Clare Muscutt talks with Christine Hemphill about the benefits of inclusive research and design.
Clare:
Welcome to the 9th episode of the sixth series of the Women in CX podcast – a series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in Customer Experience. Listen in as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner of CX subjects.
I'll be your host, Clare Muscutt and in today's episode, I’ll be talking to an incredible community member from France. She’s a disability and age-inclusive researcher, designer, and innovator and in 2015, founded Open Inclusion, a London-based but global insight and design agency which she continues to lead and grow with purpose and passion. Leading the work on emerging technologies, she looks to find new ways in which they can be adopted to reduce the limitations that exist for many customers, particularly those with lived experiences of disability.
Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest, CX sister, Christine Hemphill.
Clare:
Hi, Christine.
Christine:
Hey, how are you, Clare?
Clare:
I'm amazing. How are you today?
Christine:
Really well, thank you.
Clare:
Welcome to the Women in CX podcast!
Christine:
Oh, lovely to be here.
Clare:
And welcome to everybody who's listening or watching, wherever you are. And I'm super excited for this conversation today as Christine and I have known each other for quite a while. And our debate is going to really focus around inclusive design for Customer Experience. And Christine is literally the font of all knowledge on this. So I'm so happy that you are here. Thank you, Christine!
Christine:
It's a pleasure. And you know ... none of us are a font of knowledge. We're all on our journey of gathering it and I think that's actually, particularly, inclusive Customer Experience. It's really important - on the way, as always.
Clare:
Absolutely. So let's just jump straight in then. Would you like to let our listeners know a little bit more about how you found your way to Women in CX and what you've been up to with the community?
Christine:
It was really funny when I was thinking about this yesterday. I can't remember who it is that originally pointed me to Women in CX, so apologies, I just can't remember whoever you were! A lovely person who sent me your way, Clare. But I do remember coming into the community - and it was fairly early on - and just thinking, "Huh, here is a place that there is, one, a true sense of community. And secondly, knowledge and sharing and asking and learning in a way that's meaningful". So apologies to whoever it was. I do remember I was pointed this way, but I can't remember who it was that pointed me this way. But I do remember still that sense of first coming in and ... you know, I remember having a conversation with you Clare! Really early on in that and just going, "Got it. I understand what you're here for. I like that".
Clare:
And you're a community builder too, right?
Christine:
Absolutely. And in fact, I've been watching this community build both from you - I often use the analogy from the dance floor and the balcony. Because for all that I enjoy the community and appreciate it myself. We are also building a community of disabled people across the world and thinking about how to create spaces that allow people to add value in each other's lives. How to create the right culture that allows it to feel like a safe, enjoyable, valuable environment that you want to be in.
Clare:
Nice, nice. So, in terms of your career journey, I'm sure our listeners would love to know a little bit more about how you ended up where you are. So, do you want to give us the backstory?
Christine:
I laugh because it's a bizarre and winding path. So the starting point is, you know, I have kids that are now kind of entering into the beginning of their career. Wherever you start is not where you end up necessarily - or some people do - not for me. I started in the mining industry...
Clare:
I did not know that!
Christine:
There you go. I got picked up while I was at University because I was doing Asian Studies and Economics and they needed people that understood Asian languages and understood business. So I came out - and I'm going to show my age here - in a recession in Australia, in the nineties ... there weren't many jobs. And I had a ready-made job, which was amazing. So all of my friends were coming out of university going “Now what?” And I walked straight into a job that had been sitting there waiting for me through university. So I went up to North Asia, worked in Hong Kong and Beijing, and I was selling mineral products and steel products. And as you do, not surprisingly, not a lot of women were involved in the mining industry at the time.
Christine:
Not surprisingly to where I've ended up, my job was listening to customers! Whether it was culturally, linguistically, but also commercially. My job was listening to customers and understanding how we added value in their organization, through the products that we provided, so that we could maximize our negotiations with them. So I was a negotiator. But it was just really interesting and grounding because there are very few people in the mining industry that have the privilege of listening to customers. And then you are representing those customers back to a very large organization. So it's funny when I think about it, I never thought of myself as a CX person. And interestingly to your listeners, I still don't. It's one part of many things I wear. It's a part of -but it's one part of. But actually, it's the one thing that's woven right through my career. Sorry, that's just to say that was the start ... got involved in design and innovation through that. So how do we add more value to customers? Enjoyed that stuff more than I did my day job of negotiating. Ended up going into a strategy consulting firm and doing supply chain and strategy improvements. Still in the mining industry, but also anything in heavy industry. Did a lot of shipping work - I'd been involved in shipping as well when I was in mining.
Clare:
Again, probably not very many women in that industry.
