Designing beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
Summary
Designing with rigid assumptions often means creating for a narrow set of “typical” users—people who look and think like us. But this mindset risks excluding real, diverse needs, especially those of people with disabilities, one of the fastest-growing population segments. In this talk, you’ll explore the hidden costs of designing systems for templated personas and learn why flexible, inclusive approaches are essential.
Key Insights
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Disability affects one in five people, not a rare subset.
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The medical model of disability stigmatizes individuals by labeling them as broken.
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Designing for an average user is flawed because the average person does not exist.
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Disability is a spectrum that includes permanent, temporary, and situational conditions.
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Assistive technologies like captions have evolved to benefit broad audiences beyond initial users.
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The aging population is increasing the demand for accessible products as disability becomes more common with age.
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Temporary disabilities impact users who still need to engage with products and services effectively.
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Involving people with disabilities as coworkers and co-designers improves identification and elimination of accessibility barriers.
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QA testing with screen readers is valuable, but user research should be conducted by actual assistive technology users.
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Designing for accessibility benefits all users and future-proofs products against diverse user needs.
Notable Quotes
"The average user doesn’t exist."
"People with disabilities are not one in a thousand, or one in a hundred, they are one in five."
"Disability is not a binary, it’s a spectrum."
"We tend to design for people just like us, which is limiting."
"Temporary disability is real and products should support people when they experience it."
"Captions were once an assistive technology for a tiny subset but are now widely used."
"Failing to design for disabilities means failing to design for our future selves."
"Accessibility isn’t just for developers or designers—everyone has a role to play."
"We cannot remove barriers we aren’t aware of."
"Testing with a screen reader is fine for QA, but user research must be with actual screen reader users."
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