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You may have missed it, as it was about 3 seconds long, but the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup featured a clip of Juliano Pinto, who happens to have a mobility disability, making the first kick of the World Cup with the aid of a robotic exoskeleton. A considerable achievement for the development team behind it but also an opportunity to think about the experience of disability and how technology and design plays a role that may surprise you.
Because, simply put, usability is about how easily people achieve their goals with respect to a product, but this is often with a narrowly defined group of users in mind. At the same time over 15% of the population identify themselves as having a disability. For those people usability of products is very much a matter of human rights. How?— because usability is one determinant of “accessibility”, which is descriptive of the size of the population of users who have the physical and cognitive ability to use a product.
Okay so now we have to get into word definitions (sorry):
A certain proportion of the population will have a medical or physical or cognitive “condition”. This may be a disease or an injury or a congenital condition—something that might be diagnosed in a medical setting. People with a given “condition” may have an “impairment”, which is something their body or mind does differently to the majority of the “unimpaired” population. The impairment may lead to situations where an individual cannot do something—for example access a building, or use a product—which is called a “disability”.
So Juliano Pinto happens of have a damaged spinal cord (the physical condition), which has led to him having little or no control over his legs (the impairment), which means that he has trouble walking, running, and kicking a football (the disability).
Meanwhile (hypothetical) “Sarah” has early Alzheimer’s disease (a cognitive condition) which for her means she has problems with memory and interpreting excessive stimulus (impairment) which means, among other things, that she has trouble using her entertainment system (disability). Currently there are very few radios, MP3 players, or entertainment systems on the market that don’t have far too many buttons, a distracting display, and features she doesn’t need let alone understand.
So in these examples the disability is not related to Juliano’s body or Sarah’s mind, it’s primarily to do with their environment and the products they have at their disposal. It’s a design and engineering problem. The positive side of this word game is that it’s possible to have impairment but not have disability, but in practice that takes a lot of customisation and control of one’s own environment and few people really achieve that in all situations.
Since becoming aware of this I’ve realised just how many consumer products really don’t go very far towards accommodating people with impairments, and how much of disability is simply lack of well-designed products.
So how can one address this in consumer product development, personal care product development, fitness technology development and the other things we do at Cambridge Consultants? One response to this is “universal design” which is an attempt to design products that are usable by as much of the population as possible. Now I probably don’t need to say that this is difficult to say the least, and arguably no matter how carefully one designs anything, there will always be somebody who struggles with it. It’s an ideal. Somewhat more achievable is an empathetic design approach that is pursued with awareness of the things that commonly represent barriers to use. These barriers show up in products of all types and in all sectors of the market from high-end products that have had a lot of design investment to low-end products, which may not.
So I’d like to write in upcoming blogs about making products that work for a larger proportion of people, and how simple changes in approach can improve everybody’s experience of a product; ways to test whether a product is usable, and ways of experiencing what users of all types experience.
People with disabilities are one of the largest minorities in the population and a minority that many of us will one day join. This makes it a market sector that’s definitely worth consideration.