Christine:
I mean at this point, there were times when I was working in industries where there were two or three women globally that did what I did. So when we say not many women, yeah really, really not many women! And it was quite funny, you'd go to a steel mill in Japan and they would roll out their one engineer that worked actually at another plant on another side, who was a female, just to say, "We've got one too!" It was really quite funny. So it was a real abnormality. So yeah, so that was quite interesting. I loved that. But I travelled a lot, lots of very quirky and curious problems. I did my first .com startup within that organization - we were doing shipping contracts and putting them online. So got my first kind of real taste of what digital could do to solve quite commercial, fundamentally boring problems. They're not boring, they're actually really important problems, but they're not that sexy frontend customer-facing stuff. They're just being much more efficient in how you manage processes stuff.
Christine:
So started to understand the power of digital to solve problems and service design. And then I went to - we wanted to have a family. So I got married, and we wanted to have a family, as many women will kind of understand. I was travelling about 30 weeks a year. The job I had and the life I needed as a parent just didn't match. So I moved to the banking industry because they needed people that understood digital, understood service and could deal with uncertainty, but also understood customer. And still in Australia, early noughties in Australia, banks weren't really built around customers. They were built around really defined strict, rigid processes.
Christine:
So that was really fun. Spent a decade in banking at a time when digital was really coming into front-end banking. So really understanding how Customer Experience design could be improved. Not just with digital, but with that end-to-end experience of customer service, technology where people can help themselves, the processes, the ease and fluidity within what you design and what people want to do. So that was ... I suppose when I first, you know - I didn't even think of myself as a Customer Experience designer then, but that's when I started doing the job. And some backend stuff as well, so that you understand what you need for the customer at the front, but we are not doing it back here. So we've got this bit, but this bit's broken. And so redesigning that bit so that you're delivering to the customer. And actually, that understanding that all complex problems are solvable when you really understand the flow of value to the person that that value is being designed for, has stood me in such good stead through so many different careers.
Christine:
Because that allows you to take really complex things and go, "Huh, I'm not quite sure, but let's just ground that in what will that do for the customer? Will it add or detract from their lives? Will it add to detract in our ability to consistently deliver that to their lives?" It just makes all those, all that complexity, start to fall away quite quickly because you've got something to anchor in that is is very real. I did quite a lot of research, so we're doing quite a lot of research through that. So started understanding research much more and how to engage and listen to diverse customers. All of this is before - so decades of doing design innovation before I got to inclusive Customer Experience - that also happened through these side moments of life. A little bit of personal experience gave us that understanding of human diversity and disability quite quickly.
Clare:
Would you like to share more about that?
Christine:
Yeah. So my sister and I had five boys born. We got to keep four of them. And of those, you know, three of them are disabled in different ways, right? So, actually one lost to disability. So that experience kind of came in fast. I have two neurodivergent boys in different ways. And I have a nephew who's got muscular dystrophy, so has, you know, physical disabilities. And just understanding when you look around the world and you see... at the same time, digital - of course, the power of digital is getting more broadly understood - but also the exclusion built within digital was more understood. So accessibility was really coming in as a thing. And I'd seen it, heard it, started to understand it, but not dived into that.
Christine:
And essentially you've got this increasing capability to include, and this increasing awareness of exclusion that just kind of came together at the right point in my life. Having said that, I went and became a professional athlete for a few years in the middle there.
Clare:
I love that story!
Christine:
Yeah. A bit bizarre and a bit weird and wonderful. You know, if someone had said that I would've been a professional athlete racing for my country two years before I was doing so, I wouldn't have even been able to tell you which sport. It was that weird! Anyway, went and became a triathlete for a few years. Always loved a bike, always loved running, always loved swimming ... just wasn't competitive, I just did them. But yeah, became a triathlete! The first tri I did just to raise money for charity - actually for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Christine:
Found out I was actually quite competitive in it and yeah, just went "Oh well, you know, I'm not getting any younger, if I'm going to do this thing, let's do this now!" And we took a year off. And actually, a little bit of that awareness that life can throw surprises your way in different and curious way, had just kind of come into our life as well. So that while our children are young and want to spend time with us, let's go spend time with them. Let's appreciate this life we've got. So we actually just took a sabbatical! And I feel me being me, I feel time... you know, we probably wouldn't have taken it if I couldn't ground it in the, "well, I'll just go off and do the world championships and race as a triathlete for a year". I did that, had a great year and ended up getting a professional license and getting to race professionally for a few years!
Christine:
So yeah, it was a lot of fun. It gave us the opportunity to... we actually moved to France because that's where the world championships that year were in Europe. So we came over here for that and ended up just staying. In fact, we've just gone 13 years in France. We came here for a year. I mean, we literally left cans of food under our house in Sydney thinking we'd be back a year later. We still had our jobs. It was very low risk. You know, we both had agreements from our work. We could take a year off and come back into our roles. But yes, that was a bit of a transformational moment.
Clare:
And not just in France, you live up a mountain...
Christine:
Yes!
Clare:
...in The Alps, in France!
