What does it take to bring inclusion to product and service design?
The FCA’s latest good and poor practice paper on products and services is the one I had been waiting for. If we are serious about better outcomes, this is where the work has to start. Not when a customer has had to disclose something personal to get what they need, or find their way through a workaround. It starts in the design of the product, the service, the journey and the choices we make about who products and services are built for.
Like all FCA papers, this isn’t only about vulnerability – it’s about designing and delivering better products and services for all customers. And this specific paper points to a bigger shift: inclusive design cannot sit separately from “BAU” proposition design. It cannot be something that happens in a vulnerability team, while the “main” product and service decisions happen somewhere else.
If your product is not designed around the needs, characteristics and goals of the people who will use it, then everything else becomes harder. Your communications have to compensate. Your frontline teams have to rescue. Your complaints team has to explain. And you spend more time, energy and money as a result.
That isn’t to say that great work hasn’t happened in these areas. It absolutely has, and it clearly is making a difference to improve customer outcomes.
But I also think we need to be honest: if inclusive design is not influencing the core proposition, we are still at risk of causing harm to, or excluding millions, of customers.
This blog is not a summary of the FCA paper. It is my view on what it should prompt firms to do next.
Stop treating vulnerability as a separate customer group
One of the biggest opportunities is to stop designing for “our customers” over here, and “vulnerable customers” over there.
Customer profiles, personas and segments are hugely powerful tools. They help large organisations align around who they are designing for and what those people are trying to achieve. But if your customer segments sit in one place, and your vulnerability personas sit somewhere else, the products and services you design will not be inclusive.
No-one lives theirs lives in neat predictable categories. Customers with accessibility needs, fluctuating health conditions, financial pressures, caring responsibilities, low confidence, language barriers or digital exclusion are not an exception to your target market. They are part of it, and great, customer focused organisations understand this.
Identification is not the end point
There has been a lot of focus on identifying customers in vulnerable circumstances, encouraging disclosure and recording support needs. This work matters. But it is not the destination. Identification is the means to better support.
Firms should also consider how – once additional needs have been identified – they can meet those needs.
This line in the FCA paper that should be printed in bold on every presentation or report about vulnerability, especially for Board and Exec reporting.
Because disclosure without meaningful response creates frustration, mistrust and harm. If a customer tells you they cannot use a digital journey, cannot access a communication, or cannot complete a process in the way it has been designed, the real test is what happens next.
Inclusive design panels must challenge, and then deliver
One of my favourite lines in the paper is the FCA’s point that inclusive design panels:
“are not treated as a ‘tick-box’ exercise that fails to seriously challenge product and service design.”
I am a huge advocate for co-design with people with diverse and often complex needs – this is something we do with many of our clients.
Done well, it helps firms understand where harm is most likely to occur, what trade-offs customers are really making, and challenges the assumptions that sit behind design choices.
There is a big difference between co-design and “show and feedback”. If people with lived experience of diverse needs are brought in at the end of the process, shown something that has already been decided, and asked for comments that may or may not be acted on, that is not inclusive design. That is involvement without influence, and without implementation.
Co-design sessions work best when people are able to shape and influence the problem, not just react to the solution you have already chosen, and then remain involved until the solution is more inclusive.
Good MI should lead to better design, not just better reporting
I was pleased to see strong examples of outcome-focused, customer-centric MI in the paper. Looking at product usage, customer behaviour and areas where outcomes do not seem fair or aligned to customer needs is exactly the kind of work firms should be doing.
But the real value comes when MI asks the questions, and inclusive design methods give you the answers. Data can tell you where something is going wrong. It rarely tells you everything about why, or what to design instead.
That is where qualitative insight, journey mapping and co-design come in. This helps firms move from identifying the problem, to understanding the experience behind it, and designing and delivering the solution.
And then the cycle has to continue: identify the issue, design the change, deliver the change, measure again. If outcomes improve, learn from it and apply that learning elsewhere. If they do not, keep going.
What should firms do next?
I would start with four questions
- 1Are our customer profiles and target market assessments genuinely inclusive of the customers who use our products?
- 2Where do our products, services or journeys rely on customers being able to behave in one “standard” way?
- 3How are people with lived experience of diverse and complex needs influencing design decisions early in the process?
- 4
When MI shows a poor outcome, do we have a clear route from insight to change to evidence?
This probably means joining up work that already exists, embedding inclusion into processes, and diverse engagement in the places where decisions are actually made.
That is the work we love doing at Inclusive Outcomes, alongside our colleagues at The Big Window. We help firms understand customer needs, bring diverse voices into design in a meaningful way, review journeys, shape product features, develop inclusive design principles and work out what all of this means in practice for products, services and governance.
If the FCA paper has left you wondering whether your product and service design is doing enough, that is a good place to be. We can help you understand where you are now, plan your next steps and for the future.
If you would like to explore what this means for your products, services or customer journeys, we would be very happy to talk.
