One of the most common ways to approach product and service objectives is to create personas and conduct research based on 'average' target users. But this approach falls apart when you consider that every person has a variety of shifting needs, identities, and contexts of use.

In my talk, "There is no average person. Why it's critical to design with intersectionality in mind", I highlight the research behind prioritizing individuals over averages and how inclusive research practices can grow the impact of your work. 

You'll leave the talk with an improved understanding of markets, new approaches to opening up market access, insights on how to deliver products and services that better serve increasingly diverse markets, and an understanding of the ROI of inclusive design practices.

Interested in bringing this talk to your organization?

Hi, I’m Lee. And I’d like to tell you about my talk, “There is no average person. Why it’s critical to design with intersectionality in mind.”

My motivation behind the talk stems from a sweeping, industry-wide problem we need to address.

Looking at websites alone as a lens, we can see that well over 90% of websites do not meet basic accessibility objectives. And accessibility is only part of the story.

The result of our industry’s collective inability to deliver products and services for all means that 90% of websites actively limit access, usability, and content engagement.

This industry-wide problem doesn’t begin and end with websites. It’s a part of how we work in developing any products or services.

We design for the average and avoid the edge cases.

My talk highlights the flawed methodologies and the real data that shows there is no average to target or edge case customer to avoid.

You’ll have the evidence you need to bring this discussion back to your team members.

With practical considerations around customer markets and segmentation, product and service planning, and the ROI of inclusive design.

That way, you’ll be able to turn discussions from “why would we invest in serving edge cases” to “why aren’t we serving our whole market.”

In my talk, I highlight the research behind prioritizing individuals over averages and how inclusive research practices can grow the impact of your work. 

Understanding why it's critical to design products and services with intersectionality in mind

Inclusive design

Let’s explore in this video the three main ways the accessibility and inclusion landscape has advanced over the last three decades, and why we’ve never been closer to access for all than we are today.

As the Americans With Disabilities Act turns 30 we find ourselves at an exciting inflection point in history.

There are three factors that are together building towards the most accessible, most welcoming, most inclusive world we’ve seen over the course of humanity.

As awareness of individuality continues to grow and reach acceptance, as the differences between all of us and our intersectional and shifting needs are considered and as we see an increase in acknowledgement of marginalized communities and the systems that limit access and opportunity, all of this collective progress and ongoing change has helped those of us who are responsible for designing products and services, find new ways of working that better serve people.

Our collective efforts towards access and opportunity for all are supported by legislation, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA alongside AODA, which is an equivalent legislation here in Ontario, Canada, as well as many other global and regional accessibility compliance and human rights requirements. This legislation has helped raise the profile of accessible solutions and the cost of noncompliance.

All of this applies to our physical world as it does to digital, but it’s 

technology, especially digital channels that are the third factor.

Over the past 10 years, a combination of computer power, software, and interaction models in web browsers, apps, and other connected devices have made it easier than ever to engage with content.

As an example, 15 years ago, screen readers that help translate interfaces on screens into words that are spoken aloud costs thousands of dollars. Now they’re built into your smartphone in ever more intuitive ways. You can see this yourself if you turn on VoiceOver on an iPhone, or TalkBack on Android.

This combination of access to previously expensive technology that is now a default part of the most widely used devices in the history of humanity changes everything, but this is also why it’s so important that all designers take the time now to build accessible and inclusive practices into their work.

It’s easier than ever to access content if we designed for access and it’s easier than ever to design for access, because the tools are available to all of us.

Let’s work together to realize the impact of this inflection point and ensure access for all.

Are you ready to try out VoiceOver on iPhone or TalkBack on Android?

We mentioned in the video two different screen reading technologies: VoiceOver and TalkBack, for iPhone and Android respectively.

Looking at your website and the content you promote through these services is an excellent way to understand how capable these services are and if you have any gaps in how you’re sharing content that may be limiting your access to market.

Here’s how to enable these accessibility tools:

How to enable screen reading on an iPhone (VoiceOver)

VoiceOver is a screen reading accessibility feature on iOS that reads content on the screen aloud and enables gesture control of the device.

You can turn on VoiceOver on an iPhone using the following steps:

1. In your phone’s settings, tap on the accessibility section

2. Once in the accessibility menu, VoiceOver is the first option under “Vision”

3. In the settings for VoiceOver, there is a toggle switch to turn on/off VoiceOver, and other options to customize things like reading speed, speech, and commands.