Christine:
We live in a very little village halfway up a mountain in rural France. And none of us spoke French at the time. I mean, there were a few things in there that are quite, you know - you had to...
Clare:
Adapt!
Christine:
Yeah. Adapt fast and learn fast and be comfortable being uncomfortable. You know, going from a city of 5 million people on a beach, to a village of 1200 people, high on a mountainside.
Clare:
Very different!
Christine:
Different!
Clare:
Yeah. So how exactly did Open Inclusion start then? Where was the family?
Christine:
Yeah, so when I went back into what my parents called "real work"... when I went back into more corporate work, I was invited into a digital design agency. And I was kind of the third person around the coffee table, and I had the opportunity to set the strategy for that. And we really set the strategy for that around... delightfully accessible. So accessibility was - there were lots of tools, capabilities, ways you could make a site more or less accessible. Beautiful sites were coming in because of CSS and you know it was getting easier to make really beautiful, digital experiences. But it felt like you had this very binary option. If I could have undelightful and accessible, or delightful but inaccessible. And I just thought - that is a completely false dichotomy. You should be able to make delightful accessible and inclusive!
Christine:
So we set out to do that and quite successfully did that. You know, it was just, you didn't have designers really being challenged to make it accessible as well as delightful. And there weren't... the accessibility community were very much brought in towards the end to just make it work, as opposed to brought in at the beginning where you could make it really delightful. So it was very technical as opposed to experience-led. So bringing, again, that Customer experience perspective of, 'this is about someone's end-to-end experience, not about not failing them, but actually providing an experience'. And as soon as you flip that mindset, it opens up the opportunity to design so much better. So that all worked. During that process, though, of course, the only way we could do that was to listen to a lot of people with disability. So we did a lot of usability testing and engagement with people with disabilities. I had the pleasure of working alongside a beautiful woman called Maryanne Rankin, who had a disability.
Clare:
Yeah, I know Maryanne!
Christine:
Yeah. She's wonderful. She had a disability-inclusive community of about 350 people across the UK at the time. And she really understood customer service and built environment. I had a really good understanding of customer service and digital. And so the two of us together kind of could help each other in the bits that we weren't so aware of. She helped me navigate understanding research with people with disabilities. So, you know, how to take a standard research process and really think about how do you make that delightfully engageable and enjoyable for people with different disabilities. She'd been doing that for decades! And then when that agency got sold off and quite successfully moved on, I set up Open Inclusion. And really the grounding part of Open was rather than making a product, which is what we'd been doing in that agency, I wanted to share the process we'd used to make that product so that anyone could use that process.
Christine:
Whether it was a large organization, like where you originally came from Clare, your large retail organisations, whether it was a design agency that themselves needed that support, or whether it was, you know, government services, et cetera. But just being able to infuse where design was happening with a process of listening more broadly. So the grounding part of Open Inclusion was, and will always be, how can we listen more inclusively to people with broader perspectives, including disabled and older individuals to inform better design and innovation? So it's not the doing the design innovation, it's that infusing great design teams with better quality fuel.
Clare:
And I've got a question for you, which is around how you define inclusive design or inclusion more broadly, and particularly I'm interested in how do you consider the intersections with different, diverse groups of humans. Because you know, Women in CX, we're always talking about this inter-sectional awareness and the intersections with gender. Just wondered if, for the audience, just to make sure everyone's up to speed on how we define this?
Christine:
Yeah, it's really interesting because we talk about, you know, Open being disability and age-inclusive. In fact, even that is a shorthand for...you know, I often say we are here for people that move, sense, think, feel or communicate differently.
Clare:
Love that.
Christine:
And I don't care whether you identify as disabled or not. I care that design as it is today, as customer service, a product, an environment, a government service, an educational or organization, works or doesn't work for you because they've considered - or not considered - your needs. If that's temporary, that's fine. If that's situational - me operating in different parts of the world where I don't have the language - that's fine. If it's, you know, permanent, that's fine. It's about designing for human difference, but functional human differences around that. Now you mentioned inter-sectional and you know, Maryanne and I joined forces and actually her community became the starting community for Open. And we've since grown that quite broadly. And in fact, in the last couple of years we've been growing the community really actively. So anyone who identifies as any of those that move sense, thinks, feels or communicates differently, we absolutely welcome you!
Christine:
But we have a disability community, people that identify as disabled - kind of the 'out and proud' disabled community. There are those that might not identify as disabled, but might identify as having an ongoing access need. So people who are neurodivergent might fit within that category. People with mental health needs. Exactly. You might not wear the identity 'Disabled'. People are all disabled by environments from time to time, consistently in those types of environments. And then there's the older community that have got increasing access needs, but because they're surrounded by other people that are also changing as they age - and because that can come quite gradually - they might not identify as disabled as well. They're just getting older and they might just have a little bit more hearing loss than they used to have. I'm aging now. My hearings are one of the first bits to be going!
