Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2020 Wunderman Thompson PCD
2020 Wunderman Thompson PCD
2020 Wunderman Thompson PCD
Experience
Practice
14 Unlocking Accessibility
with Alexa
18 Rethinking Disability
Targeting
22 About
Wunderman Thompson
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON Inclusive Experience Practice 2
Introduction
Inclusion Sparks Innovation
Inclusive design is the practice of creating things that are Hearing Neurological
usable by the largest number of people, including those living
with disabilities. The end result can be a hands-free controller
for a videogame, a handbag with a Velcro closure for people with
limited upper body mobility, or a space with lowered countertops
for people who use wheelchairs. Inclusive designs work best
when they are not intended for a specific need, but rather lend
concrete benefits to anyone who uses them.
So, how do you design inclusively? Recognize exclusion. Exclusion occurs when we use our
On the surface it would seem a own biases to solve problems. Inclusion requires us consider the
varied and difficult task, with as This expects the widest possible set of capabilities of people who might be using a
many different solutions as there are customer to adapt to product or service.
disabilities. This is not the case. a system not made
for them.
The goal of any inclusive design is
Learn from diversity. In designing for people with
to create one product that works for
disabilities, we need to recognize that a key feature of their daily
all. Instead of helping human users to
lives is adaption. As a result, we do not design for limitations but
conform to inflexible systems, we can
rather for people who can adapt to new situations. That way we can
make products and services that can
unlock the true potential of the design and the people it is intended
adapt to the capabilities of whoever
to serve.
needs to use them.
universally important to all humans. to target the users near the top of the pyramid, who account for
If you create a solution that works well 25 percent of the population. By creating things that work for them,
for someone who cannot hear, you you will also be able to cover all additional users, including those
might be surprised to find out that it who have little to no difficulties.
also increases the productivity and
improves the lives of people who can.
A simple example might be a self- In both inclusive design and
Target for development, you want to
driving car. A self-driving car would
Inclusive
enable a blind person to increase her Design 25% Severe target the users near the top of
the pyramid that have severe
mobility, but it would also likely be dificulties difficulties (~25% of the population).
safer and more convenient for every By making that your target, you
human. will cover all the additional users
with little to no difficulties (~74% of
the population). This is essentially
a ” trickle down” effect for
37% Mild dificulties accessibility. Adaptive technologies
(often called AT) help cover the
severely disabled users at the top
of the pyramid with specialized
products.
21% No dificulties
Now the rubber hits the road: prototyping digital and physical
solutions. As with any product development process, the goal is
to rapidly iterate towards solutions that work. Some of your
key allies in making inclusive products and services are new
technologies like VR and voice, as well as prosthetics, robots,
Steps to Success
cameras, sensors, and more. But you should also always include
your target audience within the design process.
Building an inclusive organization
does not happen overnight.
The following process is merely a STEP 3
sketch of the steps every company will Aligning Your Organization
need to take in order to put inclusivity
front and center. Your organization Inclusivity is not the job of a discrete team working away in the basement
will likely have its own challenges and somewhere, but a task that your entire organization needs to embrace.
advantages when working towards a One way to create alignment is through inclusive design workshops, in which
more inclusive future. experts and people living with disabilities explain how everyone can help
execute on the strategy.
STEP 2
Experience Strategy and Framework
Customers with different needs will require unique journeys
that reduce friction when interacting with your products or services.
You should then create a new framework that encompasses and
optimize journey for everyone who wants to experience your brand.
This framework then serves as your roadmap for the future.
STEP 1
Inclusivity Audit
Unless you’re designing a new product or service from scratch,
you should start with an accessibility audit. This identifies all of the
touch points and more importantly chokepoints for people trying
to access your offerings.
—Kat Holmes, author, Mismatched Wunderman Thompson has a one-of-a-kind Inclusive Experience
Practice. If you’re wondering how to create and implement an
inclusive strategy, from inclusivity audits all the way through
our Inclusivity Research Hub resources, we can help.
to PWD
an inclusive initiative for people with disabilities. It disabilities is surprisingly strong. In the first place, it is a massive
launches with great fanfare, and then, crickets. While market. If the room you’re in is representative of the world, one
well-intended, one-off projects like that tend to make the in five of the people you see has a disability. According to one
People problem worse rather than better, because they set a study, the total disposable income of that community tops $8 trillion
low bar for success and take energy away from the real per year. By comparison, the total disposable income of China is
With innovation the community needs. roughly $5.8 trillion.