 How to enable screen reading on an Android device (TalkBack)

Similar to VoiceOver on the iPhone, Android devices on the newer editions of the Android operating system have a screen reading feature called TalkBack.

You can turn on TalkBack using these steps:

1. In the phone’s settings, tap on the “Accessibility” option

2. Once in the accessibility menu, tap on the “TalkBack” option

3. From there, you should get a pop-up window asking if you want to enable TalkBack on the device. Once you confirm, TalkBack will be turned on and activated.

Whether it’s apps, websites, or web apps, determining the accessibility of these digital products is best done 

through real testing with accessibility tools and the people who use them.

accessible research, design, and testing processes

 into your team’s workflow from the start, saving time and money by avoiding future reworks to meet usability and 

Need help improving accessibility and inclusion in your products and services?

Get in touch to learn how inclusive design can help your team can open up access to markets by delivering more usable, accessible, and inclusive products and services.

We find ourselves at an exciting point in history where three factors have made our world more accessible and inclusive than ever before.

What’s next for accessibility and inclusion in products and services?

The 150 year old myth that’s screwing up your service model and product strategy

Level 2: Establish a welcoming corporate culture

Level 3: Design inclusive products and services

What can you do to level up your inclusive maturity?

As digital transformation has been an increasing enterprise and public sector priority over the past decade, we’ve been charting industry-wide progress in meeting digital transformation objectives across both operational and consumer-centric areas of service. Working with organizations across myriad industries over the past decade, from enterprise to startups, public sector to not-for-profits, we’ve seen some 

 in how prepared and capable organizations are when it comes to digital transformation and 

 work is executing an organizational digital maturity assessment. By measuring the digital maturity of an organization, we can gauge where challenges in planning, decision-making, and execution can be expected, and work with this knowledge to support improving service delivery and customer experience.

For years this has formed the basis of our work in helping organizational “level up” in the processes they use to develop more capable teams and improved product and service outcomes. 

Digital and technology literacy training, service design and product strategy processes, and 

mapping organizational ecosystems and markets

, however mature these processes may be, have historically been modelled based on an 

This presents a challenge for organizations of all backgrounds when they’re growing their digital capability through training and hiring, and continuing age-old practices that underdeliver value.

So let’s take a brief look at this myth and how it’s impacting your product and service offerings.

There’s a commonly held tenet that by designing for the “average” person we can serve 80% of the market. That we need to focus on the “average” and avoid the edge cases for efficiency and scale.

Why is this a fallacy? Simply put: because there is no average person.

As a species, we have never looked like, been built like, or acted like any kind of average. Certainly, societal ideals and standards of behaviour lent a false credibility to the average fallacy over the decades.

But as we have accelerated our geographic and cultural mobility toward multiculturalism, pluralism, and mixed relationships, the lines have been radically blurred from those legacy ideals.

And an increasingly self-aware society blurs those lines even further in recognizing gender identifies, neurodiversity, and other characteristics and behaviours. Characteristics that move us so beyond a possible average that we can hardly justify grouping people into any kind of archetype or persona.

“Personas often contain a compilation of ‘average’ characteristics that, put together, actually represent no one.” ~ Margaret Price, Kill Your Personas, Microsoft Design, 2018

This is made all the more complex because, even as individuals, we are hardly static in our own behaviour, beliefs, and identities, which can change by mood, life status, or simply day to day needs.

This means that when we design for the average we are increasingly designing for no one. That impacts the quality, capability, and credibility of our products and services themselves, how we articulate value to markets, and how markets perceive those products and services.

For a deeper dive, read the full “average” fallacy article

Thankfully, there is a better way. And that is to work to serve the diversity of the markets your organization operates in by thinking individuals over archetypes: moving beyond the average, beyond the archetype, and working toward understanding all the nuances of individuals. Embracing fluidity, intersectionality, and a diversity of market. That’s what diversity, equity, and inclusion helps organizations achieve, and that’s why it’s the only path to effectively serving diverse markets and the individuals who are a part of them.

To get there, you need to work through a series of processes that are 

 to reshape your organization and outcomes. But before you make the leap to process and activities, understanding where your organizational maturity sits across the three levels of inclusive maturity is the knowledge you’ll need to highlight gaps, opportunities, and priorities. In other words, as much as it’s important to uncover and track an organization’s digital maturity, so too is it essential to understand and shape your organization’s inclusive maturity.

So let’s look at those three levels of maturity on the path to diversity, equity, and inclusion excellence.

