ABSTRACT
Inclusive design has many well-known benefits: it can lead to greater customer satisfaction, cheaper running costs long-term and enhanced corporate social responsibility. Previous studies have examined the uptake of the ethos and practice of inclusive design in industry, describing both existing success stories and barriers to adoption (Dong et al., 2004; Goodman-Deane et al., 2009). They have mainly focused on companies which do not yet practise the principles of inclusive design, however. We therefore conducted an audit of the current state of inclusive design at BT, which was an early adopter having concentrated on inclusion over the past eight years, to understand more about how it is practised in everyday business. Fourteen employees, who are inclusion practitioners and have good understanding of the internal processes at the company, took part in the study. The interactions with them focused on successful inclusivity-led processes, products and services developed to date and existing challenges to employing inclusive design. The investigation was carried out through semi-structured interviews, which were then coded using the general inductive approach (Thomas, 2006). This resulted in the identification of three overarching themes – People, Process and Practice – with users at the heart of them, and ten specific principles for (further) development of inclusive design practice.
Overall, the results show that the company studied has made good progress in its mission to be inclusive. This is despite some of the widely known organisational challenges, such as: (1) having managers juggle many, often conflicting, priorities; (2) the need to deliver products and services to market in restricted timescales and within finite budgets, both of which do not always allow for as thorough user requirements capture and testing as is optimal; and (3) despite existence of
