Methodology
Microsoft's Inclusive Design Principles
Although inclusive design also focuses on each individual's wellbeing, it no longer deliberately seeks to meet the needs of all groups in one design. The Microsoft design department has accumulated many inclusive design research and practice cases over the years and summarised them into three points of inclusive design principles.
1) Identify exclusion-When we use our prejudices to solve problems; there will be an exclusion. Identifying these exclusions can be used as an opportunity to create new ideas and inclusive designs.
2) Learn from diversity-Humans are real experts in adapting to diversity. The inclusive design puts people at the centre from the beginning of the process, and those fresh and diverse perspectives are the key to genuine insight.
3) Solve one, extend the rest-everyone has abilities and suffers from restrictions imposed on them. Designing for people with permanent disabilities benefits people in general. Constrain the beauty of adults.
Microsoft's design principles do not require designers to pay attention to what they do in the design scheme but rather indicate how to do the inclusive designs. They believe that inclusive design provides products and experiences for more people with a wide range of capabilities and reflects the actual situation of people. Everyone is growing, changing and adapting to the world around them every day, and they hope that design can reflect this diversity (Shum et al. 2016).
The research perspective of inclusive design has also begun to transition from responding to the capabilities and needs of some specific vulnerable groups to intervening and changing the interaction between people and the social environment, thereby alleviating and eliminating exclusion. Just as the design for the hearing impaired is suitable for ordinary people in noisy environments, the design for the visually impaired is also conducive to ordinary people in excessively bright or dark environments or when driving.
Respecting diversity means paying attention to the different abilities and needs of different people and means recognising and appreciating their methods and skills adapted to different environments. Microsoft believes that relying solely on simulating different skills such as eye masks and earplugs is misleading. Researchers are more focused on learning how people adapt to the world around them, which means spending more time understanding their experiences from empathy.
Reflective Practices
Based on Microsoft’s research report (Stevenson & McQuivey 2003) on the difficulties and impairments of working age (16-64) American adults concerning vision, hearing, cognition, language and dexterity, they drew the “Segmented pyramid”, which is shown in Figure 2 below (Hosking, Waller & Clarkson 2010). This pyramid shows the diversity of individual capabilities in the group: Inclusive Design does not focus on the disabled and avoids using Assistive Technology, but through a reasonable reduction in ability requirements, to enhance a broad customer base in different situations product experience (Waller et al. 2015).
Assistive Technology is committed to improving the ability of the disabled to adapt to the external environment. Inclusive Design is more inclined to create a friendlier environment, products and services for as many people as possible, reducing the ability requirements of the person. When we pay attention from the top of the pyramid to a broader group of people with mild and minimal difficulties, between the technical possibilities that have excellent development prospects and the challenges and obstacles everywhere, Inclusive Design has a wide enough field of application and development.
Figure 2: Different design responses for different levels of capability loss
Practical Inclusive Design Approach
To produce usable and accessible products or services, designers must adopt safe user-centred design practices. It is essential to iteratively modify and improve the interface while combining design steps and usability assessment. Nielsen illustrates the use of such criteria in a method called heuristic evaluation (Nielsen 1994).
Designers understand the essential nature of interactions and develop usable product or service interfaces for a broader range of valuable functions. The symbolic interaction with the interface involves the user perceiving the output of the product, determining the operation process and implementing the response (Card, Moran & Newell 1983). These steps can be identified as perception, cognition, and motor actions directly related to the user. Nielsen proposed three heuristics to address these functions (Keates et al. 2000) explicitly:
1) Visibility of system status - the user must be given sufficient feedback to gain a clear understanding of the current state of the complete system.
2) Match between system and real-world - the system must accurately follow the user's intentions.
3) User control and freedom - the user must be given suitably intuitive and versatile controls for precise and concise communication of intent.
Each of these heuristic methods effectively solves the user's perception, cognition and motor function. Three designated steps have been developed (Keates, Simon, Clarkson & Robinson 1999). Each level of the final design method, as shown in Figure 3, is accompanied by the user's perception or understanding throughout the process and before entering the next level, thereby providing a framework with the definition of the system availability goals (Clarkson, P, Keates & Dowland 1999).
Both the 5 level approach and the “segmented pyramid” have the same design ideas regarding the interaction between perception and cognitive movement. Therefore, the author combines the two and design the product through these two methodologies.
Figure 3: The 5 level design approach