Bettina Kast

Bettina is a skilled, enthusiastic, results-driven Principal UX Product Designer based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With over two decades experience in strategic design, product design, enterprise UX, enterprise AI, and data products, she brings a unique perspective and empathy to user-centric designs and innovations.

Project Inclusive Design

Research

Increasing awareness of inclusive design

What we were working on

An presentation to educate stakeholders and employees about the importance of accessibility for all product areas by promoting inclusive design, and why it matters.

What I did

I was leading an internal research initiative to understand how disability and accessibility requirements are understood, revealing that we needed to educate teams better. I raised this with design leadership and we agreed I would present during a company update.

  • Researched upcoming legal requirements
  • Made the case for accessibility
  • Research on subject matters involving inclusive design, differentiated types of disabilities, common diseases causing disabilities
  • Spoke with several scrum teams to understand attitudes
  • Communicated findings to design leaders and obtained buy-in to educate larger group
  • Story telling, and visualization
  • Appealed to the audience’s empathy and participation

Outcome

Accessibility is not limited to blind people. Vision impairments are on a spectrum, and users with disabilities in this area have a range of requirements that can be accounted for already during the design phase.
Besides, disability has also a time spectrum. Disability is not limited to permanently disabled people, but can affect anyone at any time. Designing with disabilities in mind makes it so that everyone will benefit from better products. There are hundreds of millions of people who can benefit from inclusive design.
Focusing in on data visualization shows that there is a much wider range of what disability means. Vision impairments can be caused by common medical conditions such as diabetes, medication, or can affect people who cannot perceive the full breadth of the color spectrum as many other people do.
On a project level

Widened perspectives of audience members consisting of senior executives, and developers alike during a 10-minute presentation delivered to an audience of 3.000 employees promoting inclusive design.

On an organizational level

The company opened new roles for an Accessibility Experience Manager, and a role for Pega’s first blind software engineer, ensuring accessibility.