Many companies have embarked on their own diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) journey. With plenty of data and examples of how more diverse workforces can deliver more effective products and services, for-profit and public sector leaders have been working increasingly hard to bring these capabilities to their organizations.

In a study done by Boston Consulting Group, “companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation”- World Economic Forum

In addition, when companies are more diverse, they inherently are more likely to innovate outside of existing solutions, driving significant increases in revenue for the company, and better product and service outcomes. Companies with above-average diversity had nearly 20% more average revenue created from innovation.

When organizations begin their DEI journey, they typically begin a 3-step journey across three levels of maturity, Which is not to oversimplify this journey. There are challenges at each level and they cover distinct organizational units, each requiring leadership support to achieve success.

Let’s look at these three levels of maturity in detail.

This is a natural place for an organization to start their DEI initiatives. When leadership understands the value of establishing a more diverse workforce, recruiting is tasked with reaching out to a broader spectrum of candidates, and the path to inclusive maturity begins.

The objective: you have a homogeneous workforce, therefore you look to hire a diverse workforce.

From a process point of view, your organization will establish inclusive recruiting processes to fill gaps in the current mix of employees. This involves being intentional about how you present the organization, job opportunities, and how and where you post opportunities. This will include reaching out to organizations, communities, recruiters, and established educational institutions to connect with a broader range of potential recruits. You may go so far as supporting or establishing additional training and youth programs to support a next generation of diverse talent. You will absolutely review hiring practices, tackle topics like unconscious biases, and be considerate of wage gaps and opportunities for people who do not identify within the makeup of your currently homogenous team.

The challenge: you hire a diverse group of people, but they are not welcome within your culture.

Hitting this Level 1 wall is a big hit to your organization. All the effort that’s gone into recruiting and hiring practices is undermined if those hires aren’t supported once they start work.

Diverse employees who are brought into homogenous cultures last an average of 6 months before they need to get the heck out of there!

Think of how this impacts an organization: recruiting efforts are costly; then you train to get people up to speed. You bring excellent talent into the organization and have the opportunity to learn and improve from their experience and unique perspective in your otherwise homogenous culture, but they are not only not set up to success, but chances are you’ll lose them within months.

Not only is there the cost of a failed hire, but there’s opportunity cost here in failing to deliver product and service enhancements because you lose that expertise and perspective.Worse still, you risk losing access to entire employee markets if your corporate culture is deemed toxic for some people.

As a result, you must mature into establishing a welcoming corporate culture.

There’s a natural progression here. As you hire more diverse employees into a homogenous culture, you need to establish protocols and processes to support this more diverse group of individuals. When people can bring their authentic selves to work, have the comfort to be themselves, and feel a sense of belonging, they can excel. More importantly, they can dramatically impact the capability of the team to deliver exceptional products and services.

A report on the importance of belonging in the workplace noted that “ Feelings of belonging have been related to a variety of positive work behaviours and, for some employees, can be an even greater motivator than compensation. In addition, scientists claim that humans cannot be healthy-emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or physically-without feeling connected to others. Consequently, implementing belonging strategies will result in organizational benefits.” ~ Feminuity,

There’s been a lot of tech community work, research, and practice around efforts to establish processes around developing more inclusive work cultures. Internal organizational priorities within Human Resources-and the advent of the Chief Diversity Officer and related roles-have led to significant capability and focus in achieving inclusive cultures within organizations.

The objective: through inclusive workplace practices you develop a more welcoming and inclusive work environment.

This has helped address the retention issues of Level 1 focused organizations. Where inclusive workplace environments retain diverse talent and offer an opportunity for people from many varied and intersectional backgrounds to succeed.

In fact, established diverse product and service teams are both empowered to and successfully shape product and service. However, it’s not enough to attempt to build a diverse organization in the hopes that the outcome is a product or service that meets the requirements of a diverse market.

The issue being that even with a more diverse team, two factors come into play:

Teams default to designing for themselves. The more diverse your team, the more likely they’ll develop products and services that serve a greater number of people because there are different voices, different experiences, and different perspectives at the table.

But the complexity of the market means that you can’t hope to hire a diverse enough product and service team to serve all the facets of the individuals that make up that market by relying on your team to naturally meet all those individual and intersectional expectations.

Serving the varied individuals that make up a broadly diverse market doesn’t happen by accident, it requires intention to move beyond an internal team and connect with the people the organization serves directly and authentically. And that’s where Level 3 of inclusive maturity becomes a necessity.

