In fact, markets are more diverse than ever and are becoming increasingly so, moving us far from the wishful thinking of having a primary archetype to design for—and the hope that this will reduce product and service development efforts.

When there is no average, no archetype, no shortcut, what then?

The good news is: designing for market diversity helps your bottom line.

That’s because markets have always been inherently complex and traditionally simplistic ways of designing products and services for complex markets has limited their effectiveness.

Once you bring practices to your organization that consider the range of individuals who use your products and services—including recognizing all the intersectional factors that define markets as a series of individuals, not homogeneous archetypes or personas—you begin operating at a level that has a profound impact on both operations and customer experience.

Let’s quantify the bottom-line impact

Designing for the full spectrum of your market affords you a series of benefits. These include:

1. Discovering new market opportunities by connecting with and providing service to previously untapped areas of your market.
2. Improving customer access by removing barriers that limit access to your products, services, and content.
3. Growing engagement and conversions by providing more relevant, usable, and accessible products, services, and content.
4. Reducing the risk of human rights offences by being proactive about understanding accessibility standards, language considerations, and access rights.
5. Reducing the risk of unintentionally alienating parts of your market by being more aware of market expectations and more intentional about serving the full spectrum of your market.
6. Reducing ongoing costs by more efficiently planning and delivering products and services that serve your whole market, without the need for rework and retrofitting.
7. Reducing ongoing effort by starting on a path that makes it easier for everyone to engage with your products, services, and content.

A roadmap for organizational transformation

By avoiding boxing people in by demographics and assumptions through more intentional market definition and user research considerate of the full diversity of your market, you can more deeply understand customer intent, journeys, and behavioural patterns that influence when and how people will use your product or service.

By following an approach to product strategy and service design that is more inclusive of your entire customer base, you have the opportunity to open up market access while reducing risk across your organization.

While this approach may shift your product and service teams away from familiar design and marketing processes by doing away with archetypes and personas, this shift offers a significant opportunity to reshape your organization as an operational and customer experience leader.

Get started with inclusive design

We have established processes across both the public and private sectors for realizing the impact of designing for market diversity across your organization.

As the diversity of the markets you serve continues to grow, there’s no better ROI than inclusive design. Let’s connect to discuss how we can help bring these practices—and their bottom-line benefits—to your organization.

Get in touch

The post How designing for market diversity helps your bottom line appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The diversity of communities has radically increased over the last 100 years across racial, cultural, and other lines, including where people come together across spaces, communities, and relationships. This increased societal diversity lends itself to more diversity in the markets that make up product and service users. This increased customer diversity and resulting shifting expectations of the organizations consumers engage with make it critical to understand why and how these trends can impact your products and services.

3 global trends are increasing community diversity

Let’s explore the trends that have led to this increased diversity over the last 150 years.

1. Immigration
2. Interracial marriage
3. The increasing diversity of urban and rural regions

Immigration

Immigration has accelerated across the world over the last 50 years.

In 2019, the UN reported that the number of migrants internationally hit 271 million people, up from 84 million in the 1970s.

As people move, they take their cultures, unique lived experiences, and perspectives with them, making their new home more diverse and culturally connected.

Interracial marriage

The increasing prevalence of interracial marriage is another driver of increasing diversity, particularly in North America and Western Europe. In the US alone, interracial marriage increased from around 2% of all marriages in the 60s to more than 18% in 2015, with the curve continuing to trend upwards.

Image source: What’s behind the rise of interracial marriage in the US?, The Guardian, 2018

The increasing diversity of both urban and rural regions

While the past 150 years have seen a dramatic increase in urbanization—including the growth of urban centre melting pots of multi-ethnic communities—over the last few decades, not only have urban areas experienced an increase in diversity but so have rural areas.

Nine out of 10 rural places experienced increases in diversity from 1990 to 2010 according to The Conversation.

The World Urban forum noted that “Cities such as San Francisco, Toronto, Abu Dhabi, and Brussels are among the most culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse with 35 to 58 percent of their populations being foreign-born.”

All of these changes and shifts around the world are leading to more diverse communities and the breaking down of barriers towards new cultural and brand connections as part of a growing global cultural mosaic.

Historical approaches to product strategy and service design do not serve today’s customers

Historically, designers have worked to design for the average, intentionally normalizing how we deliver products and services to cover as much of the market as possible without putting in the effort to understand market nuance, going by the general rule being the average will cover about 80% of the market.

As growing diversity trends have accelerated, among other intersectional considerations, this average has been replaced with a mosaic of unique individuals. In reality, there is no 80% average and in fact, your audience is more likely to be individualistic than average. As such, designing for the average no longer works.

We need to adapt to serve diverse communities by serving the diversity of our customer groups, understanding behaviour over demographics, and designing for individuals, not archetypes.

Ready to get started with inclusive design?

We’re here to help. And it’s part of our DNA.

Definition: What is inclusive design?

Deep dive: Our approach to inclusive design.

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The post How the growing diversity of customer segments and communities is impacting product and service design appeared first on Say Yeah!.