Why that’s important
Besides moral and social responsibility to do right by all members of society, there is a clear commercial benefit to designing for inclusivity, accessibility and sustainability:
Reach
The volume of users that identify as being in marginalised groups is huge. Assessing where you have gaps or blind-spots in your reach will allow you to target specific audiences as well as meeting the needs of the broader population. We will work with you to enable greater potential reach - growing your impact.
Conversion and Engagement
Identifying and responding to your audience needs through improving usability and accessibility for all results in fewer drop offs, higher task completion rates and conversion of users’ goals and needs - increasing satisfaction and reducing complaints.
Products and services that are simple to use, waste no time or energy, meet target users’ needs, that align with their purpose, and stand for positive impact, result in higher engagement. For example, 87% of Millennial and 94% percent of Gen Z expect companies to address social and environmental issues.
Advocacy
Experiences that are deliberately designed for real users have a positive impact and improve advocacy, recommendation and referral, delivering higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS). 70% of users will switch to more socially and environmentally sustainable brands. 78% of users will recommend products from a business with a socially-driven mission to their network.
Improved discoverability
Better managed content, clearer and consistent navigation and structure underpinned by user insights not only helps users with various needs access your content more effectively, but also improves Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Internal team efficiency
A focus on inclusivity, accessibility and sustainability means your teams will be able to create, manage and improve content and infrastructure more effectively and efficiently. This is achieved through understanding audiences better, shortening the content-supply-chain and by creating lower carbon sites and workflows.
Attracting and retaining talent
By committing to improving your experiences for your audiences, your team can see that this is a value that you prioritise and feel more invested in the organisation and their work. For example, 77% of Gen-Z consider it important that their company supports diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. 33% turned down a job with an employer whose ESG efforts did not align with their values.
Reduce negative impact on the environment
It is relatively simple to significantly lower the carbon output of your websites and wider digital ecosystem. For example:
- Hosting with low carbon providers
- Using a low carbon design approach (for example cutting page weights, reducing average page load times, sparing use of imagery, no play-on-load videos).
- Taking a low carbon development approach.
Overall business performance
Over the last 10 years, inclusive design-led companies have maintained a significant stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P by an extraordinary 211%. The total spending power of families with at least 1 disabled person is estimated at £274 billion a year.