How to make things work better for every customer 🙌✨
How to make things work better for every customer 🙌✨
Everyone wins when your culture embeds inclusion from the outset
Welcome to The Navigator 🧭 - a newsletter about people, technology and design for business leaders who want to make meaningful change. I’m Sarah Ronald, and I write this newsletter with the Nile team. If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here to receive it straight to your inbox.
Hello! 👋
In this month’s edition of The Navigator, we’re focusing on inclusion. Specifically, how you can embed it at the core of your business, with the target of becoming ‘inclusive by default’. It’s a gradual process, and not without its challenges, but it’s the right thing to do – both ethically and commercially.
Stick to the end for our round-up of what’s been happening at Nile, with a couple of fabulous client successes, plus reflections on some of the biggest summer conferences on innovation.
Wishing you all the best as you navigate your week.
– Sarah
Becoming inclusive by default
Building inclusion into your practice is tricky but benefits everyone
Each of us carries our own unique mix of identities, beliefs and circumstances that shapes how we interact with the world. These can change from one situation to the next, and shift throughout our lives. That’s why inclusive design benefits everyone, and why it’s important.
Take video subtitles, for instance. They don’t just improve the experience for people who are deaf or have hearing loss. The option to use captions helps those in places where it’s better to read than listen, like very noisy places (a factory) or very quiet ones (a library). And some people simply prefer them: research has shown that more than half of Gen Z uses subtitles regularly.
Inclusively-designed services and products make things easier for people in more situational experiences too, like moments of heightened stress. So designing with this in mind is crucial in sectors like healthcare and financial services, where people are often required to make critical decisions while feeling vulnerable, but relevant in every service.
The flip side of this is that a poorly-designed service can cause real harm – being unable to complete a form, or facing questions that make you feel disparaged or lead you to relive a past trauma. The controversial Personal Independence Payments (PIP) system in England & Wales is a case in point, having been the source of ‘pain, humiliation and failed claims’.
The public and third sectors have been cultivating different approaches to inclusion for decades. The private sector is now catching up, as failing to consider inclusion not only causes harm but affects the bottom line. Increasing regulation around how we design for vulnerable customers (such as the FCA Consumer Duty) is adding even more pressure to prioritise inclusion.
Inclusion by default
We believe every business should aim to become ‘inclusive by default’. That means embedding inclusion throughout, rather than treating it as an add-on. However, it’s important to recognise the challenges of reaching that point. Making the shift from viewing inclusivity as part of the design process (or not considering at all) to it being a common cultural mindset throughout your business is a slow process, because:
The field is constantly changing, and the way people engage with the subject is highly personal. This means what works today might have to change tomorrow, or what resonates for one person might not sit right with another.
Inclusion requires integration across services and business functions. It doesn’t work unless the whole organisation gets behind it and moves in the same direction, with the systems and structures in place to support it.
Responsibility for the organisation becoming inclusive must be shared by everyone, from its most senior leaders to those on the front line.
Without strategic coordination and direction, and without a genuine commitment to inclusion, it’s easy to see how such a cultural shift can fail. That commitment must be more than just in principle; it requires an active investment of time and energy to ensure inclusion doesn’t get sidelined when other work takes priority.
Laying the groundwork
Having recognised inclusion is vital, and that it’s a challenge to properly embed it – how can you actually go about creating a culture that values inclusion? At a strategic level, it has to be embedded in your core model and values.
Start by clearly defining what you mean. There’s a misconception that inclusion means designing for everyone and every possible outcome. This is impossible and can immediately feel overbearing. It’s really about creating products and services for the people who need them. For financial firms, the FCA has been explicit in calling for “products and services designed to meet the needs of a clearly defined target market”. At Nile, we define inclusion as the idea that anyone who needs to engage with, participate in or benefit from a product or service can do so effectively. This works at any point in the design process – in a meeting, a research interview, or when designing a product or service.
Practically, it’s important to take the fear out of doing ‘the wrong thing’:
Go into the design process led by curiosity and open to correction. Put participants in a position of control, listening to what they say, letting them share their lived experiences and define their own needs.
Reflect on what’s been shared by your target audience, and how you can build a service or product that meets those needs.
More generally, take the time as a team to reflect on your biases – we all have them – and build a common picture that can work cross-service and across hierarchies. Doing this cultivates the shared understanding and shared responsibility that is so vital to an inclusive culture.
