Public services

Healthtech

Mobility

Banking, Finance and Insurance

As a user, to achieve our goal – whether that is to get treatment for a health issue, adjust our pension savings plan, or get from point A to point B in the city – we have to go through a number of steps and touch points. Often these touch points are owned by different stakeholders in different departments across the organisation, and sometimes even in other organisations. In other words – to provide users with a good experience, the transitions between these must be smooth. In reality, they are often anything but. 

Start by getting an overview of your service and map out how 

the five barriers for digital participation

 are at play in your touch points. Through this overview you'll see where your users experience the barriers and you'll also be able to map out which transitions are important to us - and who do we need to collaborate with to achieve what?

1. Identify the barriers and the transitions

When inclusion is an afterthought, we’re not only bound to fail at it. We’re also going to spend a lot more time and resources trying to fix it. By prioritising inclusion from the start, we will make things a lot easier for ourselves – and the user. By building both html and design right and compliant from the get-go, and by using vulnerable user groups as the baseline for all design choices, we will save both time and resources.


When you are healthy, both mentally and physically, you can handle lousy user experiences. You have the mental capacity to adapt, to think, to reflect and try again. However, in the moments when your mind or body are not fully functioning, which can be short term, long term or permanent, we need things to simply work smoothly by themselves. Poor experiences have a great personal cost; people are left alone with no one to help them - because nobody takes ownership of the barrier in the transitions. For organisations, these poor experiences can be costly. In the worst case, you might not even find out about them, which stops you from improving the service as a service provider.

2. Save resources by getting it right from the start

Having identified where the pain points are, you are likely to have realised that many of them are systemic ,i.e, relate to or affect an entire system. Digital vulnerability is an example of a systemic issue - it is not something that can be solved by a team alone, but needs to be solved at an organisational level, or even across organisations and sectors. Having systems where responsibilities are clear and where nothing falls between the cracks is essential to providing a good user experience. As long as the systemic challenges are not addressed, we will struggle to design truly inclusive experiences. 

Now, these issues are rarely quick fixes. But it’s crucial to shine a light on them and start working with them to handle the long-term perspective. Today one in five citizens in Norway are at the risk of digital exclusion, more than 1,1 million people – we must start now to help reduce that number of people.

3. Take a systemic approach

Designers are excellent at identifying pain points and connecting the dots. However, having one designer in the team to “solve inclusion”, won’t cut it. To get to the root of the problem, it’s essential to distribute the responsibility for inclusion throughout the organisation. Just as “innovation”, or “strategy” can never be something that happens in an isolated department, inclusion and good user experience can never be delivered only by a handful of professionals. Every part of the organisation needs to be aware of their role in this. Here, it’s essential to have done good groundwork in step one: Identify the barriers and the transitions. Creating good KPIs that are connected to important business units in your organisation is another. What is measured tends to be important targets in the organisation. 

4. Distribute the responsibility for inclusion

Last, but not least –don’t wait! Take the lead and pave the way for others to follow. Start with yourself, your team or maybe your entire organisation is ready. Go, go, go! By daring to prioritise inclusion before others- showing that doing it right from the start or fixing it bit by bit, is a profitable choice - chances are you can take a leading position as a strategic shifter, both within your organisation and outside it. Someone must take the first step for things to happen. It might as well be you.

5. Act now – take a leading position

Do you need help figuring out how to do it? We have the expertise to help you take the leading position.

Succeeding with digital inclusion – five steps to get a head start