Christine:
They might have, you know, memory lapses that come more or less. But unless it happens quite quickly or unless it has become quite profound, they often won't identify as disabled either. But actually again, design will disable them depending on how it's considered their needs. So that's where... that's the functional needs and then the intersectional perspective. One of the other reasons we've been really actively growing our community, particularly kind of, I'd say since 2020. I mean, I think the Black Lives Matter movement impacted us all in a very positive way, where we went, "Hmm, am I doing what I can do to accurately and fairly represent the experience of disability or disabling environments?"
Clare:
Yeah.
Christine:
And I stopped and looked at our community and I went, "Hmm, I'm not sure we are." And not just ethnicity, but sexual orientation, different language backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds...
Clare:
Yeah.
Christine:
....different socioeconomic backgrounds. All these differences profoundly changed the experience of disability. You know, one of my advisors is a white, middle-aged, very well-educated man who works for one of the largest companies in the world, in a very senior role in accessibility. He identifies as disabled because he's neurodivergent. But he says, my experience of neurodivergence has to come with all those other layers of me. And it will be very different to, you know, someone who's living in a rural area of - and he's urban as well - in a rural area of the country from a minority background in whatever characteristic you picked. You know, potentially with a marginalized sexual orientation, or a marginalized other set of characteristics. The experience of disability will be profoundly different. So even in representing a marginalized community- the disability community- we really need to stop and think.
Christine:
And I certainly have been really actively thinking about how well do we do that and how - and I'll talk to this, we talk about CX in a moment, and particularly inclusive CX, but what's the exclusion footprint we are leaving behind in the work we do, because we all leave one behind? And how explicit can we be of who we are and who we're not representing? We can't represent everyone, but we can be more cognizant of who is in and who is not in the mix! And therefore how that might be skewed in one way or another. And you might need to be conscious of that when making decisions.
Clare:
Yeah! Or I guess, because it's something that's top of my mind as well. And obviously my community is a gendered community in women, but that recognition of how the intersections with sexual orientation, economic background, culture, languages, and disability creates a completely different experience of being a woman, and particularly a woman in CX! So, I think that's also something, you know, on my agenda to continue to work towards when we are thinking about inclusion from an intersectional perspective, but also representation from an intersectional perspective.
Christine:
And even the language you're using there, Clare work towards - that's what we all have to do! You know, this is a...
Clare:
It is never going to be finished!
Christine:
No, none of us have got there. I don't pretend to understand all of disability and the 1.3 billion lives that are lived in 1.3 billion different ways. I'm on a journey. We are all on that journey. And so just actually, you know, even your language, you can hear that maturity of understanding around it, but it can feel quite intimidating to people coming into it. It's like, "oh my gosh, and I've got to scramble up this learning and then I'll get there and then I'll be okay". Actually don't, well we all should scramble, but it's just... enjoy that journey of learning. Don't worry about the getting there because none of us ever get there. Just enjoy that constant opening of mind to experiences that are relevant to the questions you're trying to ask and answer. And then it just becomes less binary and more enjoyable and less judgmental and more real ... more actually doable!
Clare:
Yeah. I think a couple of things you said slightly earlier on also prompted me to reminisce on my experience of working in that gigantic retailer - that I won't name - but was sponsoring the Paralympics in 2012. And the experience I had about opening up to this realization about inclusion or inclusive design, actually being that spectrum of....I guess most people would be thinking permanently disabled people, but actually, if you could design something that works for people who are permanently experiencing disability, actually the sway of people, you'll also be able to help. Whether that's through ageing, which is a massively growing population and from a business point of view is going to need to be addressed anyway, but that temporary disability as well. So we looked at accessibility from a physical disability point of view and saw that whole range of, you know, let's say wheelchair users or someone who needs a changing place toilet for accessibility through to women when they're pregnant - when they're heavily pregnant. And how much more of a challenge mobility is when you're pregnant or temporarily having an injury, like a broken leg or a broken arm! And actually that for me, I remember that turning point when I was seeing this, you know, this gradient of inclusion and accessibility and inclusive design. And how many people you can help. So, visual impairment, you know someone who's completely blind, through to somebody who's just forgotten their glasses. You know, I think that was a...
Christine:
Yeah. Or just using different ways of providing information for someone who prefers to receive information in an auditory sense, to someone who prefers to receive information and can remember it in a visual sense. So there's such a range. In fact, the Center for Universal Design in Australia has done some work that says there's about a 4x factor on if you do it for someone with a permanent disability and design for that need. Specifically changing room, changing spaces is a particular thing. If you design that, there'll be four times the number of people beyond the initial group that you're designing for. Now, of course that varies hugely depending on what you've designed. And quite frankly, it can become 99 x or even more. Because if you think about the keyboards we use, if you think about voice technology or a touchscreen, they're all inclusive design!
