The Role of UX in Inclusive Government Design

As the government embraces digitization and relies more and more on digital platforms to transform lives and increase equity, it’s struggling with the same problem as general design – inclusivity.

User experience (UX) includes all aspects of the end user’s interaction with a company, its products, and its services. Inclusive UX design strives to create experiences that understand and enable people of all abilities and backgrounds.

In government, this means identifying and removing barriers to critical services, benefits, and information, and providing modern solutions that deliver support to everyone who needs it.

Identifying and Understanding Marginalized Communities

Marginalized communities once referred to people who live on the fringe of mainstream culture, systematically excluded from full participation in society and lacking the ability to reach their full potential. Now, the term “marginalized” expanded to include a wide range of people, including:

• LGBTQIA+
• Senior citizens
• Military veterans
• Racial or cultural minorities
• People with intellectual disabilities
• People with hearing, visual, or physical challenges
• People with cognitive impairment
• People on the autism spectrum
• People living in poverty

Where does UX come into the picture? The government has initiatives to support marginalized communities, but because of the barriers, they often can’t reach the very people they’re intended to help.

For example, marginalized groups that have limited technological access, civic literacy, and mobility may not have the capability to the delivery of essential public services that have become digitized in the wake of COVID-19.

There are other common barriers for people with products and services, including:

• Media content with audio-only features that affect hearing-impaired users
• Poor contrast that negative impacts visually impaired users
• Services on small devices without adequate responsiveness for people with poor fine motor skills
• Forms with predefined input methods that don’t adjust for diverse audiences
• Instructions or tutorials that are too complex for people with low technological sophistication

Once the designer is designing with marginalized groups and accessibility in mind, a UX audit can reveal specific barriers that should be addressed in the design process.

Accessibility and Usability

Inclusive design prioritizes accessibility, meaning a design that’s open to everyone. Accessibility often refers to people with disabilities and providing them with the freedom to engage with services, but the concept is wider than just this group.

The usefulness and accessibility of a design is not only making it interactive and responsive, which caters to the broadest segment of society but in designers truly understanding the audience and ensuring that the design is easy to use and performs as intended.

To meet the needs of all users, a UX designer must rely on a set of principles that are beneficial to all.

Empathy: Understanding the needs of the audience and the concerns with product interactions

User Research: Approaching research with a diverse audience, including people with varying physical and cognitive differences

Inclusivity: Adopting the standards of representation and inclusivity when designing for a global audience

Control on Navigation: Providing multiple options for navigation to ensure all users, including those with assistive devices, can have maximum control over interactions

Context: Ensuring the design is equally responsive in all conditions and environments

Accessible design removes barriers that separate users, allowing everyone to participate equally and independently. For example, people who have hearing impairment need closed captioning or subtitles, but those features are also helpful for people who are in noisy environments or process information better visually rather than aurally.

Cultural and Linguistic Sensitivity

With a global economy, it’s more common for designers to work with geographically distributed teams. If they only focus on local culture and language, it can be a barrier to global markets and harmful to adoption and revenue.

It’s not enough for designers to replace the language and include some culturally appropriate images. Cultural and linguistic sensitivity goes deeper than that and requires an understanding of different languages, dialects, and dimensions of culture, including differences in color psychology.

Designers should consider every aspect of the design for another culture and language, including the reading direction (some cultures read from right to left), navigational patterns, calls to action (CTAs), imagery, icons, and text expansion.

Gaining these insights through observation is key to serving the users. Designers must thoroughly research and understand local customs, cross-cultural psychology, and local patterns with in-depth research or UX consulting.

Empathy and Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design is an approach to interactive systems development that endeavors to make systems usable by solving problems from the perspective of the primary users, their needs and requirements, and usability techniques with design ops.

Empathy is crucial to human-centered design. These designers must remove bias when evaluating the needs of the ideal user, who may have different goals, desires, and values. In taking an empathetic approach with the end user in mind, designers have a unique perspective and a greater chance of success.

Unfortunately, as organizations embrace human-centered design, they can fail to gain the full value from it. The interactions with the end user may be limited to narrow research at various points in the process, creating gaps where ideas are being generated without the input of the users the design intends to assist.

Participatory design is an approach to design that brings the end user into the process. Also known as cooperative design, this encompasses techniques that are valuable to various stages of the project. The end users – in this case, marginalized communities – take an active role in designing solutions that serve them specifically.

Some of the methods used in participatory design include interviews, focus groups, observation of product use, and traditional user-centered design practices. With this collaborative approach, designers can ensure that the final product meets the needs and expectations of the user base.

Final Thoughts

Inclusive UX design focuses on designing with a human-centered, culturally sensitive, and empathetic culture throughout the process – prioritizing marginalized voices and serving their needs. In government, this ensures that critical services are accessible and understandable to all segments of people, accounting for diverse needs and delivering vital services to those who need them most. Designers must identify marginalized communities and their barriers, utilize inclusive design and cross-cultural principles, and taking a participatory approach.