Level 3 is all about intention. There’s a clear segue from recruiting to establishing a welcoming workplace. You’re focusing on strengthening, growing, and scaling your internal capabilities in order to deliver better products and services. But the very nature of this relationship between Level 1 and Level 2 highlights the gap: it’s insular. You’re focused on your internal culture, and missing how your organization manifests itself to the market.

The key to Level 3 is shifting perspective from inside the organization to who the market is and being intentional about engaging with the diverse individuals who make up that market.

The objective: by establishing practices to engage in an authentic manner with the diverse makeup of your market, you can provide products and services that capture more market share.

The requirements to achieve this objective include having a comprehensive approach to delivering products and services that focuses on 

. Together, these core values ensure that no user is left behind, and your products and services thrive by serving a diverse market.

 ensuring a frictionless, engaging, and delightful experience.

 ensuring there are no barriers to serving someone.

 welcoming diverse market segments to engage authentically with your organization.

The challenge: product teams have to break the cycle of designing for the average and find ways to connect with and serve diverse individuals.

Breaking the cycle of designing for the average through personas and archetypes is a challenging effort for most product teams as it goes against much of what has been taught and learned. The best product and service teams have taken steps through methodologies such as use cases, jobs-to-be-done, and the behavioural objectives and outcomes of users. But this still is not enough if there aren’t processes to welcome the broad spectrum of the market into the discussion.

Diverse product and service teams have the added benefit of already having some breadth of the market in the room by virtue of the different voices and perspectives they already have in the room, but if the tendency remains to just design for the voices in the room, the market will still remain underserved.

That’s why it’s so essential to follow inclusive design practices that go beyond Level 1 and 2 DEI objectives. And be intentional about connecting with and learning from the diverse people who make up your market.

By implementing inclusive practices within your organization, from 

, you’ll be prepared to serve more diverse markets more effectively.

Understanding your organization’s inclusive maturity at each level is the knowledge you need to uncover the gaps, opportunities, and priorities that will help you connect and capture the full scale of the market you serve. This sets you up for being more capable and intentional with your DEI strategy.

Understand the 3 levels of inclusive maturity: recruiting, corporate culture, and designing inclusive products and services.

The next phase of organizational transformation: inclusive maturity

Let’s take a look at the roots of this myth

What’s next for service design and product strategy

We humans tend to follow destructive patterns of practice when it comes to the introduction of new technologies. We seem to either 

 in trying to grapple with a technology and adapt it to profoundly satisfying ways of changing our lives, or we 

 that have—through an act of generational broken telephone—become so far removed from their original intent that they’re now inapplicable to modern practice. Or, worse still, were so foolishly formed in their inception that they were almost instantly irrelevant, but time and abstraction have established them as principles of practice.

In the early days of the Internet, you could see the former unfolding in web design. 

 and early HTML specialists were learning about the pipes that powered the internet and the HTML that presented it, while working hard to relearn all the tenets of visual design, instead of applying 100s of years of 

. The result was an almost infinite wave of garish websites (hello 

). Democratization of the medium, low resolution screens, and basic web browsers on underpowered consumer computers surely played a role, but this was all exacerbated by a misconception that design needed to be wholly reinvented because the medium was a glowing screen and not a piece of paper.

. We overcame that foolishness and can point to strong practices such as interaction design, software engineering, and more, borrowing important tenets from graphic design, industrial design, manufacturing, and other fields. The issue is, despite some of these great successes in adapting principles of practice for the Web and establishing new practices to serve the medium, we have been leaning on a fallacy that has been impacting the products and services we develop to serve people on the Web and in person.

This is a fallacy that was tenuous at best when it was first identified, yet not only crossed over from an objective of defining external physical averages, but managed to become a standard tool for engineering, marketing, and design. It’s a fallacy that has since been adopted as a key tenet for focusing product strategy. A tenet that, in practice, leads to inferior products which, at best, reduce access to markets and, at worst, lead to public outcries, boycotts, lawsuits, and fines.

It’s the fallacy of the average person.

 The commonly held tenet that by designing for the “average” person we can serve 80% of the market. That we need to focus on the “average” and avoid the edge cases for efficiency and scale.

