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
-
•
Disability affects one in five people, not a rare subset.
-
•
The medical model of disability stigmatizes individuals by labeling them as broken.
-
•
Designing for an average user is flawed because the average person does not exist.
-
•
Disability is a spectrum that includes permanent, temporary, and situational conditions.
-
•
Assistive technologies like captions have evolved to benefit broad audiences beyond initial users.
-
•
The aging population is increasing the demand for accessible products as disability becomes more common with age.
-
•
Temporary disabilities impact users who still need to engage with products and services effectively.
-
•
Involving people with disabilities as coworkers and co-designers improves identification and elimination of accessibility barriers.
-
•
QA testing with screen readers is valuable, but user research should be conducted by actual assistive technology users.
-
•
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The kind of leadership I was craving was creative leadership, not people management."
Edward CuppsThe Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
June 11, 2021
"The user is the weakest link is an unhelpful and harmful perspective."
Heidi TrostTo Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
January 23, 2025
"Most services were being used by people not directly impacted by the storm but by construction workers and volunteers."
Emily Danielson“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
June 9, 2022
"Imagine a world where the government prototypes and iterates the whole time."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
"We had passed through this awkward moment. I felt I had rudely probed into this open wound."
Susan Simon-DanielsWar Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
March 30, 2020
"The government UK Design System only works if the community contributes to it."
Kara KaneCommunities of Practice for Civic Design
April 7, 2022
"More context is not going to make a better product; everything you put in the context competes for attention."
Paz PerezContext Architecture for AI systems
September 11, 2026
"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it's hard not to treat that individual as a problem."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"The self-service model works best for projects with concrete and well-defined design objectives at the surface layers."
Nora Tejeda Giovanna AlonsoScaling Design Capabilities at BBVA Through a Self-service Design Model
June 10, 2021
