The toolkit sections that consider ‘how?’ are as follows:
Inclusive design process
A successful Inclusive design process must be anchored on an initial discovery phase that focuses on understanding the real needs of the user and the business. This understanding should be translated into the requirements specification, therefore ensuring the needs of the user and the business remain at the heart of the subsequent design activities, including the creation of concepts, and development of solutions.
Knowledge
This section provides additional information to support the implementation of inclusive design. Corporate implications gives guidance regarding strategic issues for the business. Representing users explains the use of market segmentation and personas to effectively communicate a representative variety of users and their differing needs. Task analysis shows how to break down an overall task into a series of steps that users need to do. Evaluation tools provides a set of user centred techniques for assessing designs in the context of population diversity.
User capabilities
Understanding how capability varies within the population is critical to making informed decisions through out the design process. This section first presents a model of user-product interaction, followed by a more detailed description of the most important capabilities for interacting with products, namely vision, hearing, thinking, communication, locomotion, reach and stretch and dexterity. Design guidance is provided and population statistics are presented for each of the capabilities.
Interactive resources
This section contains interactive resources to support inclusive design, including a vision and hearing impairment simulator, which enables you to experience the effects of different impairments on a sample set of audio clips and images, or an image that you have uploaded. An exclusion calculator allows you to assess the demands that a task places on the user’s capabilities, and therefore evaluate the proportion of the UK population who would be unable to complete achieve this task. A 10 minute video presents the business case for inclusive design, and a set of pro formas are provided that can assist an inclusive design process. Bookings are now available for a half-day inclusive product design training course.