Sustaining the change
Make it part of your practice to engage in continuous research with diverse and underrepresented groups (again, for the financial sector, this is at the core of the Consumer Duty). Ensure you know what data you’re looking for, both in order to maintain an up-to-date picture, and to ensure the insights you get are useful and manageable. This research will not only help you stay on top of situational changes, but replace opinion and guesswork with informed tools that paint a clear picture of your target market’s diverse needs.
Benchmark inclusion: see what others are achieving, and set realistic targets for your own organisation. Implement governance and structures to hold yourself accountable, such as having measurement and evaluation frameworks in place. This will help you move away from a piecemeal approach to a centralised, integrated one.
Remember this is cultural change, so it will take time; it has to involve education and training and internal comms, as well as a rethink of your processes, to ensure inclusion is truly embedded. Creating toolkits, how-to guides and documented standards can help your colleagues know how to embed inclusion in their work.
This is a journey that requires commitment, continuous learning, and adaptation. By defining inclusion clearly, embracing curiosity, engaging in ongoing reflection and sustaining the change you can ensure inclusion is no longer an add-on but embedded at the heart of everything you do.
Thanks to our Senior Service Designer, Katherine Snow, for her insights and helping put together this guide.
Nile News
Client successes
We’re excited to share some brilliant awards nominations and a win for two of our clients.
First of all, huge congratulations to debt charity StepChange on being awarded Vulnerable Customer Strategy of the Year at this year’s Credit Awards. We’re thrilled to have worked alongside their amazing team to establish the organisation's inclusive framework, which guides the design and delivery of all their services. Informed by the charity’s values, strategy and principles, as well as the FCA Consumer Duty, the framework ensures every interaction with StepChange feels consistently inclusive for every client.
And best of luck to Royal London, whose generative AI initiative for Marketing has been shortlisted for two awards: Most Innovative Use of AI (Brand) in the DataIQ Awards and Best Use of AI or Automation at the Financial Services Forum’s Awards for Innovation and Transformation. We’re pleased to have played a role in this groundbreaking work – fingers crossed for a double win.
Nilers in London: Fintech Week and AI Summit
Last month, we headed to two key conferences in London.
Our Portfolio Lead for Financial Services, Phil Reid, was at the Fintech Week conference to explore the future of tech in the finance sector. One highlight was hearing about Project Nemo, an initiative to connect disability inclusion experts with Fintech decision-makers. You can read more of Phil’s highlights over on LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, we were also finding out how businesses and the public sector are navigating AI at the AI Summit. The event had everything from senior leaders from NATO and the European Parliament discussing their approach to AI, to singer Daniel Bedingfield co-creating a song live on stage with AI (we only captured a little bit of this magic moment, but you get the idea.) Design Director Neil Collman has also shared some reflections on the event over on LinkedIn.
Turing Fest 2024
Earlier this month, Nilers James Denholm and Lewis Crooks attended Turing Fest in Edinburgh. While the focus was on startups and emerging technologies, events like this let us see what's on the horizon and think about the implications for human-centred design.
Naturally, AI took centre stage at this event too. Here are some of the key insights James and Lewis took away from the event:
🧑💻 Todd Olson of Pendo talked about how AI + customer data could revolutionise user interactions by customising content, features, and UI elements based on individuals' profiles, preferences and familiarity with a product or service. We think this has the potential to create more inclusive and accessible services: imagining a banking app, for example, that fully understands a user's ability to understand specific content, and which can cater the tone of voice and pace at which features are introduced to prevent them feeling overwhelmed.
✏️ Open Velocity's Bethan Vincent stressed that, while AI can help us produce content faster, it still lacks the human nuances essential for meaningful engagement. When we communicate we can pick up on more complex conversational cues while AI struggles to fully understand the more emotional and abstract aspects of communication (for now).
📋 In the realm of product development, product management leader Matt LeMay stressed the need for product teams to align their efforts with business goals. He warned against the trap of low-impact work and excessive feature development. According to Matt, frameworks and processes can provide a false sense of security that you're on the right track just because you've done the 'right things', when instead you should focus on taking responsibility for delivering real outcomes for the business.
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About Nile
We’re a strategic design company that delivers human-centred change in highly regulated industries. Here’s three ways we can help:
Strategic projects - We’ll help you de-risk outcomes, saving time and money without compromising experience.
Accessibility - We can help you get accessibility right, as a fundamental part of inclusion.
Talent - Supercharge your internal change efforts with our Trusted Talent service – long-term placements of expert people who’ll help you deliver key transformation and BAU outcomes.
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