Disabilities
Here’s the way one fashion brand got it right. Two years Based on that alone, going inclusive should be a compelling option.
ago, an adaptive clothing line that makes dressing easier But people with disabilities are also not islands, and as such they
for adults with disabilities was launched. The brand don’t function as an economy. Rather, almost all of us are closely
partnered with over 1,500 people with disabilities to ensure linked to someone with a disability. Four out of five Americans have
that all customer touchpoints were inclusive. It addressed a loved one with a disability. Almost everyone knows someone with
not merely the challenges they faced getting dressed, but one, and it’s likely the only minority all of us belong to eventually.
also the end-to-end shopping experience, from searching
for products to unboxing them at home. The brand’s site In addition, inclusivity has a knock-on effect with ordinary
was accessible; and if you needed to call up customer consumers. In 2018, the Porter Novelli/Cone Purpose Premium
service, that was accessible too. study found that companies perceived as purpose-driven—including
those with a commitment to inclusive design—have a distinct
In other words, the brand is not doing this solely for advantage in the marketplace. Americans prefer organizations
attention. This is not a PR gimmick. It sees people with that are responsible (86 percent) and caring (85 percent) and
disabilities as a significant customer segment with unmet were much more likely (88 percent) to buy from a purpose-driven
needs. And the real question is why everyone else isn’t company.
following suit.
Christina Mallon
Global Head of Inclusive Design and Accessibility
1b $8T #1
face a good jobs market, which puts pressure on companies to find
the talent they need to succeed. Providing an inclusive workplace
is a great way to unlock a talent pool that has been historically
underemployed—and innovative. Many important inventions,
Of the world's Disposable Fastest-growing
particularly around communication, have come from people with
population income minority
disabilities, including email, touchscreens, voice assistants, and
identifies of disabled the typewriter.
as being disabled community
Hiring an inclusive workforce, for what it’s worth, also makes
companies more effective. On average, those committed to social
good see 13 percent increase in employee productivity,
70% 1.7X 4%
a 20 percent increase in revenue, and a 50 percent decrease
in staff turnover.
Of buyers prefer More likely to be ... of businesses actively As a result, brands and businesses need to realize that being
inclusive and creating inclusive products are not merely good things
to buy brands that innovative make their offerings
to do, there is a strong business case for doing them as well. They
are inclusive if your company accessible, providing
enable you to reach a large customer segment, access a hugely
is inclusive a large opportunity underutilized talent pool, and find a much larger group of potential
for future improvement employees and consumers. Inclusivity is not just ethical and moral,
it also drives success. It may be disheartening to some that the real
1. https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health reason a company became inclusive was to compete better in the
2. https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2016/11/02/an-overlooked-and-growing-market-people-with-disabilities/#33f8233c2ab0 marketplace, but, all things being equal, money can be a powerful
4. https://www.rod-group.com/content/rod-research/edit-research-2016-annual-repor t-global-economics-disability
5. https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/millennials-will-spend-big-with-inclusion-conscious-retailers-this-holiday/ incentive to do the right thing.
6. http://www.rod-group.com/content/rod-research/edit-research-2016-annual-repor t-global-economics-disability
While this was reassuring in some ways, it still left the A number of brands–such as Zappos, Target, and L’Occitane–
question of life and a career wide open. Being a software have started exploring ways to make their products and services
developer, my initial instinct was to work on ways that I could more accessible. My recent work in the field has focused on voice
teach Nolan to code. It’s a career that requires a sharp mind, commerce with the Echo Show, a device that features a screen
which Nolan has, and not a lot of physical movement. Also, along with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The project is a part
if he didn’t want to become a coder, a computer would still of a pilot program that creates inclusive designs, which are meant
likely be his best way to find a good job. to make getting dressed easier. The problem, of course, is that
we also need to make shopping for this clothing easy, too. Due
However, most of us use keyboards to interact with a to their disabilities, many people cannot interact with traditional
computer, and Nolan can’t type efficiently. So we needed to e-commerce interfaces, and we’ve been exploring ways
find a way he could quickly convert speech to text, something to address that.
that has continuously fueled my interest in the technology–
as well as my own personal research to improve it.
