Inclusive Design

Inclusive design seeks to identify who might be excluded by a product or service and improve the experience through deliberate research and testing. People may face permanent barriers, temporary constraints or situational difficulties. Microsoft's methodology emphasizes recognizing exclusion, learning from diversity and designing solutions that can help more than one group.

For a service website, inclusive design can influence labels, keyboard access, navigation, language, form errors and methods of contacting the business. It is related to, but broader than, meeting a particular accessibility checklist. Accessibility requirements remain important and independently testable; describing a design as inclusive is not a certification of compliance.

Teams should include people with different abilities and needs in research, test representative journeys rather than only the homepage, and revisit decisions when the product changes. An accessible form may still exclude someone if it assumes that every customer can upload a document or take a telephone call during working hours.