Hello, lovely to be speaking before you all today — especially after Fatemeh’s talk, I related so hard to her story as someone who had a screaming meltdown on a tram a couple years ago. Excellent, we’re all in good company here.

As you may have guessed, I'm an autistic product designer and I'm here to talk about my special interest. Brace yourselves.

First things first, though — as an experiment for better user experience for those of us who wish real life came with subtitles, I have created a partial transcript for this talk — via this QR code or bit.ly/inclusive-design-toolkit. I say partial transcript because in true sitcom fashion I decided to restructure this talk at 3am. Yay building in public!

In all seriousness though, the text will be completed later today, and I will also share the slides; in the meanwhile I hope you enjoy my experiment.

Secondly, I'm going to be discussing fraught topics, like racism, sexism, ableism, other forms of exclusion… as well as mental ill health and experiences of vulnerability. Inclusive design doesn't shy away from these topics, but that doesn't mean they're easy to talk about. So please put your wellbeing first, step away or disengage if you need to. If you have any feedback on how I could better deal with these sensitive issues, I'm very open to hearing it.

Thirdly, I use the word “design” a lot here. I'm aware that there's often blurry lines between UX and UI and service design and where does research fit in… but when I talk about design, I don't mean just futzing around in Figma or Miro or Claude Design — it's not about the tools. It's about the thinking that goes into it, the process of intentional creation of user experience. In that sense, inclusive design is, I hope, useful for all of us here.

In a similar vein, I’m going to be choosing pragmatism over perfection when it comes to terminology here. There’s a lot of nuance in the discourse surrounding inclusion — and that’s how it should be — but in the interest of time, I may conflate some terms and concepts. Again, I welcome all feedback, especially if anything is unclear or outright wrong.

Now.

Let's begin.

I'm not going to talk about “why” we should do inclusive design. While that's a very important discussion, especially when you need to equip yourself with strategies to convince stakeholders — or be convinced yourself — it's an entirely different talk.

Today, I'm going to assume that you've already got the “why” handled, even if it's only because “it says so in the banking code of practice.”

So we're going to dive straight into the “how.”

At its core inclusive design is about asking more and better questions — but often we can get overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of the field.

I have created a resource to help people practice inclusive design by creating their own toolkit. I am not the kind of product designer who throws work over the wall though: this talk is the handover instructions.

I would like to encourage you to build your own toolkit, rather than gqving you mine, because you are the one working in your problem space. You know what you need.

My hkmaope is that after this you'll have enough clarity to know what accessibility — or gender, or language, etc — issue you’ll need to examine further next week. Short-term success here means that you’ll have a “to read” or “to do” list.

In the long-term, success means that you’ll be making better design decisions. Because the questions you ask throughout your process will have expanded in scope and grown sharper in intent — to clarify or deconstruct more assumptions, to reach out to more margins, to interrogate impact and harm… to be more human.