We have 6 fundamental principles that we infuse into everything we do.
From our hiring, internal measures, tools and training to delivery.
These are the things we believe provide you with greater value.
We help you go beyond expert testing for compliance with accessibility guidelines.
Don't do it just because it's on a list. Ask real users with real needs what they think. Do it because it is better.
Our panel of over 300 people, with specific access needs due to disability or just getting older, are fantastic research participants. Our clients regularly involve them in quantitative and qualitative consumer research including mystery shopping, focus groups, online testing and reviewing new products, services or equipment. Mainstream market research companies can be nervous about engaging with diverse groups. We are not!
It's not the work you do, the effort that you have made, or the standards you have complied with, but the impact on your target user groups that counts in the end.
We care about how easy it is for disabled people to use products and services. However we don't forget about the needs of non-disabled people either. We help our clients find the design options that enhance the experience for all, while delivering capability that is essential for some.
We help you to make your services and products work for as many people as pragmatically possible. Where trade-offs are required, we help you prioritise these by depth and type of impact and size of the group impacted.
We tailor our support to each of our clients to ensure we jointly achieve the best impact for effort.
At the start of each engagement we work with you to deeply understand your organisational goals, current internal capabilities and pain points. We can then bring together the best team from within Open or, as appropriate, from our broad network of associates. We collaborate closely with your team to resolve your specific needs. Our bespoke approach achieves your goals the most direct way for maximum impact.
By engaging people with very diverse needs we can help you generate and identify breakthrough innovations that are useful beyond the groups you created them for.
We call this Extreme Innovation.
Open's experienced team help identify real business value and inclusive innovations that leverage physical and customer service design, current or future technologies. These can include connected "smart" spaces, AI, autonomous vehicles, voice interfaces or immersive technologies.
The typewriter was created for a blind Italian Countess to write letters.
Siri is based on technologies initially designed for motor-impaired and blind users.
The touchscreen was initially developed by an engineer who had carpal tunnel syndrome and wanted an alternative to keyboards as the input interface.
What could you create when you think about your product differently?
While we can just "do", we prefer to guide. Beyond immediate product fixes, we provide you with longer lasting process solutions. While fixing your products, in addition to providing a great quality outcome, we always look to leave a legacy of people within the organisations who are able to continue the journey once we have left.
We help you build inclusion into the way you work, through embedding skills, tools and organisational governance. In addition to customer-facing products and services, we also support internal inclusion, ensuring your organisation is able to hire and retain the best staff including those with temporary, permanent or progressive impairments.
Eventually we hope to retire off all our current clients. It may sound like an odd strategy, but we firmly believe that there is far more need out there than there are people to identify those needs and provide quality solutions. Our goal is to maximise the long-term impact of our efforts.
We prefer to teach people to fish rather than just set up our line and do the fishing for them.
Did you get what you expected and wanted?
We can help ensure you measure, understand and maximise the value of your efforts in inclusion.
Using our proprietary tools, strong research and background in finance, in conjunction with specific understanding of your business goals, we'll ensure your inclusion work creates the greatest positive impact to your organisation.
We look to maximise your Return on Inclusion Investment, which we call ROI2.