Social Business Design has replaced the rush for cheaper, faster, more. The survival and prosperity of well-known web businesses now rests on their ability to include us all.
It was a red-hot morning and the school disinfectant smelt particularly strong. The doors were wedged open at the back of the school hall, but there was little movement in the air to have any affect. Still, I took up my position on the concrete floor and tried to find comfort in what was likely to be another agonising assembly. The heat fuelled chatter beginning to fill the room but this was soon cooled by the entrance of our Headmistress – Mrs Burden. We all thought the world of her, but she also commanded our immediate respect. “Good morning” she said. “Today we have some special visitors from the Royal National Institute of Blind People” (or the RNIB ). “This should be interesting” I thought, and I was right. Almost 24 years later I can still remember this particular talk, not so much the words, but the technology on display. There was a red ball that made a loud screech (I still don’t know what that was for to this day), a mug that bleeped when the water reached the rim, and a whole host of specialist canes and telephones with mega-sized buttons. Great, but even at the age of eight something wasn’t quite right. The motivations behind these solutions were true and good, but the manifestation of the design was the great disappointment. Not only does a vision impaired person have to make sense of a life without eyesight, they are subject to equipment that is, well, simply “not cool” – that was the impression of an eight year old.
Looking at those technologies today I might better understand the importance and freedom they brought to people’s lives, but the young man’s hunch was probably correct. The design far being from being inclusive was actually building barriers. The technology with its loud and garish appearance was labelling people, and when we label people we tend to categorise them, and when we categorise we leave the door open to stigma and preconceived ideas. These preconceived ideas take hold and the paradigm is set. Industry and society are able to produce simple responses to that category or group. Worse than that, it takes away the problem. Industry and invention can get on with getting on, safe in the knowledge that access is most likely someone else’s problem – in this case the RNIB. This, sadly, was the lesson I took from that sweltering hot assembly hall. The RNIB will look after the blind group. Unless I want to join the RNIB I don’t really need to worry about it. The same can be said for the environment. Organisations like Green Peace for all their brilliance tend to take the problem away. “Those green peace boats are on top of it, so I don’t need to worry”. And even if Green Peace falls short, technology will likely fix the problem. This, of course, is wholly wrong and unfair.
I am sorry to report that this mindset continued to play out in my early professional career. Like many ambitious, head-strong twenty somethings I was saddling up my horse and on route to those rivers of gold – getting on with the business of building web sites and creating online initiatives. But I may have missed a trick, because not once did I think about accessibility. It seemed to me as a nice-to-have. Something to think about once the race was won. If I had given it a moments thought then I would likely have come across the W3C guidelines, but these in themselves are inaccessible to anyone but the most savvy of web engineers. When money and time is tight the three hundred page document does little to inspire hope. Innovation is once again put first – cheaper, faster, more. The other stuff can be fixed later.
Over the last several weeks I have been working for Media Access Australia (MAA). It has been a humbling and enlightening experience. For one, the challenge is startling. They are up against the steal tank of preconceived ideas. They know that access issues are unlikely to be fixed overnight, but having said that, everyone at MAA has a success story. They have, in each of their relevant disciplines brought about a dramatic change in access to cinema, TV, education and new media. Over the last six weeks I have been fortunate to work with Dr Scott Hollier. Scott has a degenerative eye condition by the name of Retinitis Pigmentosa but it is not in Scott’s nature to dwell on this point. In a show-stopping presentation to the Australia Broadcasting Commission (ABC) Scott started by saying “I have lived a full and good life”. This line was quickly followed up with an acute pronouncement that “At some point in all our lives we have to manage and cope with some form of disability – whether it be ourselves, a friend or a family member”. My early dogmas were beginning to erode and I was sufficiently motivated to learn more.
With my interest roused, I started to do some research. I immediately came across a study commissioned by Microsoft (2004) showing that among adult computer users in the United States 1 in 4 has a vision difficulty, 1 in 4 has a dexterity difficulty, and 1 in 5 has a hearing difficulty. There may well be overlap in those groups listed, but adding up the numbers suggest that 40% of the population has an impairment of some description. 40%! If these numbers are only half true it would not be too bold to propose the following hypothesis:
H0: If a site is accessible, it is more likely to access a greater share of the market and succeed.
H1: If a site is inaccessible, it is less likely to access a greater share of the market and will not succeed.
According to some analysts, if a site is accessible, it is also a third quicker to all other users, suggesting that a route to the mainstream market can now be forged through innovations that are directly concerned with accessible design or Social Business Design. There are a number of practical reasons why this makes sense, for example, web services are increasingly being accessed through iPhones, mobiles and notebooks. A mobile version of the site is less cluttered and often more accessible and intuitive to us all. Obliterating the flash elements and providing alternative or transcribed media content of photos, videos, and audio will undoubtedly improve a web-sites search rankings, moreover, and as we have noted, an accessible site is typically a usable site, and in an age of limited patience this can not be ignored.
Where is the evidence?
