We're at an inflection point in user experience design. Projects that used to require a highly skilled team of producers, developers, designers, and technologists can now be created by one person in an afternoon.

The traditional constraints between idea and execution have disappeared. This is very exciting, to be sure, but as soon as something you’ve created needs to be relied on by more than one person, you quickly realize the potential of a good idea can only be fully realized when it’s executed as a thoughtful, rigorous collaboration between the people making the thing and the people that need to use the thing.

The solution is right in front of you

Whether we're building a sensory-friendly brand experience for an autism care provider, designing gamified learning tools grounded in education science, or partnering pro bono with underrepresented entrepreneurs through our Build Week initiative, Instrument has always aimed to ground our process in the real needs of the people using what we build.

But a lot of the approaches we've come to rely on were built for a world where software development was more predictable, teams were more specialized, timelines were longer, and the outputs were easier to test against established standards.

And as we’ve been reckoning with how to best respond in this moment, we’ve had to remember that we are not creating solutions in a vacuum. Similar problems have been solved before, and when we zoom out from our UX design bubble, we realize the solutions are all around us. They're embedded in decades of real-world problem-solving by disabled communities, urban planners, and advocates who figured out how to make previously rigid, adversarial systems and environments bend toward the humans using them.

What sidewalks can teach us about software

Urban design provides a direct model for digital design: how to make a shared space usable for as many people with varying needs and contexts as possible. The next time you’re on a walk outside, take a look around and notice all of the accommodations incorporated into the built environment that were originally meant to solve specific problems for specific human constraints. Eventually, what was a requirement for some becomes an expected benefit for all.

Curb cuts were first introduced to the US in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1945 after disabled veteran and lawyer Jack Fisher advocated to navigate city sidewalks by wheelchair. Once implemented, parents with strollers, delivery workers with hand trucks, cyclists, and travelers rolling luggage used them as well. A solution designed for wheelchair users improved mobility for everyone, and curb cuts became so embedded in urban infrastructure that most people never think about where they came from.

Standardized public signage—including universal symbols for exits, restrooms, and transit—emerged in the 60s and 70s from international accessibility advocacy and wayfinding research. The goal was navigation regardless of language, literacy, or cognitive ability. High-contrast text, consistent placement, Braille additions, and pictographic symbols shared one principle: creating signage that could be understood by more people, regardless of language spoken or education levels.

Automatic door openers took a different path. They were originally invented and installed to help busy waiters carrying trays of food and drinks at a Connecticut restaurant in 1931. Today, they're one of the most essential accessibility features in public buildings, and the 2021 International Building Code only recently began requiring powered doors at accessible public entrances in larger buildings.

These examples can easily translate to digital experiences. Think about how those stories are focused on navigation, wayfinding, and assistive accommodations. We spend our time thinking about similar problems, just in a different environment. And if we’re going to rethink how we build the truly accessible digital experiences of tomorrow, we need to get better at leaning on the voices that matter most before any assumptions are made.

Learning from the original lifehackers

This is what disability advocate Liz Jackson spends her time thinking and writing about. During a recent presentation to Instrument, Liz asked us to completely rethink what the term accessibility means today and what it could mean tomorrow.

This is where we have an opportunity to push ourselves to think beyond contrast ratios and tap target sizes. There are questions we don’t know to ask. Jackson calls disabled people "the original lifehackers" because they've been creatively solving problems in worlds that weren't built for them long before digital design tools existed. Integrating that lived expertise into the design process will help ensure the development of products that actually serve all of the people using them.

Time for a reset

What does this mean In practice? We’ve got big ambitions. We want to move toward co-design as the default, through listening sessions with the communities a product is meant to serve. We want to work alongside these communities, collaborating on briefs where end users help frame the problem before we start solving it. And we want to focus more on researching the history of a specific need by learning from the people who already figured it out before we build something new. The goal is to move from designing for communities to designing with them.

At Instrument, that shift is already underway, led in large part by Orchid, our chronic illness and disability affinity group. Orchid is an always-on internal community that helped shape this conversation—and who will continue to work on expanding this new way of thinking across the entire studio.

We're fundamentally reframing what we do when we say we're designing for people. We don't have it all figured out yet, and we probably never will. But we're committed to building this practice alongside the communities whose lives the work touches, and we'd welcome your partnership in getting there.