Open was recently interviewed by the innovation strategy agency Subsector. Phil Dearson and Jessica Gregson invited Christine Hemphill from Open to their Subsector Shorts programme to talk about inclusive design and innovation in 10 minutes or less.
If you are interested in watching it, please find the interview here.
If you prefer to read the key takeaways, they are;
- Inclusive insight infuses design with higher quality considerations. This helps to generate powerful innovations and solutions that solve deep unmet needs of some consumers and in doing so also makes more innovative products that are better for all.
- Getting these insights from the edges is most valuable early in the design process. The mantra, “a little early and often” is a good one to keep in mind.
- People differ in the ways we move, sense, think and feel. All people are different in these characteristics! No-one is quite the same. By gathering insight from people who more significantly and potentially permanently differ in these characteristics, such as people with lived experiences of disability, you will find design challenges to address you may not have considered and more inventive solutions that you may not have otherwise considered.
- A lot of great innovations that are helpful to everyone today, like touch screens, easy-open packaging and voice interfaces (Siri, Alexa) were initially designed through specifically inclusive insights.
- When considering who to bring in for diverse insight, ensure you engage with people as different to the design team as possible and as different from each other as possible to broaden the spectrum of insight. An important note I didn’t make in the short, is that by having a diverse design team you will already have some of the power of difference enabled.
- The last point was to check out our Inclusive CX Canvas to understand how this all connects across a business. We show the link between understanding customer experiences across a range of customers with various difference in abilities, the choice of environments that customers select to experience a brand, designing propositions in each of these environments and creating efficient ongoing inclusive capability in the organisation. Please take a look if you are interested.
I hope you enjoy this short segment on inclusive design and innovation. Apologies for the poor quality of my video. Wifi was “having a moment” as this was being recorded.
If you would like to discuss inclusive customer insight, design or innovation further with us, please contact us at contact@openinclusion.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
We hope you are all keeping safe and well. If you are in the USA, wishing you a very Happy Holidays for last week. If you are in the UAE, Happy Holidays for this week.