Christine:
They were specifically designed as adaptive and assistive technology for disabled people. And yet they are the pervasive technology now that we all use. So there's this spectrum from designing some things that solve for barriers that some people have all the time, and many people have some of the time. And that's the, you know... a changing space, bathroom, which might be useful to someone, as you say, who's a wheelchair user that needs a carer to support them going to the toilet, through to someone who's pregnant or got a young child. They need a bit of space to change them in. Through to someone who's got a health condition and might need to change an ostomy bag.
Clare:
Yeah.
Christine:
There's a full range of reasons. Or someone who's neurodivergent. We've done a lot of work in airports and actually, a lot of people use bathrooms who are deaf and hard of hearing because it's a space that you can hear more easily in a very noisy environment. So they can hear what's going on, all of the announcements. Or for someone who just needs a green space, a quiet space...
Clare:
Quiet space. Yeah.
Christine:
To settle their energy before they go back out into this very overwhelming sensory environment. And it just allows them to manage that throughout their journey. So there are so many reasons that people will use adaptive capability that you build into your Customer Experiences. And it's understanding, what are the barriers that this particular thing - in that case, you know, a washroom that has a bit more space and a number of adaptive, considerations built into it - what are the barriers that your various customers have in their journey, through your environment, that that might help solve?
Clare:
Yeah. And I was just going to add, and we eventually created this Customer Experience proposition wheel, which was the steering wheel for anybody designing anything. And one of our key principles became, it just works for everybody. And we built this inclusive design toolkit that would support anybody designing product, service, experience, physical formats, digital products, anything to be able to put a lens over at the start. And definitely at the end of production to ensure that those needs had been considered. But I guess let's dive a little bit deeper into your point of view. Because I'm going to ask you a question around what you see as the difference between CX practices and outcomes as businesses generally operate today, and what you term inclusive CX? I think we've kind of started to get into that a little bit there, but I'd love to just crystallize this for our audience. What's the difference?
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Christine:
Yeah. And it's really interesting and I always feel like an outsider just as a starting point. I even feel like, you know, I don't feel like I'm a CX practitioner. It's one part of the toolkit of tools that we use. You know, and I'll go to UX environments and I'm... that's one part of a toolkit and I go to research environments and market research and design research and that's one part of our toolkit. So let me start by just being a little bit - this is one part of a toolkit I use. And there's many people in the Women in CX community that this is the absolute - a hundred percent of their energy goes into understanding that. So just a little bit of a - this is a part of what I do, but what I see in the CX world at the moment is actually quite exclusive. And quite quickly limits who is asked, how they are asked and how they might engage, and equally how they might be understood. And so if you think about, if your role is listening and ensuring that you are listening with purpose, think of it that way. Customer Experience is about designing better Customer Experience. And in order to do that, you need to listen to customers because...
Clare:
I'll challenge that though because I don't think everybody thinks that is what it is. It is a tiny portion at the moment. I think design is the most underrated, under-skilled, under-capabilitied aspect of infrastructure. Everybody's just investing loads of money in Voice of the Customer surveys, which definitely do not capture the whole array, of just customers generally. Definitely not for inclusion.
Christine:
Yes, yes. I mean, I've just put a great big assumption out there that you have very delightfully challenged - and very correctly challenged me on - so thank you.
Clare:
It's alright.
Christine:
My understanding is good quality Customer Experience is grounded in listening to customers properly.
Clare:
Yes. Good.
Christine:
And you are right. The practices today are neither listening to customers broadly, deeply, or properly. Sorry, that's quite judgmental, I have the ability to be that. But it's very limited, back to that analogy of fuel for the engine of design. I come from a design and innovation background. I know what's needed in order to really empower the hands to design something that's a delightful experience, that's going to be consistently delightful. And it's not my hands, it's the listening. It's the understanding and unpicking where challenges exist in that environment today for different customers, with different characteristics and in different contexts.
Clare:
I totally agree. But what usually happens is there's a journey map produced where they identify pain points for these homogenous customer groups and attach it to financial outcomes.
Christine:
"Personas". The 2D cardboard cut-outs of people.
Clare:
Sometimes it's not even looking at segments and their experience and where they experience pain points. It's just 'homogenous box of provable risk'.
Christine:
And, and I think this is...
Clare:
That's quantitative over qualitative, isn't it again?
Christine:
It is, and it's also our human nature to misunderstand the true diversity of humans. There is not a single human on earth that things feels, moves, senses and communicates like me or like you or like anybody listening to this. We are all different in fundamentally different ways. And there is a point of difference at which different Customer Experiences will break and no longer work, or will create additional cost, or additional friction, or additional difficulty that is taking away from the value that you think you are creating. That's the designable, manageable point at which you know, understanding experience through research, and redesigning environments for business value. And it's again, this is for business value. Let's ground this in what it is. This is just designing consistently valuable experiences - which will today exclude, you know, up to 20% or 24% of the population with permanent disability that will impact many of your customers from time to time, or at certain points in the process.
