A few days ago, while discussing voice assistant devices, an acquaintance mentioned the different scenarios a company was testing for. I enquired if this included testing to improve the software for people with speech impairments. I was not surprised when my acquaintance shook their head and said: “That’s too far away - it’s an edge case.”
This is how most companies tend to work. They focus on the 90% percent of the population - designing for what they have defined as “normal”. Even when companies look at extreme users, they are referring to them as “extreme”; which is just a different approach to designing for the "normal." For true empathy-driven design, we must break these barriers of what we consider extreme and what we consider normal. One reason we continue to be blind to the magnitude of designing for extremes is that we talk in percentages.
Which one resonates with a higher impact for you?
7,297,100
“The number of non-institutionalized, male or female, ages 16 through 75+, all races, regardless of ethnicity, with all education levels in the United States reported having a visual disability in 2015.” (https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics)2.3%
“The number of non-institutionalized, male or female, ages 16 through 75+, all races, regardless of ethnicity, with all education levels in the United States reported having a visual disability in 2015.” (https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics)
By thinking about users in exact numbers, as human beings, we stop seeing them as mere statistics to design for. 7,297,100 is not a small number, and that is in the United States alone! What would happen if we took Chieko Asakawa’s word for it and designed for accessibility? The rate of innovation would increase by 2.3% at least, for we would have included brilliant minds to help us advance, rather than treat them as ‘edge-cases’. Impaired abilities are not signifiers of talent and potential. We need to make technology more accessible for everyone to collaborate and create together as a community.