Creating Digital Experiences Everyone Can Use
Picture this scenario: Someone who's blind tries to apply for a job online. The form looks clean, professional, modern, even. But when they navigate it with a screen reader, the submit button is just... silent.
No description. No way to know what it does.
Twenty minutes spent filling out fields, uploading a resume, and crafting thoughtful answers. And then? Nothing. A dead end.
This isn't hypothetical. It happens thousands of times every day.
We spend countless hours obsessing over colour palettes and micro-interactions, but we're building digital experiences that lock people out. Not just inconvenience them. Completely exclude them. And honestly? Most teams don't even realise they're doing it.
Every line of code, every design decision, every late-night sprint where everyone's "just trying to ship" is a choice about who gets to participate in our digital world. The scary part? How often is that choice made without any conscious thought?
Look, accessibility has this reputation as the thing you bolt on at the end. The compliance checklist. The WCAG audit that makes everyone groan in planning meetings.
Teams frantically adding alt text to images the night before launch, hoping they don't get flagged by some automated scanner.
But what if that's missing the whole point?
Real accessibility isn't about checking boxes. It's about creating experiences where people feel like they belong. There's a massive difference between those two things.
Think about it this way: You can build a wheelchair ramp (accessibility) or you can design a space where the main entrance works beautifully for everyone (belonging). The ramp says, "We added something for you."
The seamless design says, "We built this with you in mind."
The belonging approach touches everything. The words you choose: do they welcome or alienate? The images you select: do they reflect real human diversity or some narrow Instagram fantasy? The way you structure navigation: does it assume everyone thinks the same way, or does it bend to meet people where they are?
Consider playgrounds for a moment. The best ones aren't the ones with separate "accessible" equipment tucked off to the side. They're the ones where kids of all abilities naturally play together because the design itself is inherently inclusive.
Nobody feels othered.
That's what digital design should aspire to. Not separate experiences for different people, but experiences that work beautifully for the full spectrum of human diversity.
There's this fictional person who haunts every design meeting. You know the one: twenty-something, tech-savvy, perfect vision, latest iPhone, blazing internet connection. Lives somewhere trendy, speaks perfect English, has all day to figure out your interface.
This person does not exist.
Well, they may exist, but they're not the only user. Or even the typical user, if we're being honest. Yet somehow this phantom persona drives most design decisions. Teams optimise for this imaginary ideal while accidentally shutting out millions of real people.
Take a typical example: signup flows that require users to upload profile photos. Seems harmless, right?
Wrong.
It completely blocks people with limited data plans. Creates barriers for those concerned about privacy. Excludes anyone uncomfortable with image-based identification: three assumptions, three groups excluded, all for a feature that isn't even necessary.
The ripple effects of this "default user" thinking spread everywhere. Job sites that break with screen readers don't just frustrate. They eliminate qualified candidates. Healthcare portals that force binary gender choices don't just inconvenience. They make people feel invisible. E-commerce sites that assume high-speed connections don't just run slowly. They become completely unusable for millions of people.
But here's what's wild: when you start designing for the people who typically get left out, you almost always create better experiences for everyone. Voice commands started as assistive technology and now run smart homes. Curb cuts were built for wheelchairs and transformed how cities are navigated with strollers, suitcases, and bikes.
The "edge cases" often lead to breakthrough innovations.
Maybe it's time to stop treating them like afterthoughts.
So how do you actually build this stuff? It's not like there's a "belonging" button to add to design systems (though honestly, that would make things easier).
It starts with getting out of internal assumptions. Getting out there. Not just creating personas based on team biases, but talking to people who experience the world differently. Paying them for their time and expertise and listening to their stories without immediately jumping to solutions.
Consider a recent project where a team built what they thought was an incredibly intuitive navigation system. Clean, minimal, obvious (to them). Then they tested it with users who had cognitive differences.
It completely fell apart.
What seemed "simple" was overwhelming and confusing when you process information differently.
That experience highlights something crucial: empathy isn't intuitive. You can't just imagine what someone else's experience might be like. You have to witness it. Learn from it.
Be surprised by it.
