Inclusive design

When planning, designing, making decisions and testing your materials and activities, encourage meaningful participation by asking for feedback from a diverse range of people.

This could include your target audience, as well as organisations of people with disabilities.

This will help you to identify and remove communication barriers for a more effective communication campaign.  

When producing print or digital content that contains videos, illustrations and photographs, include people from different backgrounds.

Consider characteristics such as gender, age, disability and ethnicity.

Use positive images and representations of people with disabilities in your work.

For example, use images of people with disabilities and people without disabilities interacting on equal terms in the workplace.

Do not include negative perceptions of people with disabilities, such as begging or being mistreated.

Understand the local context before you start designing.

Use the local language of your audience and represent its culture and customs in materials and activities.

Defining your main goal and your target audience go hand in hand in every communication strategy.

It is important to think about the diversity of your target audience. Consider the following:

• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Culture
• Socioeconomic status
• Literacy
• Language
• Education
• Ability
• Location

Review any existing documents to assess the information available.

This could include data on local context, existing practices, barriers and enablers, the audience profile and any behaviours that can effectively address your project’s problems.

Organise a one- or two-day session with stakeholders, project partners and representatives of your target audiences, including representatives of people with disabilities.

The objective of the session is to:

• Review the project objectives, understand the problem to be addressed and identify the targets, challenges and priorities
• Review and discuss the existing evidence
• Brainstorm, identify and prioritise the key objectives you want to address
• Develop clear objective statements and discuss how you will achieve them
• Build audience profiles and brainstorm potential activities, communication channels and media
• Develop your communications plan

Co-creating is the practice of inviting representatives of the target audiences to the design process.

Its purpose is to help you produce ideal solutions that meet the needs of the audience. In other words, by bringing the audience to the centre of the design process, you will optimise their journey and achieve your communications goals.

No two co-creation sessions are the same. When you’re moderating a session, be open to discovering new ideas and perspectives. You want to spend time understanding your participants, exploring the topic, choosing the right activities and establishing a comfortable space for ideation and creativity to flourish.

Co-creation activities may include:

• Icebreakers
• Role-playing
• Journey mapping
• Brainstorming
• Rapid prototyping
• Prioritisation

Once you’ve defined and planned the activities, create a discussion guide. It can be as simple as a list of key questions, or as complex as a script on how you’ll approach the audience. This will help you to keep track of the session and enable you to see it from the participants’ perspectives.

You should encourage participation, creativity and ideation from people of different genders, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds as well as people with disabilities.

At this point, you should have agreed on messages, activities and materials.

The next stage is to brief copywriters and designers on the materials and activities that were decided in the co-creation sessions.

The brief should include language translations and any visual representations of the target audience.

Once the work has been completed, show it to the people involved in the co-creation sessions, or people of the same audience, including people with disabilities. Listen to the feedback and make any necessary changes to the material.

The idea of this phase is to test whether the activities and materials resonate with the target audience.

Very simple and short questionnaires are a useful way to survey the people involved in the co-creation sessions, or people of the same audience, including people with disabilities.

The result of the survey will help you to create a final version. You shouldn’t stop testing the product after launch. Post-release testing should be done periodically to allow for the possibility of adaptations.