“There’s this myth that endures to this day that shows up in design and engineering: the 80/20 rule. You design for the middle of that curve, and we’ll get to the 20% later. What if there was no such thing as a normal human being? If there’s no normal, there’s no edge cases–just diverse people changing from one moment to the next.” ~ 

Let's take a look at the roots of this myth

In the 1840s, Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet—a mathematician at the time—undertook a series of studies on the human body. This was a departure from his usual work in the field of astronomy. He wanted to define the “Average Man” in terms of body proportions, height, and weight. To calculate these proportions, he measured as many people as possible in order to gather data on a range of different body characteristics.

The result? The Quetelet index, or, what we know today as the 

 (BMI). The formula that he devised based on all of these measurements purports that the weight of a person goes up as the square of the height increases. Then, by calculating BMI for average heights, Quetelet could extrapolate to determine the proportions of the Average Man. In addition, he also worked on formulas for average heath, average number of people in poverty, and average age of marriage. His lens of sociology was focused entirely on determining averages to understand a population.

This lens, however useful it may be for generalizing populations, is not without its flaws. In fact, even the most well known and used of Quetelet’s average formulas (the BMI) has had several issues identified by the medical community, including its lack of basis in genuine physiology and variance (e.g. muscle and bone density) and how these types of average formulas cannot be used to understand individuals. Even at a population level, these averages discount anyone who falls outside of them, which is still a significant portion of the population.

These formulas also had logic issues, in that Quetelet was arbitrarily squaring numbers to match the patterns he wanted to show in the data. There is little mathematical reason to do this, in essence he was “hacking” the formula to match what he wanted to demonstrate. This concept of the average human is essentially based on rigged formulas, rather than on rigorous scientific method.

To then use Quetelet’s findings as the basis for making product and service decisions is downright foolish. His findings didn’t hold much merit in the 1840s and, as individuals, we have continued to shift ever further outside of his arbitrary boundaries since then. Even the concept of archetypes and personas (finding key common groups of people to design for) does our products and services, and the consumers who engage with them, a great disservice.

Think of yourself. How your body feels right now, your moods, your day to day activities, when you commute, when you’re at home, when you’re out with friends or visiting family. There’s so much nuance to who we are and how we engage with the world and even with ourselves.

Who you are right now isn’t who you may be when you’re under pressure, or surprised to hear from an old friend, or just plain grumpy for a moment, or an hour, or a day.

Let’s not even focus on who you feel you are, but how you engage with the world. When you’re at home versus on the go you have different modes of engagement. Different ways of interacting. Thinking just digitally, you may be on your phone while you commute, using a smart watch at the gym. An iPad at home. A computer at work.

From a physical point of view, do you wear glasses? What if you don’t have them on? Don’t want to put them on? What if you’re watching a video and can’t put the sound on because of where you are or who’s around you? What if you sprain your wrist tomorrow? Or break a leg? How does all of this impact you?

And when considering all of this nuance and possibility, how can you define a you, an archetype, a persona that is fixed that explains who you are? We surely can’t define archetypes that cover a wide range of us when—with all of this change within even ourselves—we aren’t even an archetype of ourselves.

As a species, we have never looked like, been built like, or acted like any kind of average. Certainly, societal ideals and standards of behaviour lent a false credibility to the average person fallacy over the decades.

“Though today an average person isn’t thought to embody perfection, it is presumed that an average person is a prototypical representative of a group—a type.” ~ 

How the Idea of a ‘Normal’ Person Got Invented,

Another blow to commonly employed design processes—suggesting that we do away with archetypes and personas—but one that offers so much more opportunity than making product and service decisions based on a flawed methodology.

While the objective of a persona is to provide an overview of a group of people, outlining expectations around preferences and behavioural patterns, personas present a very serious challenge in that individuals themselves are constantly shifting in their preferences and behaviours.

“Personas often contain a compilation of ‘average’ characteristics that, put together, actually represent no one.” ~ 

We need to move beyond the average, beyond the archetype, and work toward understanding all the nuances of individuals. Embracing fluidity, intersectionality, and a diversity of market. That’s the only way we can effectively serve the whole market.

To deliver truly impactful products and services that serve diverse markets, we can and must do better. 

 provide a foundation for taking those steps, but it’s intentionality and methodologies around engaging, listening, learning, and adapting to individuals and diverse markets that are the sea changes in process that are required. That’s inclusive design. 

And it’s something that’s baked into our DNA.

We’d welcome the chance to learn more about how you’re building these kinds of processes into your product and service work, or how we can help you get started.

The fallacy of the average person. The commonly held tenet that by designing for the “average” person we can serve 80% of the market. It doesn't exist.