Is Inclusivity and Well-being a Luxury?

Inclusivity and digital well-being are not optional extras or luxury features. They are foundational to reaching and retaining users in India’s vast, diverse market. The actual job is to design products that work for the broad spectrum of users you will encounter — not just the urban, English-literate, tech-savvy segment.

India is approaching digital penetration saturation in metro cities. The real growth lies in the hinterlands, where connectivity is improving but digital literacy and cultural context vary widely. Your product must work there too. If you ignore this, you are leaving large swaths of users behind — and ceding opportunity to competitors who get it right.

This lesson teaches you how to think about inclusivity and well-being not as afterthoughts, but as strategic imperatives in product leadership.

Digital inclusion is a business necessity, not a luxury

The Google Southeast Asia Economic Report 2023 highlights a critical insight: digital inclusion is imperative for growth. It is not a checkbox or a feel-good add-on. It is a business imperative.

Connectivity is improving rapidly across India, narrowing the urban-rural gap. But connectivity alone is not enough. Digital literacy remains a complex, multi-dimensional challenge — from mobile literacy to app literacy to cultural relevance.

Designing for inclusion means addressing this entire spectrum. Your app must be usable by someone who has never used an app before, who may speak multiple languages, who may have limited reading skills, or who may have specific needs related to disability or socio-economic background.

The trap is treating inclusivity as a luxury reserved for big companies like Google or Microsoft. Many startups think, “Why should I care about inclusivity now? My users are mostly urban and English-speaking.” That mindset leads to products that work for a few, but fail at scale.

I tell PMs this often: If you want to be a kick-ass product leader for the new generation, you must adopt a different mindset. You must look at your world around yourself differently.

Inclusivity vs accessibility: Know the difference

These terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same.

Accessibility is critical — it is a legal and ethical baseline. But inclusivity goes beyond that. It asks: Who are you excluding? Who is invisible in your design?

Diversity is everywhere. Your users have multiple identities — age, gender, language, education, physical ability, location, and more. Inclusive design is about recognizing exclusion and learning from diversity.

Emerging trends in design thinking: Inclusivity and well-being lead the way

The design thinking community is moving beyond just solving usability problems. Here are some key trends shaping product innovation today:

1. Inclusive Design
   Creating products that are accessible and usable by a wide range of individuals, including those with disabilities and diverse backgrounds. This means designing for the full range of human variation.

2. Sustainability
   Considering environmental impact and designing products that can be recycled or repurposed. While more relevant for physical products, digital products must also consider energy use and e-waste.

3. Design for Well-being
   Focusing on creating products and services that promote mental, emotional, and social well-being. This includes mindfulness, reducing digital fatigue, and encouraging positive social interaction.

4. AI and Personalization
   Using AI and machine learning to generate personalized user experiences, but ensuring these do not reinforce biases or exclude marginalized users.

5. Designing for New Interfaces
   Virtual/Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Voice User Interfaces — all require fresh thinking about accessibility and inclusion.

6. Emotional Connection
   Creating storytelling and personalization to engage users emotionally, increasing satisfaction and loyalty.

These trends are not academic. They reflect what the market demands and what Indian users expect as they become more digitally mature.

The Indian context requires cultural relevance and empathy

Indian users are not a monolith. Your product must respect cultural, linguistic, dietary, religious, and socio-economic diversity.

For example:

• Zomato’s limited diet-specific filters (vegan, keto, allergen-free) exclude many users with dietary restrictions. A wider range of filters tailored to local habits would improve inclusivity.

• One-size-fits-all recommendations and promotions ignore individual health goals and cultural preferences. Data analytics can help tailor these experiences.

Your app language, icons, workflows, and onboarding must be culturally relevant. This means more than translation — it means understanding local contexts and behaviors.

The hidden costs of ignoring digital literacy

Digital literacy is not just about knowing how to use a smartphone. It includes:

• Mobile literacy: Understanding how to navigate mobile OS and apps.
• App literacy: Knowing how to interact with specific app interfaces.
• Cultural literacy: Recognizing symbols, language nuances, and workflows that feel natural.

Ignoring these leads to user frustration, drop-offs, and poor adoption. This is especially true in rural and tier-2/3 cities.

Your job as a PM is to design products that reduce cognitive load and guide users intuitively.

The multi-dimensional nature of exclusion

Talvinder often asks: When was the last time you got annoyed because someone couldn’t use a digital product? Or you judged someone for their dietary restrictions or language skills?

These everyday moments reveal unconscious biases and assumptions that creep into product design.

Exclusion can be cognitive, cultural, physical, or social. For example:

• Assuming everyone is fluent in English or Hindi.
• Expecting users to skip meals during long meetings, ignoring religious fasting.
• Designing interfaces that rely heavily on text, excluding users with low literacy.
• Not accounting for users with intermittent connectivity or low-end devices.

Inclusive design demands you ask the right questions and challenge assumptions.

Practical principles from Microsoft Inclusive Design

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design framework is a useful guide for product leaders:

• Recognize exclusion. Identify who is excluded by your current design.
• Learn from diversity. Use diverse perspectives to inform design decisions.
• Iterate with inclusion in mind. Continuously test with real users from diverse backgrounds.
• Design for flexibility. Provide multiple ways to complete tasks or consume content.
• Build with empathy. Understand the lived experiences of your users.

These principles apply whether you’re building a mobile app, a web service, or a hardware device.

Designing for well-being is the next frontier

Well-being in product design means creating experiences that improve users’ quality of life, not just engagement metrics.

This includes:

• Minimizing addictive patterns and digital fatigue.
• Encouraging mindfulness and purposeful use.
• Supporting social connection and positive interactions.
• Respecting user privacy and control over data.

Google’s Digital Well-being Toolkit offers UX principles and thought starters to embed these values in your product.

Well-being is especially critical in India, where smartphone users often contend with unreliable connectivity, noisy environments, and mixed-use devices.

Inclusive AI: Avoiding bias and exclusion in machine learning

AI and machine learning offer powerful personalization but can also reinforce existing biases if not designed inclusively.

Indian data sets can be messy — multilingual, inconsistent, incomplete. Your AI models must be robust to this reality.

Inclusive AI means:

• Training models on diverse data sets.
• Testing for bias across user groups.
• Designing feedback loops that capture corrections from marginalized users.
• Ensuring transparency and explainability.

This is a growing area of focus in Indian product leadership.

Case studies and resources worth exploring

• Google’s Monk Skin Tone Scale: Improving representation in image search.
• Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit: Practical activities and case studies.
• Inclusive Design Toolkit website: A rich collection of case studies and guides.
• Shopify’s UX blog on diversity and inclusion in design.
• “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez — a foundational book on gender bias in data and design.

Your role as a PM in inclusive and well-being design

The actual job is to champion inclusion and well-being throughout the product lifecycle.

This means:

• Leading user research that includes diverse and marginalized users.
• Advocating for accessibility features and inclusive language.
• Collaborating with design and engineering to build flexible, adaptive experiences.
• Prioritizing features that reduce cognitive load and support well-being.
• Measuring impact not just on engagement but on user satisfaction and retention across diverse segments.

If you do not own this, your product will fail to scale in India’s diverse market.

Test yourself: The Inclusive Design Challenge

Where to go next

• Explore practical inclusive design methods: Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit
• Learn how to integrate well-being in UX: Digital Well-being Principles
• Understand cognitive exclusion and how to address it: Inclusive Design for Cognition
• Build AI products responsibly with inclusivity: Inclusive AI Product Management