Who Did We Forget to Design For?

On accessibility, assumptions and designing for people who aren't you.

I have very strong feelings about self-checkouts.

I've already complained about supermarkets elsewhere, so I won't drag everyone through that again, but there is something interesting about comparing a Coles self-checkout with a Uniqlo one. They are essentially trying to solve the same problem: you have some things, you would like to buy the things, please exchange money for them and leave.

At one, I scan every item individually, place it in precisely the right location, wait for the machine to decide whether I've done something suspicious, move things around, call someone over and generally feel like I've accidentally picked up a casual shift while doing my groceries.

At Uniqlo, I put everything in a little box. And it just knows. I realise that's a very technical explanation of the RFID system, but from the customer's perspective that's essentially what happens. My clothes appear on the screen, I pay, pack them and leave. It's quiet, quick and strangely satisfying. The first time I used one I genuinely had a little oooooh moment.

Good design does that to me. It scratches a very specific itch in my brain because you can feel when somebody has properly thought something through. You can also feel when they haven't.

I think we talk about designing for the user so often that it's very easy for the phrase to become wallpaper. Of course we're designing for the user. Who else would we be designing for?

Except sometimes, when you look closely at an experience, you can almost see the imaginary person it was designed around. They have good eyesight. They speak the language fluently. They're comfortable with technology. They can stand for as long as required, reach everything, hear everything and manoeuvre through the space without difficulty. They aren't pushing a pram, carrying a child or trying to manage three things at once. They've read the instructions, they understand the terminology and, conveniently, they behave exactly the way the designer expected them to. Basically, they're having a fantastic day. Real people are considerably less cooperative.

I've certainly been guilty of designing from my own experience. I've made type too small before because, well, it looked nicer. I could read it perfectly. Problem solved! Except I can read it is a fairly terrible accessibility standard. I've made colour decisions in the past that I would think about differently now too, particularly around colour blindness and contrast. I'm still learning, and I'm sure in another ten years I'll look back at decisions I'm making today and find something else I should have considered.

That doesn't make me want to avoid the problem. It makes me want to get better at noticing it.

Dieter Rams once said, “You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.”

Annoyingly, Dieter has rather nailed it.

The interesting part for me is that considering more people doesn't make design less creative. I actually find the opposite happens. Give me some rules.

Tell me the type has to be readable. Tell me colour can't be the only thing communicating important information. Tell me somebody needs to understand the hierarchy quickly. Tell me the thing has to work across different environments, formats and people. Suddenly the leash is shorter and I have to be smarter about what I do with it.

I love designing like that. There can be a strange assumption that accessibility, functionality and creativity are competing interests, as though every concession to usability takes another tiny bite out of the beautiful design you originally wanted to make. I don't buy that. Some of the most satisfying design I've ever seen exists precisely because somebody had a complicated problem, a ridiculous number of constraints and still found an elegant answer.

Rams included “good design makes a product understandable” among his ten principles, arguing that at its best a product should be self-explanatory. He also considered aesthetic quality integral to usefulness, which is probably why I like his work so much: function and beauty aren't being asked to fight to the death in a car park. Public design can be particularly brilliant at this.

I love the City of Melbourne identity because it feels like a system rather than a logo slapped onto things. I love the London Underground for the same reason: an enormous, complicated network has to communicate with millions of people who are moving, distracted, unfamiliar with the city or simply trying to work out which bloody platform they need.

And then there is Dumb Ways to Die, which might be one of my favourite examples of what happens when public communication is allowed to have a personality. Metro Trains needed to communicate rail safety, which could very easily have become a stern poster everyone walked past without reading. Instead, the 2012 campaign gave us colourful little characters cheerfully dying in increasingly ridiculous ways and a song that lodged itself permanently in an entire generation's brain.

It was useful and weird and memorable. That's the itch.

Public design is also where I think our responsibility gets much harder to shrug off. A fashion brand can decide exactly who it wants to sell to, although I have plenty of thoughts about brands deciding their clothes apparently stop existing above a particular size,but you don't get to choose whether you need a government service, a train station, a hospital or a council website.

“They aren't our target market” starts sounding fairly ridiculous when they are also a member of the public.

This is where I think design has to be particularly careful about mistaking our own experience for everybody else's. I'm able-bodied. There are things I move through without thinking that somebody using a wheelchair, someone with low vision, an elderly person or a parent trying to manoeuvre a pram might experience completely differently.

There's a ramp onto the platform at my local train station that I think about all the time. On one side, you walk down a steep slope that ends almost directly at a brick wall before turning towards the platform. Even walking it, I notice the angle. Trying to control a wheelchair down there independently, or even navigating it with a pram, luggage or your hands full, looks genuinely difficult. Then to get up onto the platform, there's another long, steep ramp in the other direction.

