improvement.

The methods also help designers to identify what aspects of a product or image cause the most difficulty and consider how to improve them.

The session will briefly introduce the concepts and importance of inclusive design and will introduce the tools. Participants will then apply these tools to different graphical elements on a smartphone screen, and will have the opportunity for discussion.

The tools can also be applied to physical products and paper artwork, but the focus in this session will be on mobile phone interface design.

About the Speakers

Joy Deane

Joy Goodman-Deane is a senior research associate at the Engineering Design Centre, which is part of the Engineering Department at Cambridge University. Her research looks at how to enable companies to design more inclusive products, i.e. products that are suitable for a wider range of people, including those who are older or have disabilities.

Her interests focus on developing tools and methods to help support designers in conducting inclusive design. These include the Impairment Simulators and Exclusion Calculator, which can be found on the Inclusive Design Toolkit.

Joy did her PhD in computing science at Glasgow University before working on a research project investigating the design of computer-based technology for older people. She moved to Cambridge University in 2004 to work on the i~design 2 and 3 projects on inclusive design.

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 InclDesignTools

Yuanyuan (Daisy) Liu

Yuanyuan (Daisy) Liu is a final year PhD student in the Inclusive Design Group and Healthcare Design Group at the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre. Her PhD research focuses on how to apply the principle of Inclusive Design to improve healthcare services.

Her research interests include exploring methods and tools to support non-designers to understand and conduct Inclusive Design, to improve their products and services, and thus offer a better user experience to a wider range of users.

Yuanyuan (Daisy) took her master’s degree in design management at Tsinghua University. She was involved in various research projects with international companies and universities, e.g. cooperating with Southampton University to help supermarkets improve elderly consumers shopping experience in the UK and China, as well as to assist Boeing (US) in advancing their user experience in China.