Progressive thinking about inclusive content combined with a review of our content design tools prompted us to look at the effectiveness of our Inclusive Language Guide. Before we could think about improving the guide, however, we needed to ensure staff knew it existed.

Since the relaunch of our Effective Digital Content course last year, and following a succession of content improvement club sessions regularly attended by web publishers and content creators, it’s been gratifying to see more and more University staff learning about content design and putting theory into practice. The raised awareness and interest gave the UX team cause to review the guidance we direct staff to follow, to check that it’s as clear and easy to apply as possible.

The Inclusive Language Guide (ILG) was published In June 2022, following months of careful research, investigation and analysis by Ari Cass-Maran, former Senior Content Designer of the UX Service. Nearly 4 years on, amidst increasing UX and content design maturity, it was timely to revisit the guide with a view to improve it. Before we could think about improvements, however, we firstly needed to appraise how well the guide was known and being used by University staff.

Read more about the origins and publication history of the Inclusive Language Guide in Ari’s blog posts:

Inclusive Language Guide

Inclusive Language Guide: how we co-designed with our community as part of a human-centred Design System

Inclusive language awareness and practices have advanced since we published our guide

Since 2022, there have been many positive developments in inclusive language practices and approaches in the public sector and beyond. In November 2023, members of the Home Office Digital team created inclusive language guidance as part of their goal to embed diversity and inclusion into their research and design practices. In September 2024, the Department for Education published the first release of an Accessibility and inclusive design manual and initiated research to learn how easily users could find information within it, with a view to making improvements for a second release. Further afield, in 2024, the Council of Europe published inclusive language guidelines and the European Institute for Gender Equality published ‘Words Matter’ a guide and associated toolkit designed to encourage more gender inclusive language practices. Content-design publications like ‘Considerate Content’ by Rebekah Barry and ‘Designed with Care: Creating Trauma-informed content’ by Rachel Evans and contributors helped shed light on practical ways to prepare content in more sensitive ways, for example, taking into account needs associated with neurodivergent conditions and needs triggered by previous difficult experiences. On a more conceptual level, Karen Yin’s book ‘The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible Approach to Language that includes, respects and empowers’ prompted a philosophical approach to inclusive language use, going beyond lists of ‘do’s and don’ts’, instead, calling for engagement with changing cultural norms to make decisions around language use within a framework guided by content, context, consequence, complexity and compassion.

Read about some of the developments in inclusive language practices:

Conscious Style Guide website

Inclusive language by design, published 22 November 2023 on the Home Office Digital blog

Accessibility and inclusive design manual blog, published 29 October 2024 on the GOV.UK website

Guidelines for the use of language as a driver of inclusivity by the Council of Europe

Words Matter: Supporting Gender Equality Through Language and Communication, published by the European Institute for Gender Equality

Before we could make improvements, we needed to understand the guide’s current use

Working in UX, with its overarching aim of making things better for people, it can be tempting to track developments in user-centred design and apply emerging thinking directly to the work in front of you – in this case, the iteration of our Inclusive Language Guide. But to make changes that are meaningfully impactful, it is often better to pause first and understand the current state in order to plan accordingly. In this instance, that meant taking time to assess how our existing guide was performing – to find out whether it was known, adopted, and being applied by  University staff with content publishing responsibilities.

Appraising the guide’s effectiveness involved assessing receptiveness, discoverability and findability

We weren’t certain whether staff knew about the Inclusive Language Guide, let alone whether they were using it. In order to find this out, we identified two broad categories of behaviour that would indicate successful engagement with the guide.

The first related to receptiveness – did staff realise the need to write inclusively, or recognise that inclusive language was something they needed to think about at all? , in other words,  that inclusive language was’a thing’?

The second related to information-seeking- once staff had identified the need, how did they go about addressing it? The answer depended on whether the guide was findable (for those who knew it existed) or discoverable (for those who didn’t).

These behaviours mapped neatly onto a framework from an old but still salient blog post from 2006, in which Donna Spencer wrote about four modes of information-seeking:

• Known item seeking – looking for something specific you know exists
• Exploratory seeking – browsing when you have a general sense of what you need
• Don’t know what they need to know seeking – no clear awareness of the gap or what would fill it
• Re-finding seeking – locating something you’ve accessed before

Four modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them (Boxes and Arrows blog)

When it came to the Inclusive Language Guide, the staff who already knew it existed would draw on known item seeking or re-finding behaviours, and if those succeeded, the guide could be considered findable. Those who had identified a need but didn’t know the guide existed would rely on more exploratory methods, and if those succeeded, it could be considered discoverable. Our research needed to probe for all of these.

We developed a scenario-based test to understand perceptions and expectations around inclusive language

Before beginning any piece of research, the UX team thinks carefully about what we want to learn, framing our intentions as explicit research questions. Working together, Mel Bacharj, Content Design Assistant, and I identified three core questions to guide our research:

• Do staff know the guide exists and the type of guidance it includes?
• Do they know what it can help them with?
• Can staff recognise situations where it would be useful to them?

Drawing on UX and product literature, we identified a scenario-based approach as the right method for testing whether staff felt a genuine need for the guide. Rather than asking directly about the guide itself, we would present participants with a content preparation scenario where the guide’s rules could apply, and observe whether they recognised the need unprompted. This approach is grounded in the principle of ‘talk about their world instead of your idea – described by Rob Fitzpatrick in the book ‘The Mom Test: How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you’ – which cautions against asking people about a product or tool directly, since doing so tends to invite polite, unhelpful answers.

From there, the research followed a logical sequence. If participants identified a need for guidance on writing inclusively, the next stage would ask how they would naturally go about finding that information – testing whether the guide was discoverable. If they located it, the final stage would assess whether they could find relevant guidance within it to help them write inclusively in the content preparation scenario we had tasked them with.

Based on initial findings, we’ve improved the guide’s visibility by adding it to key websites

Following our research plan we conducted testing with staff volunteers and the results were insightful – revealing staffs’ current perceptions, expectations and understanding of inclusive writing practices. Further, more detailed analysis will follow, however, having watched participants search for inclusive language guidance, an primary research finding was that the guide was not that easy to find.

We wanted to act upon this finding as soon as possible, so we reached out to relevant site owners and have now successfully added a link to the guide from the following webpages:

Disability Information | Help | Information Services – Linked from the question: ‘How do I make sure I use the right words to write about disabilities and disabled people?’

Helpful links | Help | Information Services – Added to the list of resources

The Social Model of Disability | Health & Safety | Health and Safety Department – Linked from a paragraph ‘The University’s Inclusive Language Guide contains advice about how to write about disabilities and disabled people’.

Staff EDI Learning | Equality, Diversity & Inclusion | Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – Linked from the Available Learning section

Further Reading and Learning | Equality, Diversity & Inclusion | Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – Added to the list of resources

Resources – by topic | Institute for Academic Development | Institute for Academic Development– Added to the list of resources

With the guide linked from more places, we are in a better place to work on improving its content, to ensure it can be found and used more effectively by those preparing content for the University.