Product Design Insights to Serve Those with Disabilities

What you'll learn:

What are the main considerations for designing products serving a community with a particular disability?
Best strategies for creating successful product designs.

Designing products for those with disabilities presents unique challenges especially for those design engineers who aren't facing the disability. In such situations, the need to be able to understand the sensitivity of those being served is crucial. Likewise, those with disabilities often develop their own unique “workarounds” to daily living or possess heightened alternate senses for navigating the world around them.

Here are a few of the unique criteria necessary to design successful products to serve a community with a particular disability (or disabilities):

Leverage enhanced abilities: Those with a particular disability may have developed enhanced capabilities in other areas. For example, those with visual challenges may have developed enhanced auditory or tactile sensory capabilities that can, and possibly should, be leveraged in development of targeted products.
Immersive research to understand a “day in the life”: Unless the team is already immersed in the daily life of the target audience, it's important to understand the challenges faced in daily living and to do research around these issues.
Understand the psychological motivators and sensitivities: In most cases, individuals with disabilities don't want devices created for their benefit to cause them to stand out in public. Understanding these sensitivities and their motivations to “buy” are important.
Analyze impact of combined disabilities: Some of the target customers may have multiple disabilities that could be factors in how a product can be of potential use.

Strategies for designing products:

Conduct user research to fully explore the factors

If the designer doesn't have the disability or hasn't been deeply immersed in the lifestyle of the target customer, they should discount their own experience. In more than any other product category, deep research needs to be conducted with the members of the target market to fully explore the challenges of daily living. There could be adjacent issues uncovered or particular sensitivities could be present that need to be considered in the design.

Research that results in constructing multiple personas of the potential user groups can be quite helpful as guides. These can't be treated as static tools and should be referred to often to ensure that the researched requirements for the various user types are always being considered.

Develop prototypes of potential solutions

Those experienced in developing products for individuals with disabilities realize the extreme importance of prototyping early and often when developing these targeted products. Having individuals with the disability closely involved in the development, prototyping, and testing of solutions is one key to creating a product that ideally helps in the context of daily life.

Go beyond addressing technical human factors

Consider aesthetics for the user. Products in this category must do more than mechanically satisfy human factor requirements. The aesthetics of size, weight, and fashion may need to be considered so that a product not only proves helpful, but is also one that intended users are willing to embrace into their daily life. Solutions may need to be compact enough so that they're not readily viewable by others.

Given the demographics for a solution may span many age groups, there could be differences in a device serving those who are in their 20s and 30s, for example, versus those over 65. In any research with those having a particular disability, designers must have access to a broad cross section of the target population to understand demographic differences that could be crucial to adoption.

Develop products that are mistake-proof and are durable in all environments

Individuals with disabilities taking advantage of supportive devices will likely become dependent on them for daily life if they function well and are deemed helpful. It may be one thing to have a device fail at home and something completely different if the device were to fail in a remote location. Because of this, it must be as mistake-proof as possible. In addition, it should be suitably durable so as not to fail in regular, long-term use.

Cognizance of the environment also is important. In daily life, those with and without disabilities are outside in all kinds of weather. Will the user engage in sports or athletic activities that might bring up unique challenges in the product design? If so, those may need to be considered, too.

Develop a Comprehensive Design Plan

Most designers and engineers don't have the disabilities for which they're designing products. It can be hard to imagine all of the nuanced challenges faced by those dealing with a disability or impairment, as a daily fact of life.

As such, it's incumbent on product developers to build a comprehensive understanding of the difficulties faced by those with disabilities, how those disabilities affect their daily lives, and how they work around their challenges. User studies are critical to success. With smartly designed products that take these factors into consideration as part of the design process, designers and engineers can make a major impact on improving the lives of those with disabilities.