Designing with Extraordinary People: Stories of Creating Accessible Technology for the Five Percent

As human factors practitioners, we are well versed in targeting our design requirements for the range of users clustered within the ‘5th percentile female up to the 95th percentile male’. But what happens to the tail ends, or the 10% of the population that become inadequately served under this model? Minority populations often must mask their own needs in order to find inclusion, and their pain points remain invisible to mainstream populations. As industries continue to focus on inclusion and experience growth in diversity, a persistent issue has been an unawareness of the inaccessible nature of “designed for the majority” systems. It is imperative that HF practitioners understand that inclusive and accessible are two separate things. Through stories of lessons learned from designing technology for U.S. Department of Defense warfighters who are women, the practitioner will discuss applied principals for creating accessible designs.