The Journey to Include People with Disabilities in Research

According to the World Health Organization, 1.3 billion or 16% of the global population experiences a significant disability. Within the US travel industry in 2020, 27 million travelers with a disability took 81 million trips and spent just under $30 billion.

This presentation demonstrates how Hilton built and formalized an inclusive research program. In partnership with the UX Research team and Accessibility team, we developed a program that is more inclusive of a wide range of cognitive and physical disabilities.

In this session, we share our experience creating a framework, moving beyond usability testing to understand cognitive disabilities, overcoming challenges, and exploring how inclusive research impacted our digital products. At Hilton, the larger design team integrates Accessibility and Design Research into projects. The teams provide processes for de-risking designs before they go live, further maturing our design program to be more inclusive in its research process. This presentation examines

The value of including people with disabilities in user research.

• Building a data-driven business case to demonstrate the importance of inclusive research
• The methods we used to go beyond usability testing with screen reader users.
• The various research methods, including usability, inform design, and differentiate compliance testing and user testing.