Learning and development is a key part of growing a business, but in order to be effective, and to earn buy-in from organizational leadership, it must be strategically aligned with larger business goals. The fall TICE event offers learning professionals opportunities to connect and collaborate with industry peers as they explore ways to build an effective learning strategy that drives growth and team performance.

Factors like budgeting, needs analysis, and stakeholder communications will be explored, as well as tactics like analytics, well-defined learning outcomes, tech integration, and continuous improvement–all of which can help to ensure the sustainability and longevity of an L&D strategy. 

As eLearning pros passionate about helping organizations turn training into their competitive advantage, we’re eager to connect with learning leaders and exchange insights on how best practices in tech + education can help enable their L&D strategies.

What to look forward to at the Fall Training Industry Conference & Expo (TICE)

This two-day virtual conference will feature exciting talks from 20 learning and development leaders across industries like healthcare, hospitality, technology, retail, and more. You can look forward to insights on topics like data analysis, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), and design thinking.

For example:

• Your Guide to Aligning Your Training Programs with Business Goals with Amy DuVernet
• When Design Thinking Meets Change Management You Find the Sweet Spot with Jackie Corbett
• Building a Learning Analytics Program to Support Your L&D Strategy with Christopher Massaro
• Aligning Technology to Support the Learning Strategy with Kim Davis

Register today!

Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to explore tactics to ensure L&D has a seat at your organization’s decision-making table. Get tickets for access to live and on-demand sessions for $99 USD.

Save your seat.

Ready to take your L&D strategy to the next level? We’d love to connect!

At Say Yeah, we’re committed to executing eLearning programs that bring your learning and development strategies to life in ways that drive organizational outcomes and enhance workplace performance. 

Get in touch with us to exchange insights on how to boost your L&D strategy with tech + education tactics.

Get in touch

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Attendees at the University of Guelph Accessibility Conference will get the opportunity to participate in workshops and informative sessions regarding themes such as IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility), education, UDL (Universal Design for Learning), and technology. Regardless if you are a novice or an expert on the topic of accessibility, everyone is welcome to attend!

Noteworthy sessions at the upcoming University of Guelph Accessibility Conference

• Mobile Accessibility: testing Mobile Sites and Native Apps for Accessibility, with Gian Wilde
• Creating Sustainable Accessible Interfaces, with Talyah Aviran
• Awareness of Assistive Technology in the Course Design Process Creates a More Egalitarian System, with Humberto Hernandez
• Accessibility is Everyone’s Responsibility: A Sustainable Team-Based Approach, with Mary Huang and Christine Hogenkamp

Check out the full lineup and conference schedule.

Register today!

Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn how you can leverage accessibility in your organization. Tickets start at $100. Sessions will be recorded and will be available for 30 days after the conference, along with transcripts.

Register here

Need help incorporating accessibility into your design process?

Learn about the differences between universal design, accessibility, and inclusive design in our blog post. Check out our approach to inclusive design and inclusive website design services.

Get in touch

The post The University of Guelph Accessibility Conference, May 24-26, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

When using images of people in your product or marketing content, those images should reflect the full range of diversity across your audience.

To consider your audience and their representation across your product and marketing content, you’ll need to reflect on the following:

• examples you describe
• photos or illustrations you use
• people who may be showcased as part of a video, podcast, event, or even the content writing team

A great way to get started with creating more inclusive content is to review your current content photography and illustration to confirm that the people shown in these images reflect the full diversity of your audience.

If you find that some of your audience is underrepresented, here are some excellent stock photography and illustration resources to help you update your existing content and plan your next update with inclusivity in mind.

Stock photography and illustration resources

Explore these 8 photography and illustration resources to bring more diversity and representation to your content.

Disability:IN

Disability:IN offers disability-inclusive stock photography to encourage corporations to use this in recruitment material, marketing material, internal and external communications, and more.

Browse Disability:IN photos

Affect the Verb: Disabled and Here

Disabled and Here is a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from a disabled perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

Browse Diabled and Here photos

WOC in Tech Chat

The WOC in Tech community has shared a series of photos representing women of colour in tech. Their ask is that we use these images in pieces about entrepreneurs, software engineers, infosec professionals, IT analysts, marketers, and other people who make up the tech ecosystem in order to show a different representation of all women in tech.

