Designing for the 100 percent
Often, designers create products and spaces that suit the majority of users. But how can we create great design for everyone?
A few years ago I arranged to meet a work colleague at my office. Through my window I watched him cross the small park opposite our building. He walked slowly but purposefully, circumventing a pair of bollards blocking the footpath, skirting a light pole and a drinking fountain. My friend is a disability consultant. He is also legally blind.
During our discussion, he described the experience of navigating a world he can’t see. “the problem with a lot of design,” he said, “is that it caters for the 80 percent of people who have no physical limitations. But what about the 20 percent who have disabilities, no matter how minor? Blow your knee running and you’ll find out how hard it is to get down a badly designed staircase. Once your eyesight starts to go at forty, you’ll discover you can’t read that poorly lit sign anymore. Good designers should be thinking about these things.”
I was still thinking about our conversation an hour later as I stepped into a recently refurbished lift in a premium city tower. The lift had beautiful finishes and moody lighting with the required braille. But as I rode that lift to the twelfth floor, I realized the design process employed here was flawed. The button layout was confusing. The lighting was so dim my forty-six-year-old eyes couldn’t adjust to read the interior. There was a lack of contrast between the gleaming finishes. The braille might have complied with regulations but little thought had gone into how people without disabilities might navigate the controls. This gorgeous metallic box had failed to deliver a good user experience.
Steve Jobs once said, “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed something and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
As I get older, I’m becoming far more adept at noticing bad design. Often it’s lack of thought that leads to a pretty product offering a poor experience. How often do you stumble around a web page searching for the one button you need? So many apps are difficult to read and nearly impossible to navigate. Designers need to remember a good looking product will fail if it’s annoying to use.
My friend was right. Why are we designing for the 80 percent and making accommodations for the 20 percent? Why aren’t we endeavouring to design for the 100 percent?
Working on the new Fiona Stanley Hospital in Western Australia some years ago, my team was asked to design waiting areas that would accommodate visitors from specific ethnic backgrounds. Families might congregate in large groups or want to separate from the mainstream for religious or cultural reasons. We answered the brief by incorporating organic seating that could be configured in multiple ways to suit the various groups and the diverse cultural and psychological requirements.
The design solution was instigated as a special requirement for a small, distinct user group but actually enriched all users. Shouldn’t we be applying this approach of inclusiveness to our design process more often?
Designers have learnt some hard lessons from history. The aeronautics giant Boeing is a case in point. Boeing’s B-17 plane, better known as the Flying Fortress, helped the Allies win World War II but a design flaw cost many crew their lives. The plane was rushed into production after only a year on the drawing board. While the B-17 was a force majeure in the air, the planes crashed unexpectedly on landing. There was no evidence of mechanical malfunction and surviving pilots reported no engine troubles. Boeing blamed pilot error resulting from rushed training.
It wasn’t until after the war that investigators realized the controls that lowered the landing gear and the wing flaps looked identical. The pilot could reach for the landing gear lever and grasp the one for the wing flaps instead, driving the plane into the ground. The term “designer error” was born.
The B-17’s controls were redesigned with users in mind. Each button and lever was given a different shape to prevent a pilot from mistaking one for another.
Designer error has taught us that machines should be designed to accommodate human behaviour. We should not have to adjust human behaviour to fit our machines.
Good design should nurture its user. Great design should create solutions that work for everyone. Our job as designers is to grow a culture of inclusiveness. Too often we create products and build spaces that suit the majority of users. Those in the minority are treated as a special case, or worse, a design hindrance, requiring multiple adjustments and modifications. Why can’t we look to other cultures, embrace our differences and design solutions that enrich us all?
Let us start designing for the 100 percent and reap the rewards. a