MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Serve More Customers With Inclusive Product Design

Imagine a product that millions of people find frustrating to use because of a design choice that could have easily been avoided. If it were your product, wouldn’t you want to know who was frustrated by it and why, how to fix the problem, and how your organization could avoid making similar mistakes in the future?

Obviously, letting a customer down is bad for business. Yet some products do this every day, unintentionally.

Consider, for instance, how marketers and designers use color to create a distinct visual identity for their products and brands. Decisions about color are often based on the expectation that all users can see the colors that are chosen. But such an assumption might unintentionally exclude colorblind users, who account for 8% of the global population. Recognizing the importance of designing for accessibility, Adobe Color provides accessibility tools that enable designers to select hues directly from the color wheel at the start of the design process, helping them to avoid issues later.

About the Author

Vanessa M. Patrick is the Bauer Professor of Marketing at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. She has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and is the author of the book The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No That Puts You in Charge of Your Life (Sourcebooks, 2023). Jeffrey D. Shulman is a podcaster, filmmaker, and catalyst for change who helps organizations achieve the outcomes that matter to them. He is the Marion B. Ingersoll Professor of Marketing at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.

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