Christine:
Or as you know, increasingly as they have different needs. So today listening is not enriched to the point that you and I certainly feel would infuse better design and therefore generate better business value. Even the listening practices of good CX organizations today though, generally are not inclusive listing practices. So the difference between inclusive Customer Experience and Customer Experience today is more... who might be excluded in the formats of listening that you're using, whether it's qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative, it's very easy. Most of the survey tools are not very accessible. So anyone who uses an assistive tech, anyone who doesn't engage easily in written material, doesn't respond easily in written material. Anyone who's not digitally savvy - because it tends to be online. Anyone who doesn't have a lot of time in their life because it tends to be underpaid and asking people just to respond for pittance - you have already excluded actually a very large proportion of the world!
Christine:
And what you think of as representing your customers - and therefore you're making quite big business decisions on the back of - the cost is not the cost of the research. The cost is the poor decision you made off inaccurate and incomplete research. And people haven't yet quite got - or many organizations haven't, some have, but many organizations have not yet got - that they're making their business decisions and investing billions of pounds in developing new Customer Experiences, services, products, environments, training their staff, managing their built environments, managing their digital environments... grounded on the information that is incomplete and inaccurate. That's just the quantitative! On the qualitative side- And even on things like if you're using big quantitative data sets - Nat Rep has only, you know-, yes it'll be gender Nat Rep and yes, it'll probably be age... Sorry, nationally representative/representative nationally, of the market that you are specifically looking at. But you've really got to dig into the 'what are the characteristics that are embedded within this data set?' and 'what are the ones that may be excluded and how might they be excluded?' And I keep using this term lately, you know, what's the exclusion footprint in this data set? What's the exclusion footprint in a qualitative piece of research? There is an exclusion footprint in everything, but are you conscious of it and are you making the decision knowing that that's missing? And thinking about how might we just offset that with some very direct customer listening around that group, or with some very specific knowledge, you know, some interviews or some engagement with different disability groups or different access needs, groups of different types... et cetera.
Clare:
Are the any examples you can talk to of where this has been done? Well, you don't have to name brand, but what the steps taken were and the outcome that was achieved from a business and customer perspective?
Christine:
I'll give an example of - I always love catching people that are a little bit... not surprising, it sounds terrible to get it right. But you know, government services are often under fire for not being designed well. We worked with the NHS on the Test and Trace app through COVID. And you know the team in the NHS engineering team - a group called Zuhkle Engineering - that were doing the design and development of it. And then there were two different research houses: ourselves, doing disability, aid and mental health and another research house that did all the mainstream, non-specific that we did, research. And we did that in the most - and under a lot of time pressure, there was a new app release every three weeks. Under a massive amount of criticality pressure because literally people were dying.
Christine:
You know, you couldn't get this wrong. There just wasn't an option to get it wrong because you'd kill people. You know it felt incredibly important because we needed to get the right information into the right hands, understood in a way that was actionable and protectable both for the individual and for others around them, as easily as possible. And we worked. So collaborative work was the starting point! What were the keys that made that work so well? Firstly, a team that wanted to collaborate. A team that turned up with intent and said, "I don't know what you do. I don't... you know, you know that better. Let me completely trust you in doing what you do really well. Tell me when I'm giving that to you in a useful way and tell me if I can do that better."
Christine:
And all of us had that attitude. So it just made it easy for us to find those edges of our capabilities and match them more neatly together. The other thing is it was regular and ongoing. So it wasn't trying to do, 'let's do this big project and understand the disabled Customer Experience of a test-and-trace app and then let's design it.' It was every three weeks we are running usability testing. We were also backing that with understanding of where people were dropping out of journeys and you know, just constant light and regular input. And we didn't get to it last time, but we need to make sure this time we've got someone involved with a characteristic that includes your ethnic diversity, linguistic diversity. You know, we haven't had someone who's a sign-language user for three rounds, time to bring them back in. So it's not trying to be perfect in any one lot, but building this ongoing wealth of knowledge of how people are engaging with this particular product, within a very specific environment, so that we could help them make the best decisions at the time.
Christine:
So that was one where, you know, it worked really well. Other times we've worked with organizations where they might start with a particular programme and it might have a very specific requirement. You know, maybe they'd had a failure, maybe that they've got something new going out, but whatever the driver for that which they want to programme. And we start with that. And they get this kind of... almost enough awareness and understanding of richness of how human diversity impacts their specific environment. Say banking or supermarkets or, you know, airport journeys or people opening bottles. You know, we're doing packaging at the moment with one of the biggest beverage companies. So they get enough learning about where some of those failures and friction are and then they start unpicking, right, what can we do? And then just over time they'll just keep bringing us in for, again, a little bit here to infuse this part of the journey we're making.
