A big part of what Concurrency does is engage companies to bring about impactful customer experiences. As we’ve done these projects we grew a Ux practice focused on the user experience, the way that people interact with a system. As we’ve thought about more however, the core goal is not just Ux, it’s Cx… the complete Customer Experience flowing through a journey interacting with a company to achieve a goal. As you look at providing an outcome, whether it is through an application, a multi-experience platform, AI, a bot, or an in-person experience, we often overlook those that are ignored in our society. As a result, we are worse off, because both the product is missing the critical input from another way of looking at the problem and the people that should be engaged by the product are excluded.

If we are to consider that people are the highest good, we should build everything with them in mind, not just on short term ends. The outcomes we leave to society are greater than the first result and our design and teams need to take that into account. We are in control of what we build and rather than make an excuse based on a disability or our own short-mindedness, we should build for all the stakeholders that will engage in our platform, app, or solution. It all comes down to not being lazy designers and an intent to engage. I love this slide from Microsoft for this purpose, talking about the difference between Cx as an afterthought and as intentional design.

We sometimes don’t consider the entire spectrum of what it means to be disabled either… think about the variety of personas that need to interact with products, or you desire to help design products.

So, the question is… how to do we positively impact those with a disability through our products? In my mind, it starts with the team you have designing it. Is your team diverse? Does it represent the people that you are designing the system for? Does it bring a variety of opinions and ideas to the table? Is humanity’s best good a core tenant of anything you build?

Examples of how to build accessibility into Customer Experience:

• Engagement in variety of modalities from text, to voice, to text again
• Build default engagement approach with a wide net
• Mobile experiences support voice vs. just text
• Movement in app into human support model
• Engagement of cognitive disabilities… workers and customers
  

Actions to engage in accessability:

• Understand the mission of your brand, platform, and outcome
• Map that outcome to the complete set of stakeholders
• Create a great team, made of diversity
• Include the diverse stakeholder group in what matters
• Build for it… deliver it… measure it
  

This is a critical motion to get moving.

Nathan Lasnoski