Designing more inclusive websites

About 10 years ago Professor John Clarkson from the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge and Professor Roger Coleman from the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art realised the importance of designing more accessible, usable and desirable products and the value such products bring to the market, and as a result they collaboratively set up 2 Inclusive Design research groups in the UK: one in Cambridge and one in London. Since then, a lot of other UK-based academic and business institutions, including Kent House, recognised the benefit of inclusively-designed products and started they own inclusive design ventures. All these institutions operate from the belief that inclusively-designed products not only minimise the exclusion of less capable users, but they are also easier for everyone else to use.

Inclusive Design Background

Inclusive design is a general approach to designing in which designers ensure that their products and services address the needs of the widest possible audience, irrespective of age or ability. The concept of inclusive design is similar to Universal Design, which is popular in the United States and Japan. However, it is widely accepted in the inclusive design discourse that designing ‘one product for all’ is implausible because people of different ages, capabilities and social and cultural backgrounds prefer different products.

Kent House and Inclusive Design Websites

Kent House believes in the power of inclusive products and services and we have always been stressing the importance of accessible and easy-to-use websites to our clients. In 2006, we conducted an extensive usability study on 303 Primary Care Trust (PCT) websites in the UK and found them to be of poor quality in terms of design, content and effectiveness of communication. As a solution to the problem with PCT websites, we developed the 3C Compliance Model. The results of the study were published in the British Journal of Healthcare Computing & Information Management in February 2007.

Kent House and the University of Cambridge

In the pursuit of even more understanding on inclusive design and the need to further develop guidance on how to design more  accessible and usable products and services, I joined the Inclusive Design research group at the University of Cambridge as a PhD student in October 2007. My work focuses on modelling interaction between product features and human capabilities. I am particularly interested in finding out whether product designers really consider heterogeneous users during their designs, and if so, whether they use any models or frameworks to ensure that their products meet the needs and wants of  users with varied capability. I am also interested in finding out more about the goals and actions of heterogenous users when they interact with daily living products.

Since I have been working with the Inclusive Design group, I have introduced the vision impairment simulator to the Kent House team in order to help our graphic designers understand how declined vision affects the ability to interact with our websites and as way of testing if our websites can be seen by people with reduced capability.