Christine:
It's those points of decision. I just anchor that back. What's the thing that's critical when you are making a decision, that's going to have an impact on a future product, service or environment or going to have a major kind of directional impact on what's limiting in the future? Because of that, that's where you need to inform it with that broader perspective. And so that kind of ongoing 'Right - refresh!', getting enough knowledge to know where to build it in and then ensuring that all the regular listening is done in an inclusive way, or done augmented by an inclusive element. So that you're not getting constantly-, if you think about it like a current of mainstreamed non-inclusive knowledge, isn't dragging you sideways so that you do this work and then you get dragged... and then you do the work and then... You actually need to make sure that the majority of your listening is done with consideration to human difference.
Clare:
So bringing this to the punchline then, of almost being out of time, what can CX practitioners do to make insights more complete and accurate to the full breadth of customer experiences?
Christine:
Think about rather than starting at the center- start at the edges. You won't necessarily get more time or money do the same work. So one way to be very efficient is rather than having, you know... say you've got an opportunity to interview 20 people, don't have 20 people with quite homogenous difference. You know, quite homogenous characteristics and context of use for that product. Start with people that are very significantly different. We often say you start at the edges, you get the middle for free because just because someone's a wheelchair user doesn't mean that they're not straight across the middle of the normal curve in many other characteristics. Just because someone's neurodivergent or comes from a deprived socioeconomic background doesn't mean that they're not going straight through that middle of the normal curve in many other areas. So rather than starting at the center and saying, oh, we'll do the 80% we'll get to the 20% later, which is our standard practice today, start at the 20% and you get the 80% for free.
Clare:
That's brilliant. I absolutely love that. And what a great piece of advice for our audience to take away. Before we go there, I just wanted to bring up something that I know we in other conversations have kicked around a little bit. Let's just finish off personas. What's your thoughts on inclusive personas?
Christine:
Such a good question. A persona is such a reducted version of human experience in itself. It's only helpful if it's reduced in a way that is meaningful and decision-supportive, as opposed to decision misinform - to make up a word, which I do. I have seen a lot of very dangerous personas that misinformed designers thinking that they're designing on the back of good customer understanding. And in fact, two things. One, the persona itself is quite filtered and a very thin or distorted limited perspective of the real range of customers experiencing that particular product. But secondly, it's then filtered through people's brains in a way that makes it even more reductive because of course we only have our own lived experience. And if you don't spend a lot of time considering how humans differ, it's quite hard to think, "oh, this persona, let me just think about how would that work if you know someone ... it's not just someone with sight loss, but it's someone with sight loss with an extreme use of assistive tech."
Christine:
They're an amazing power user or with a very limited range of assistive tech use. So even within one character, we're assuming, you know, say it's someone who's blind who uses a screen reader. Well, are they an advanced screen re-user? Are they a new screen-reader user? Have they just swapped phones and they've just swapped out of the Apple into iOS? It's so reduced. So as a lightweight tool that can go far, they go far. Are they actually supporting better design decisions? Most of them I think don't. And in fact I think most of them can be a sense of comfort, but not a sense of valuable information. Where personas are good - let me just flip it the other way - they can be useful. It's when they are whole characters! And we do personas sometimes. And what we'll do is we will ground them in very real people.
Christine:
And it might be two or three people that we amalgamate together, And we do completely depersonalize it by doing that. You know, mixing and matching a few people, but that depth of knowledge of that person then can come through and you are - all you're trying to do is pull forward those bits of their different characteristics and contexts of use that are relevant to that product or that service. So you're pulling through those bits that are really important for a designer to think of, you know, understanding. And so it's almost, you know, the other side of it is you then just turn it into where the barriers are in the environment, and you say there are people to which this is a really extreme barrier or there are many people that this isn't a barrier. How can you know what can we do about that?
Christine:
How many people are impacted? How profoundly are they impacted and what can we do? You were talking about, you know, the designing for all, but you can't always do that through universal design. That one-size-fits-all only takes you so far. Humans are too different for that to work all the way. So what adaptive alternatives, what different journey versions have you given people, that if the digital journey doesn't work for them, do they have a way to use a contact centre? Or what if they're deaf and they can't use a call centre? Is there a text version of that? or is there, you know, just knowing that there are multiple paths to get to experience? Experience is not linear. Experience is giving people paths through that best suit them.
Clare:
Yeah. And the reason I'm asking is because I was just again thinking about the takeaways, whether - because you talked about the people at their margins giving you the mainstream for free - basically from a research and insight point of view. So could, for example, a CX person that's trying to influence an organisation say, "Okay, we'll take our regular persona, let's just call him Dave. We'll give Dave a wheelchair for the purpose of this exercise and we'll take our persona of Mandy and actually, we'll give her..."
Christine:
Dyslexia?
Clare:
Yeah.
Christine:
And we'll say Craig's now got, you know - he is short of stature, you can do that.
