Designing for your future self

For at least 20 years, designers and engineers have been encouraged to create solutions to only attend to the 80% users that are the most abled, as businesses focus on the highest return on investment.

But as we age, we pick up disabilities and those solutions become less suited for us.

Traditional software design and engineering practices are now looking for new ways to address challenges, such as accessibility, aging, gender inequality, sexual preference, racial divides, cultural diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

As the emerging markets introduce the next billion users (NBU) into the World Wide Web, the urgency for creating inclusive solutions FOR ALL becomes even more important.

Whether the remaining 20% of users are people with disabilities or people living under socio-economic challenges, this workshop will illustrate that accessibility drives inclusivity. Still, we need to go beyond disability guidelines to master better Inclusive Design practices, such as cultural awareness in internationalization, gender preferences, and even technological barriers.

This workshop will review that adopting essential inclusive design practices leads to a better outcome, higher user adoption, fewer customer support escalations, better sales conversion, and more productive and motivated teams from inception to the deployment.

Including:

• How to write inclusive user stories?
• How to design - and write tests - for keyboard interactions?
• How to communicate Accessibility requirements properly?
• How to test for inclusivity early in the design process?
• How to design for offline, slow, and intermittent connectivity?

Regardless of the digital medium, each team member has an equal share of responsibility for defining and executing better inclusive practices in the product life-cycle.