Digital Design Marginalization: New Perspectives on Designing Inclusive Interfaces

Abstract

We conceptualize Digital Design Marginalization (DDM) as the process in which a digital interface design excludes certain users and contributes to marginalization in other areas of their lives. Due to non-inclusive designs, many underrepresented users face barriers in accessing essential services that are moving increasingly, sometimes exclusively, online – services such as personal finance, healthcare, social connectivity, and shopping. This can further perpetuate the “digital divide,” a technology-based form of social inequality that has offline consequences. We introduce the term Marginalizing Design to describe designs that contribute to DDM. In this paper, we focus on the impact of Marginalizing Design on older adults through examples from our research and discussions of services that may have marginalizing designs for older adults. Our aim is to provide a conceptual lens for designers, service providers, and policy makers through which they can use to purposely lessen or avoid digitally marginalizing groups of users.

Description

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by ACM.

Keywords

Digital Design Marginalization, Older Adults, Marginalizing Design, Inclusive Design, Digital Inclusion, Digital Exclusion, Digital Inequality, Digital Divide, Social Exclusion, Social Marginalization

Citation

Jaisie Sin, Rachel L. Franz, Cosmin Munteanu, and Barbara Barbosa Neves. 2021. Digital Design Marginalization: New Perspectives on Designing Inclusive Interfaces. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May 08–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445180

DOI

10.1145/3411764.3445180

ISSN

Creative Commons

Creative Commons URI

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