Clare:
Does that work?
Christine:
The question is, how many people who are short of stature inform your character of Fred? Right? And do you actually understand what it is like living with that experience? Because living as someone who is not short of stature, I don't live in a world that is designed to be height exclusive to me. But if I then engage with my lovely friend Hanney or you know, people who are short of stature, or people who are wheelchair users who are shortened of stature by their wheelchair use, I can understand where those barriers exist. And therefore when I'm creating that persona in-, and I keep saying it, but humans are so complex, you can't understand them fully. But you can, and actually I'm just going to touch on this, I know we're just about time, but I think this is a really important point. There's a difference between empathy and making space. And there's so much noise around - we just still need to be more empathetic at the moment.
Christine:
Well, I can be as empathetic as I want, but I still can't understand what it's like to live at 3ft 6inch. I can't, I've not lived it. I can be as empathetic as I like, but I can't step into your brain and you can't step into mine and understand your divergence. So empathy is making space for people. It's not pretending and having the arrogance of thinking that I know what it's like to live someone else's life. I don't! But I can make space for them to tell me what it's like, relevant to the context of this particular design, this particular set of research, this particular challenge or innovation. And that's I think the power of empathy. It's not that it's not powerful, it's incredibly powerful, but it's not because we can live or understand or feel someone else's feelings. What we can do is make space for them to express, describe, and inform what we're doing.
Clare:
Okay. So if I were to summarize, I suppose my takeaways from this conversation are… Inclusion in research, the opportunity being to investigate the margins that will give you the centre for free. And you know, the tools bit is a bit challenging because you can make something inadvertently unhelpful by generalizing or overgeneralizing. That's a problem with personas anyway, isn't it? But through the research, making sure you have a clear perspective on the user needs and goals and how their disability impacts that so you can design for it. So considerations are made through the design process of those different user needs from a disability point of view, but critically user testing at prototype stage before you've actually invested and built something. Working with something, like a disability group, that represents people of lived experience. Rather than trying to use the empathy aspects of 'we've done all the right things from a persona and use case point of view'. Actually, engaging with an organisation like yourselves - or the many disability forums out there - to find people to actually help test your design and just feedback at the other end, isn't it?
Christine:
Yeah. And just picking up on that point, Clare...
Clare:
I may have very much oversimplified it, apologies.
Christine:
No, no! But just on that point of how and who do you engage with, not oversimplifying who you need to engage with as well. So let people guide you through where barriers might exist in your product. So rather than thinking, "Oh, it's a digital product, right? Well we need people who are blind and low vision so that we've got some screen reader users and those that, you know, magnify the content". And not understanding that actually, you know, digital products can exclude many people in many different ways. And it's not just AT assistive technology users, but it's actually content simplicity and clarity and navigation. And you know, if you think, "Oh I know which group. Well I'll just go to a group that deals with people with sight loss." Well that's all you're going to get because that's what they represent and they'll make sure that you get that.
Christine:
But you've missed the fact that there are all these other layers! So one - find the people in your business that have a broader understanding of disability, bringing them together. You might have ERGs and so on. Find groups that represent across the spectrum of disability because then they're not biased on, 'well I'm here to represent my thing.' Jam-Jar accessibility as I call it. It's really not very helpful. Humans are much...you know, way beyond their jam-jars. And then engage and constantly learn rather than thinking that this is a, 'I've done it at the beginning and then, you know, then we are done.' We've got that knowledge constantly lightly re-informed like you do in other areas of CX. And that other one which is to be quite demanding of suppliers. If you are commissioning research, who are you including and who are you excluding?
Christine:
And start asking, well how are you including them? Do they help you co-design the research? Are you even asking the questions in the right places because you've understood where in our environment we might be creating barriers? How are you including them in the tools and technologies and approaches you are using? And even what meaning are you taking away? Because if I then take the meaning away from a use of research that I've taken away through my brain and my understanding, I might have actually misheard and misunderstood. So we actually even co-create the understanding and check back in with those, with the lived experience to say, "This is what we heard. Was this correct? Did we synthesize it correctly?" Because actually there's quite a lot of misunderstanding even once the work's done. So just checking that you're getting the value you're paying for right through to the understanding that you've taken away.
Clare:
Awesome. Oh, unfortunately we now are out of time. But thank you so much for being here today, Christine.
Christine:
Pleasure!
Clare:
And thank you to everybody who listened or watched wherever you are. We'll see you all next time. Bye for now. Bye.
Christine:
And thank you, Clare, for making this space. I love it.
Clare:
You're welcome.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the episode, please drop us a like, subscribe and leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on, and if you want to know more about becoming a member of the world's first online community for women in Customer Experience, please check out www.womenincx.community/membership.
Well, that’s all for season six! Join us again soon for another inspiring series were, alongside amplifying the voices of more of our incredible community members, we’ll be talking to some extra special guests too!