The language piece matters more than most people realise. So many products use unnecessarily complex words, insider jargon, or cultural references that assume everyone grew up with the same touchstones. Error messages that blame users instead of guiding them. Instructions that sound like they were written by lawyers for robots.
Clear communication isn't just considerate. It's more effective. Period.
When you explain things clearly, everyone understands better. When you write error messages that help instead of just stating what went wrong, support tickets go down. When you avoid idioms and cultural assumptions, your product works for global audiences.
Visual representation matters too, though it's easy to get wrong. Stock photos of perfectly diverse groups sitting around conference tables looking artificially happy?
That's not representation. That's performance.
Real inclusion means showing actual human diversity in natural contexts. Different ages, abilities, body types, and skin tones, all integrated naturally into your product's visual story.
Some brands have figured this out. The results speak for themselves.
Microsoft completely rewrote their design playbook around inclusion. The Xbox Adaptive Controller didn't come from a focus group or market research. It came from actually partnering with disabled gamers to understand their experiences.
The result wasn't just a specialised product for a "niche" market. It was a breakthrough that inspired innovations across their entire gaming ecosystem and demonstrated that inclusive design drives innovation, not just social good.
Airbnb's "belonging anywhere" isn't just a tagline. It's woven into their platform's DNA. They redesigned their entire booking flow to combat discrimination, added accessibility filters, and developed AI to detect bias.
Not because lawyers told them to. Because exclusion was fundamentally incompatible with their mission.
Google's approach is fascinating because they're building inclusion at the platform level. Live Caption on Android generates real-time captions for any audio. This helps deaf users, sure, but also anyone in a noisy environment, anyone learning a new language, and anyone who prefers reading to listening.
When accessibility becomes a platform feature, millions of apps inherit inclusive capabilities instantly.
These companies discovered something important: belonging isn't a cost centre.
It's a competitive advantage.
Inclusive experiences create deeper loyalty, unlock new markets, and generate positive word-of-mouth that traditional marketing can't buy.
Let's talk numbers for a second. The business case here is compelling.
The disability market represents over a billion people globally. That's not a niche. That's a massive audience. Older adults, who often get excluded by ageist design assumptions, control enormous spending power in most developed economies. Younger generations increasingly vote with their wallets based on whether brands align with their values around inclusion and diversity.
But beyond market segments, inclusive design simply makes products better. Captions help everyone in noisy coffee shops. Simple language reduces confusion and support tickets. Flexible interfaces accommodate different preferences and contexts.
Accessibility features often become beloved by all users, not just those who need them.
This pattern plays out repeatedly. Teams that embed belonging into their design process create products that work for more people, in more situations, generating broader market opportunities and deeper customer relationships.
The companies that ignore this? They're leaving money on the table while alienating potential customers.
There's something else, though. Something more challenging to quantify but equally important. When we design for belonging, we're not just building products.
We're shaping culture.
Every interface becomes a public space. Every user flow becomes a statement about who deserves access to opportunity.
Here's what's keeping design leaders up at night: we're at this inflexion point where digital experiences are becoming central to everything. How people work, learn, connect, access services, and participate in society. The design decisions being made today will shape how inclusive or exclusive our world becomes tomorrow.
We can keep building for imaginary default users, creating beautiful products that accidentally exclude huge portions of humanity.
Or we can choose a different path.
One that recognises diversity as strength and inclusion as innovation.
This isn't about being politically correct or checking diversity boxes. It's about recognising that good design serves human needs, and humans are magnificently diverse. When we embrace that complexity instead of fighting it, we create better solutions for everyone.
The tools exist. The knowledge is available. What we need now is the will to expand our definition of excellent design beyond aesthetic beauty and functional efficiency to include something more fundamental: the recognition that everyone deserves to belong in the digital world we're creating.
Because when we design for belonging, we're not just building better products.
We're building a more inclusive world, one pixel at a time.
And honestly? That feels like work worth doing.
The question isn't whether inclusive design matters. The question is whether we'll have the courage to prioritise it before we accidentally build a digital world that works for some people really well, and fails everyone else entirely.
