The Inclusive Research Handbook
A resource to empower everyone doing research with the knowledge, best practices, guidance, and templates to make inclusive research part of their everyday practice
The Inclusive Research Handbook is designed as a go-to resource providing guidance for everyone doing research inclusively and along the entire product development process. The handbook surfaces foundational knowledge, best practices, and tools that can be used not only by researchers but also by designers, engineers, and other functions and roles who want to ensure their products are truly inclusive.
Inclusive research is a vital part of product inclusion. It involves taking a participatory research approach that actively involves a wide variety of people as collaborators throughout the entire end-to-end development process. Inclusive research is not another method to apply. Instead, it enriches the methods already used today and helps to reduce unintentional biases within teams by involving people with diverse perspectives in the product development process.
This handbook is the result of research and conversations with the community of product inclusionists from a range of companies and industries around the world. We're bringing to life their learnings and experiences, as well as our first-hand experience conducting inclusive and accessibility research across our own product development process at SAP.
It is a living document; it is by no means complete, and we hope to get more insights and feedback as we go, together.
We invite you to share your thoughts on the handbook with our team by emailing us at inclusive.research@sap.com
What you'll find in the handbook
The handbook is organized into five chapters that cover everything from defining your research needs to best practices for running your study. Chapters include:
- Inclusion Criteria: Ensuring everyone has a seat at the table
- Best Practices: Well-functioning approaches for teams building inclusive foundations both in and outside of the research session
- Planning the Session: Getting the most out of your research
- Screening & Recruiting: Intentionally including a diverse range of people
- Running the Research: Putting it into practice with these tools
Why do inclusive research?
The unintended consequence of not doing inclusive research as part of our everyday practice means we may exclude people from being able to use the products and experiences we are creating.
Frequently, we strive to create products and services for what we perceive as the 'mainstream' user. Unintentionally, this often means designing for younger, right-handed cis-male users without disabilities who are tech-savvy and have access to cutting-edge technology and infrastructure. However, the notion of a 'mainstream' or average user is a fallacy; people’s needs and experiences are diverse and multifaceted. A wide range of diversity characterizes the world’s population of nearly 8 billion people, be it gender, age, diverse abilities, language, social and cultural factors, education, beliefs and norms, lifestyles, and many more forms of human variance.
That is why we need to include a wide variety of perspectives and prioritize people from marginalized communities in our research to ensure our products and services are accessible and inclusive for all people, regardless of their background. Ultimately, our products and services are only as inclusive as our research.