Book Review: Mismatch
A familiar problem in design is that you’ll likely never design a perfect solution, or a universal design, that works for everyone. I recommend learning professionals read, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. The reason is that many training departments become stuck trying to make the one perfect solution for all of their use cases. This book will give you some ways of thinking about those use cases and some practical tactics. It was a pleasure to read with well placed anecdotes and bullet points of ways to shift towards inclusion in your design at the end of every chapter.
Why a learning designer should read it
The book is called Mismatch because that is the author’s way of talking about exclusion. In order to design for inclusion we must recognize exclusion. A mismatch is a building block of exclusion. An example of a mismatch in learning design might be that moment of exasperation when a user who is hard of hearing doesn’t get a transcript for a video in the course. One incident doesn’t necessarily make someone feel excluded but that hurt builds up. That can mean that someone leaves a classroom or abandons an elearning midway because it feels as though this isn’t for them. Another response is that people who are excluded may feel they need to create work arounds or put in extra work just to learn what’s in the course. That has a cumulative effect on a user. If a course was designed for the average user and it’s expected that an average user might complete the course in 30 minutes but it takes an excluded user 60 because of the work arounds they have to put into place it can have other impacts on their work day, confidence and the perceptions of their coworkers. It’s an unfair burden on those users.
Enter inclusive design. Instead of trying to encompass all use cases into one design, Mismatch advocates designing in a “one size fits one” approach. The idea is to start a design project with a traditionally excluded group or the group that experiences the greatest amount of mismatches. Then you extend the solutions you come up with to others who may face similar mismatches. An example is that there are deaf users of elearning so by adding a transcript to all videos in your elearning you are not only helping deaf users but also all users on the spectrum of hearing loss. We know as humans that perfect hearing is temporary for almost all people so transcripts will help all along the spectrum of human experience. There is also an added benefit for average users who may have to take a course in a crowded café when they forgot their headphones. In this way building one-for-one improves overall user experience. Another way to think about this is having different ways for users to participate. Many instructors are familiar with this where you may have an activity that only works for groups of 4 and you have a group of 3 so you predetermined alternative activities for different group sizes. A digital example of that from the book is online sandbox games like World of Warcraft. You can participate in WOW in multiple ways and still have fun. For example fast paced battles might not work for some users but they can still have fun with the crafting system in WOW. There are very few elearning that work like that because much of elearning is very linear and only allows for one way to learn. I remember being frustrated seeing open world learning in Second Life that mirrored a “sage-on-the-stage” classroom” There is a lot of opportunity in elearning to make courses more inclusive by providing multiple ways of learning.
I didn’t get the impression that the point of the book is to solve inclusion or present the perfect checklist of all accessibility requirements. I also don’t think that’s the point of inclusive design. Inclusion in instructional design is an iterative process where we’re always chasing an expanding horizon. I think one of the best takeaways from this book is to include excluded groups in the activity of designing. Sometimes, technology, money, time or other factors stand in the way from making the perfect solution but by bringing users along in the process and setting the right expectations with users and leadership we can arrive at better solutions overall. I hope you get a chance to read Kat Holmes’ book.