Browse WOC in Tech photos

Black Illustrations

Black Illustrations includes both free and paid illustrations of Black people across a variety of categories such as business, design, disability, LGBTQ+, and more.

Browse Black Illustrations

Tonl

Tonl offers a paid collection of culturally diverse stock photos that represent the true world we live in.

Browse Tonl photos

Nappy

Nappy offers a free collection of beautiful photos of Black and Brown people.

Browse Nappy photos

The Gender Spectrum Collection

The Gender Spectrum Collection is a non-commercial, free stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.

Browse Gender Spectrum photos

The Noun Project

The Noun Project has a series of photo collections offered for free with attribution or with a paid commercial license. Their collections include Diversity in Tech and more.

Browse Diversity in Tech photos

Pexels

While not exclusively providing underrepresented photos and topics, Pexels has been growing its diversity, accessibility, Black, pride, and other collections by working with many creators from diverse backgrounds.

Browse Pexels photos

Create more inclusive products and services

We offer a wealth of insight and expertise on inclusive design and delivering more inclusive products, services, and educational experiences. Reach out for the latest insights and to explore how we can work together to realize the bottom-line benefits of designing for market diversity.

Get in touch

The post Images and representation: creating more inclusive content appeared first on Say Yeah!.

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

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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.

Get in touch

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

With 40% of people having brains that work in neurodiverse ways that can impact comprehension, learning, and engagement, understanding how to accommodate neurodiversity is an important part of your product strategy and service design work.

What is neurodiversity?

At its most basic level, neurodiversity describes the differences in how people’s brains work, solve problems, think, and process information. This can include the impact of various neurodiverse conditions like ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Autism.

In design, all of these ways that people’s brains differ from one another also affect how they will interact and whether they will enjoy using your product or service. Benton et al in “Diversity for Design: A Framework for Involving Neurodiverse Children in the Technology Design Process”, 2014, note that children and people with diverse needs are “at risk of growing frustrated or bored with existing interactive technologies because their needs…are not well understood or identified.”

When designing for a neurodiverse population, consider these factors to minimize frustration with your product or service.

Tactical approaches to accommodating neurodiversity

• Avoid flashing images, excessive animations, and rapid changes to the interface or pictures. These changes can be both distracting and disorienting for people.
• Use highly-readable typefaces, such as sans serif typefaces like Open Sans, to increase readability and clarity (particularly for people with Dyslexia)
• Ensure you show information in a range of different ways to accommodate for different ways of learning. This includes a mix of text, images, video, and audio.

The ROI of inclusive design

As with many accommodations related to what have historically been defined as “edge cases”, planning for neurodiversity affords a series of benefits that include improving your products and services for everyone and reducing long-term development and maintenance costs.

Making products and services work for neurodiverse customers makes it easier for everyone to engage with your product or service. Alternatively, designing without considering neurodiversity risks alienating part of your market.

When 40% of people have brains that work in neurodiverse ways, not considering neurodiversity in your work limits your success and negatively impacts customer experience.

Whether it’s choosing colours that are less distracting to read or look at or avoiding disruptive animations or images, to making more fun, dynamic experiences, changes and designs that build on neurodiverse needs ultimately benefit all users of your product or service.

Let’s get started

Looking to bring inclusive design considerations to your product strategy and service design work?

Get in touch

The post Improving products and services by embracing neurodiversity appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Free to everyone, the event will host over 4000 attendees for talks, fireside chats, recruiting sessions and more.

The conference will focus on creating a welcoming tech space for Black and LatinX tech professionals to get inspired, network, and get connected with new opportunities, as well as enabling companies to level up their inclusive outreach and internal practices.

Full conference details

Talks we’re excited about

• Advanced UX: Managing the Designer and Researcher Relationship: How to Strategize and Build Together with Renee Reid and Harrison Wheeler
• Tech For Creating Social-Economic Impact, with Justin Samuels
• Inclusive Outreach – Where Action Meets Your Diversity Intentions, with Maasha Kah
• The Digital Divide and the Future of Work, with Geoffrey Starks and Kathryn Finney

Sign up for your free spot!

To get access to the four days of talks, networking events, and more, register for free on Eventbrite.

Register now

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