Equitable Design means ensuring that everyone has access to a stellar, inclusive experience no matter who they are.
Product Inclusion is about bringing the human and the business case together to create products and services that truly serve your customers. Do you create a physical, virtual, B2B, or B2C product or service? Then you should be thinking about who your users could and should be.
Product inclusion is about thinking holistically about the dimensions that make people who they are in the moments that matter. Your customers are multifaceted, and your products must be built with that in mind.
Building an equitable product or service doesn’t just happen accidentally, it happens with intention and yields exceptional business results.
Here are the equitable design principles:
There is no they, there is only we: You cannot build anything for a community without getting their perspective at critical points in the design process and allowing their feedback to shape the trajectory of your plans.
Holistic is magestic: when we think in silos, we build in silos. People have multiple “meltable dimensions” that work together to make them beautifully unique. Building for one dimension without considering others oversimplifies.
Diversity is the core of innovation. For everyone. When you build for an underrepresented group, the solutions benefit all of your consumers.
Profit and People are not mutually exclusive. By ensuring that you think about historically underrepresented users and building more equitably, you can grow your consumer base and build your business. Because at the end of the day, everyone just wants to feel seen.
For more, check out equity.army, a community I lead, that has created principles for equitable design across industries.