Consider Google for one moment. At its inception (circa 1998) the web was made up of a number of cluttered portals – windows to the web that listed sites under entertainment, health, and arts. Google saw this and decided to walk the other way. They kept it simple, adopting a search box and an ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. This simple design paired with useful results attracted a loyal following to the service. Accessibility was a cornerstone of their growth and success. Google.com is still arguably the most accessible website on the planet.
- Portals like Yahoo maintained a cluttered and busy interface.
- The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results.
Perhaps this was an early indication of social thinking in the modern day gold rush, but has this been repeated in history? The California Gold Rush of 1848, sparked by James Wilson Marshall, resulted in thousands of men, women and children arriving in the sunshine valleys in search of their fortune. Those early settlers soon advanced sophisticated methods for the recovery of gold – cheaper, faster, more. Cheaper – cut back on your possessions and pack up your wagon. Faster – develop more sophisticated methods of gold recovery. More – retrieve as much gold as you can. However, the euphoria eventually tempered and the gold seekers began to develop a social conscience, building churches, schools and even systems of law and government. They gave time to cementing their place in the world and putting the lives of others first. It might be argued, they recognised the importance of social business or the social economy that they were in.
This could well be food for thought for the savvy entrepreneur. The twist suggests that we should now lead with a social innovation. It is no longer a case of producing a technically brilliant product, pitching to the early adopters, hoping that it filters into the mainstream, and then, and only then, if the company does sufficiently well adopting a social conscious and building the accessibility features in. Social business design is now central to modern day business. The web asks us to obliterate the categories and labels that once defined access to technology, services and normal life experiences. It is no longer okay to leave the social aspects to the end, and if this strategy were adopted today it would most likely sound the death knell to any early stage startup and even an already well established business.
- Existing paradigm: Innovate, pitch to the early adopters, convince the mainstream and trust that a third-party group will fix the access problems.
- New paradigm: Successful organisations will now lead with Social Business Design.
Reena Jana suggested in a recent Business Week article that Apple’s success can be put down in part to features that were created to help disabled people use their products more effectively, including voice commands, touch screens (iPhone), and even audible navigation (iPod shuffle). Peter Abrahams takes this further and observes a more significant twist in the Apple product strategy. Not only are they including accessibility features in all of their products, to the benefit of the impaired as well as the regular user, but they are actually leading their marketing campaigns with this message.
“Apple products have included accessibility functions for many years, the difference in the latest release is that Apple is making accessibility a significant part of the marketing of the products. In the recent Snow Leopard release of Mac OS X, accessibility is one of the bullets on the first page of the announcement.” Peter Abrahams.
Perhaps the real genius of Apple is that their technologies attain to be, and often are, accessible to all. The vision or hearing impaired no longer have to be saddled with a mobile phone designed with mega-sized buttons or even that screeching red ball. The labels and categorisations have been obliterated. Not only that, the original hypothesis begins to show strength. Apple is succeeding and how!
Apple are not alone. According to the Social Media Accessibility Review produced by Media Access Australia, Facebook undertook a comprehensive design review to improve the way we all share and discover information on the service. As part of this review the company partnered with the America Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to make the site more accessible to users who are blind or vision impaired. Undoubtedly other factors are at play, but by focussing their design effort on accessibility Facebook opened up their service to an additional 40% of the overall market. Facebook is now the number one social network in the US with more than 300 million active users. MySpace, in comparison, is in free-fall having lost over 30% of the market this last year. MySpace is an inaccessible site. It has failed to deliver any accessibility policy and has no evidence of accessible design built into the service.
TED (a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading) has sought to open up their talks to new audiences, nationalities and languages by offering interactive transcripts. TED continues to grow. YouTube has also recognised the importance of Social Business Design and has been working on a number of projects to make videos more accessible to everyone. One new feature is the ability to include captions in videos via Caption Tube. When uploading a video to YouTube you also have the option to upload a closed caption file for the video. You can even include multiple languages. When you have uploaded the file, viewers will be able to activate the captions through the video player menu. Not to be out done, the incumbent media players have adopted Social Business Design to cement their position as primary delivers of content. The BBC is the only broadcaster in the world to include audio described TV programmes in its video-on-demand service.
There is much to be learned from this social twist in the modern day gold rush. Fundamentally, it is a recognition that we are all different and that we should no longer categorise groups believing that their representatives will solve the problem. The savvy startup or established business will now lead from Social Business Design, whether it be accessibility, the environment, or business ethics. This makes social sense, but the true gold-seeker also knows it makes economic sense. Social Business Design is a rich source of innovation and a key catalyst for growth or simply cementing a position in the marketplace. Social Business Design equals successful business.
- – -
This article can also be found at Free Trade – the free trade of ideas.
Filed under: inclusion, media, society , accessibility, apple, australia, bbc, blind, control, deaf, design, development, faith, http://martincahill.wordpress.com, humanity, inclusion, individuals, innovation, martin cahill, media access australia, nsw, policy, progress, science, social business, social business design, society, sydney, tamarama, technology, TED, vision impaired, youth, youtube
