And how inclusive design benefits all students
By Michelle Wantuch (opens in new tab)
Image credit: iStock
There is a high prevalence of neurodivergence* worldwide, representing approximately 20% (opens in new tab) of the population and spanning race, gender, and orientation. Earlier this year, we announced some ‘accessible by design’ features and advances in Microsoft 365, enabling more than 200 million people to build, edit and share documents. These are among many efforts (opens in new tab) across our products to improve access and affordability, create accessible technology, and enable a diverse and inclusive workforce in the future.
Our researchers have further leaned into the effort to build more inclusive products through our work developing guidelines to inform creating products for neurodiverse students. The goal is to create guidelines that can be used across disciplines throughout the company and implemented in any tool students use– so that neurodivergent and neurotypical students can have better experiences with our products. Moving forward, UX research and design can play a pivotal role in creating more inclusive products by testing our hypotheses and designs with neurodiverse students.
Microsoft inclusive design principles
These drafted guidelines were informed by past research, including industry-accepted inclusive design principles. Inclusive design is a methodology born out of digital environments that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Microsoft’s inclusive design principles (opens in new tab) are:
- Recognize exclusion: Designing for inclusivity not only opens our products and services to more people, it also reflects how people really are. All humans grow and adapt to the world around them and we want our designs to reflect that.
- Solve for one, extend to many: Everyone has abilities, and limits to those abilities. Designing for people with permanent disabilities results in designs that benefit people universally. Constraints are a beautiful thing.
- Learn from diversity: Human beings are the real experts in adapting to diversity. Inclusive design puts people in the center from the very start of the process, and those fresh, diverse perspectives are the key to true insight.
Universal design for learning
Another key framework is the Universal Design for Learning (opens in new tab) (UDL) guidelines, which seek to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. The UDL Guidelines can be used by anyone wishing to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. They offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.
What we’ve learned so far
Our guidelines for informing inclusive product design for students are a work in progress. We began with Microsoft’s universal design principles and the Universal Design for Learning guidelines and supplemented those with research other teams within the company conducted with neurodivergent individuals, as well as external sources, such as research papers, uncovering students’ needs. We also consulted with neurodiverse individuals across Microsoft to gain the benefit of their perspectives in learning. From all this background, some guidelines for optimizing products for neurodiverse students have emerged:
- Engaging with tech screens: Digital devices have pros and cons for neurodiverse individuals (opens in new tab). They can be an important tool that helps students communicate, develop social skills, and alleviate anxiety. However, screen time can worsen behaviors that students are trying to reduce, interfere with sleep patterns, or lower attention span. So, it may be advantageous to design with focus and attention in mind, such as finding ways to limit screen time, or adding breaks and ways for them to resume where they left off more easily.
- Interacting positively with a UI/UX: UI/UX interactions that are positive, reduce anxiety, and are also easy to parse help reinforce learning for neurodiverse students. Offering tactile experiences and feedback, for instance, can help both neurodiverse and many neurotypical individuals.
- Growing and exceling as a student: Students are not just in school to gain academic knowledge and facts; they also are developing other executive functioning and soft skills that will help them succeed throughout life. One way that technologies can assist them is to support social and emotional learning (opens in new tab), which will aid them in their interactions both during their education and beyond.
- Getting support from and with adults: Parents, teachers, and other adults, such as aides and therapists, form the support network for all students, helping to ensure that each student receives the resources and variety of options they need to successfully work and learn in the way that that works best for them. Technologies can help by enabling adults to easily share a variety of content and tools as well as options for how to access them (such as reading versus listening).
I hope that this information will help you in your efforts to design more inclusive products. We’re continuing to learn and evaluate our guidelines. We also plan to work with neurodiverse students to validate and refine our findings as we learn from them how we can improve each of the specific products across our education ecosystem.
*For the purposes of this blog, I am defining a neurodivergent person as someone who has, for example, autism and/or ADHD and identifies as “neurodiverse.” Neurodiversity is the idea that these are variations in brain development that are different from the “norm” and diversity of information processing.
What do you think? How does your team design for inclusion and neurodiversity? What best practices do you have when researching with a neurodiverse audience? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab)and join the conversation.
Michelle Wantuch is a User Researcher at Microsoft. She has a Master’s in Technology, Innovation, and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked as a Teaching Fellow in a Chicago Public School. Michelle is fascinated by the ways education technology should and shouldn’t be used inside and outside of the classroom, striving to improve student outcomes in collaboration with teachers and administrators around the globe. She works across a variety of EDU teams and products, including but not limited to Teams for EDU and Office.