Adam Wolf
Chief Technology Officer, Wunderman Thompson West
Isn’t targeting based on Even if legal, targeting for disability in Targeting based on disability may have some real benefits
medical diagnosis illegal? marketing is inherently too sensitive for the consumer-brand relationship as well. For one, it proves to
the consumer that the company has consumers with disabilities
If you are a medical caregiver, your Too sensitive for whom? On Facebook, I can target you in mind both when designing products and when considering
ability to market using data collected based on whether you are pregnant, but not if you’re motivations for purchase. Rather than displaying a product being
from your patients is likely constrained wheelchair bound or if you have a child whose upper limb used by a typical model that a person with disabilities could,
by laws such as HIPAA. Outside loss makes tying shoes difficult. The unstated difference with some ingenuity, adapt to serve their own needs, a targeted
of that, there are little more than between those scenarios is that the former is historically ad would demonstrate that the consumer with a disability is the
recommendations and guidelines. heralded by society as a blessing while the latter are typical consumer considered at the outset. This inclusivity and
The NAI Code of Conduct distinguishes stigmatized as a curse. Any view of a disability as consideration as a primary audience are central to dissolving
between sensitive and non-sensitive “too awkward to broach” in the context of advertising our society’s historical focus on people with disabilities as an
medical data with respect to ad is a problem purely on the part of the advertiser and is “other,” and might even lead the way for other industries, such as
targeting but are not exhaustive on increasingly at odds with how members of the disabled entertainment, to act similarly.
where specific disabilities fall. community have viewed themselves over recent decades.
From the people we use in the ads we create to the scenarios we
HIV status, as one example, is an What if we come off as tone deaf or put those people in to convey a “universal truth,” the advertising
explicit example of a condition that inappropriate? industry has long rested on assumptions that people with
is expressly sensitive and should disabilities and those who care for them represent corner cases.
not be segmented. Being a partial Sending out a frivolous, inauthentic, creepy, or downright That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that risks obstructing de-
amputee, however, is not, and it is stereotypical targeted ad is a pitfall we face as marketers, stigmatization.
left to the marketer to determine regardless of audience. As for any targeted advertising,
appropriateness based on a number we must ensure that the content provides benefit to the To be on the right side of this, advertisers need to include
of qualifiers, including the prevalence customer, that we present it appropriately both in form a more truthful, representative set of targeted user journeys in our
of the condition in society and whether and context, and that the message is persuasive. marketing both at a global level and at an individual level. If we
an average person would deem the properly and intentionally use the power of targeted marketing on
disability private. It is a thoughtful, Do you know what the best way to guarantee your content behalf of our disabled customers, beyond simple color preference
if potentially ambiguous, set of is appropriate for the disabled community? Hire a diverse or past purchase, we might drive real value for an audience
principles that allows brands to explore and inclusive marketing team, specifically including we’ve ignored for too long.
the option to segment in many cases. marketers with disabilities, and give them the space to make
Closed Captioning: Inclusive design, when Products, services, and brands employing
done well, can benefit all. Universal Design are better, more accessible,
and more appealing not just for PWD but for
Closed captioning was first introduced in the 1970s as a way everyone.
to make television content accessible to people who were
deaf and hard of hearing. The first television show that had OXO Good Grips is the quintessential case study for Universal
closed captioning was The French Chef with Julia Child. Design. The company was born in the late 80s when Sam Farber,
Although it started as a solution for a specific group the retired founder of Copco (an enameled cookware company),
of people, closed captioning has allowed anyone to watch was watching his wife Betsey peeling apples for a tart. Betsey had
TV in crowded or noisy environments, such as a bar or gym. arthritis, so gripping the conventional peeler was laborious and
In classroom settings, closed captioning has shown painful. But her difficulty performing a mundane household task
to increase the rate of learning a new language, as well hatched a priceless epiphany for Farber: kitchen devices should be
as assist students with learning disabilities. as functional as they were comfortable and excellent not just for
cooks with grip issues, but for all cooks.
Farber got to work and his innovative potato peelers debuted in 1990
at $6, compared with about $2 for a typical peeler — but they proved
a massive hit with consumers. And OXO steadily expanded the
principles of Universal Design and minimalist chic throughout every
nook and cranny of the kitchen. And the rest is history.