Christine Hemphill and Tom Pokinko
Co-Founder and Research Director at Open Inclusion
Christine Hemphill
Christine is co-founder and Managing Director of Open Inclusion (a London based accessibility research & experience design consultancy). Christine has a background of over 20 years designing and creating innovative products, services, teams or businesses, or making them better. The last 5 years have been solely focussed on customer and workplace inclusion, helping identify opportunities and develop creative solutions for inclusive brand experiences.
As an economist by trade, she understands the scale and value of this very significant market segment and the positive mainstream impact of universal design to businesses. However she is an innovator by nature and loves the power of human centred design, utilising current and emerging technologies and approaches to solve for significant unmet customer needs that exist today. Drawing on their user research panel, Open runs many forms of qualitative research and co-creation that ensures user experiences are inclusive, practical, valuable, usable and delightful. She is a regular speaker at conferences on innovation and emerging technologies, accessibility, research, customer or user experience design and value management from the perspective of developing environments (digital, physical and service) that are simply better for us all. She is a member of the Market Research Society and is a Certified Practitioner in Accessibility (CPACC) from the International Association of Accessibility Practitioners, G3ic.
Tom Pokinko
Tom is the Research Director at Open Inclusion. He is an inclusive design and user experience research specialist who is passionate about user-centred research with “lead” users as a way to help businesses realise their inclusion goals and create better customer experiences for everyone.
Tom has provided inclusive research and design solutions spanning digital and built environment accessibility for both public and private sector clients on three continents, including some of the UK’s leading players in the retail, banking and transport industries. He oversees Open’s Research Panel of 450 people with a stated disability or over 65 as well as all user-research for Open. With years of experience working across industries in multidisciplinary design and research settings, Tom helps provide insight using a wide range of methods including usability testing, ethnography, semi-structured interviews, surveys, focus groups, mystery shopping, card sorts and contextual enquiry. A native of Canada, Tom has a Master of Arts and a Master of Design in Inclusive Design from OCAD in Toronto, Canada.
Learning from the extremes, to improve your designs for all
11.15 – 12.45
Workshop
Moving away a division between “normal UX” and “accessibility” to a single perspective that difference is the one guaranteed characteristic between each of our users. Not designing for difference in the way people perceive, move, understand, sense or problem solve will limit the value of our designs. This workshop will provide a hands on experience with a really useful and quite simple approach to understand experience variance and start to solve for it.
In the workshop we will create an opportunity in small groups for 2 short sprints designing for differing specific needs. Not single needs such as “blind” or “wheel-chair user” or even cardboard thin personas, but richly interesting intersectional characters with varying needs, preferences and approaches. We will introduce a range of tools and approaches that can help think about the problem through these different perspectives, making something that is not just better for their character, but also for many others. Having quickly developed some solutions for a specific problem at each table (5 tables of 5 people) we will look to extend this specific solution to provide mainstream additional functional and delightful value for many users.