And every time I use it I wonder: who tested this?

Technically, there's a ramp. Somebody can point to it on a plan and say the station has step-free access. But providing a ramp and designing an experience somebody can actually use comfortably and independently aren't necessarily the same thing. I don't use a wheelchair, so I'm not going to pretend I can tell you exactly what that experience is like. What I can do is notice that something seems difficult from where I'm standing and ask whether the people who actually use it were part of the conversation.

That's the bit I think matters. I can't magically know every one of those experiences because I am a designer. So I have to ask. Research it. Talk to people. Talk to the people who deal with the service every day. Look at complaints. Watch where people get stuck. Test the existing thing myself and notice where I get stuck, while remembering that my experience is one data point rather than the universal human condition. Get my hands on as much useful information as possible, make the best informed decision I can, put it in front of actual humans, and then; crucially, be willing to change it when they inevitably do something I didn't expect.

Because people will. I think websites are particularly good at exposing this. There are government websites where finding one very ordinary piece of information can send you through links, sub-pages, PDFs, more links, an FAQ that answers everything except your actual question and, eventually, a page that appears to have been last touched during the Rudd administration.

You shouldn't have to answer a troll's riddles under a bridge to buy a white T-shirt or find out when your train is coming. If somebody can't work out how to use something I've designed, my first instinct isn't that they're stupid. I want to know why the design didn't tell them what to do.

That's probably partly professional pride.

There is a very noble answer I could give here about my deep commitment to designing a more equitable world, but there is also a slightly more embarrassing truth: the thought of somebody looking at my work and saying did the designer seriously not think about this? makes me want to crawl under my desk.

I don't want to be a bad designer. I want to be the kind of designer whose work gives somebody else that tiny oooooh feeling. The button was where they expected it to be. The information they needed was easy to find. The space was comfortable to move through. The instructions made sense. They didn't have to think particularly hard about any of it because somebody had already done a lot of thinking for them.

That ease can look simple when it's finished. Usually it isn't.

Jony Ive once described simplicity as something that requires going deeply into complexity, rather than simply stripping things away until they look minimal. I think that's what I respond to in really good design: you can feel the thinking without having to see all of it.

My art is different. Art gets to be subjective. I can make something strange, uncomfortable, obscure or challenging and you are completely entitled to hate it. That's part of the fun. I can explore the difficult ideas there, make something that asks more questions than it answers and leave somebody standing in front of it wondering what the hell I was on about.

Design has a job. Sometimes function does have to win over form. The text needs to get bigger. The clever layout needs to calm down. The beautiful colour combination might need more contrast. My personal taste may have to move out of the way because somebody actually needs to use the thing I've made.

But I think the really bloody good designers manage to get beyond choosing between the two. The form becomes part of the function. The thing is beautiful because it works so well, and it works so well because somebody took the time to consider the human being at the other end of it.

I think that's also why I'm wary of saying designing for everyone is impossible. Of course there will always be somebody whose experience I haven't lived, a circumstance I didn't anticipate or something I simply don't know yet. I'm still learning. I hope I'm still learning when I'm seventy. But I don't think we can't possibly think of everyone is a particularly good reason to stop trying.

Maybe the responsibility isn't to somehow know everything about everybody before you put pencil to paper. It's to stay curious enough to ask who you've missed, do the research, listen when somebody tells you something doesn't work for them and be prepared to change the design when they're right. Sometimes that will mean making the type bigger. Sometimes it'll mean rethinking an entire process. Sometimes it'll be something embarrassingly obvious that makes you wonder how nobody noticed it sooner.

There are so many things we move through every day without really noticing the design at all. We tap on, follow a sign, fill out a form, buy a T-shirt, return a parcel, find the right platform or work out where the hell we're supposed to stand. When those things work beautifully, there's an ease to them. You don't necessarily stop and congratulate the designer. You just get where you needed to go.

I think I'd be pretty happy with that.

I want to make work that feels considered. Clear without being boring, beautiful without making somebody work unnecessarily hard to understand it, and simple because somebody has already dealt with the complexity behind it.

Maybe that's what I'm actually chasing when I get that little oooooh feeling from a piece of design. It's rarely because somebody has done something flashy. It's because they've solved something so well that the answer suddenly feels obvious.

And when I look at something I've designed, I want to feel like I've done the same. That I've thought about who is going to use it, where they might struggle, what I've assumed and who I might have forgotten. I probably won't get all of that right every single time. I'm still learning, and I hope I always am.

I just never want “well, it worked for me” to be good enough.