Support Hub: Making Accessibility Accessible for Disabled Customers
For the last two years I have been working on the most exciting project of my working life. And I can finally talk about it. In fact, one of the reasons you have seen less of me online the past two years has been because I have been working on this. In part because I have been devoting so much of my time outside my day job to it. But in part because it has been in stealth mode until now.
Support Hub, which has now launched in pilot mode and can be accessed here, is a new platform run by Experian that allows disabled consumers to tell multiple organizations about their support needs from one place, and then have the reassurance that the next time they deal with those organizations they will be met, without them needing to take any further steps.
It brings together many of my interests: as an activist wanting better lives with fewer barriers for disabled people; as an advocate for models of co-production; as a researcher on the impact of technology on people’s autonomy, and in particular the impact of the frictions and unequal resource costs associated with technology on the autonomy of disabled people; and as the CEO of a company dedicated to helping individuals and institutions use creativity to solve wicked problems — keenly aware that it is precisely these technological frictions and their impact that throw up one of the biggest barriers to finding and implementing those creative solutions to our biggest problems.
Over the next few weeks I want to talk about several unique and important aspects of the project. I hope these pieces will also start a wider conversation about the devastating impact of friction on disabled people’s lives — and on society.
As well as answering questions I hope to encourage my disabled peers both to sign up and to provide feedback about what can be improved during this pilot phase.
And I hope that the conversations that follow might start to demonstrate the value to companies across multiple sectors of being a part of this solution, seeing that being accessible on their own is not sufficient to serve customers for whom interacting with them is only one part of a vast and complicated web of relationships they must navigate.
But I want to start by talking about the problem Support Hub sets out to solve, explaining it in terms of my own experience.
I am bipolar, ADHD, and dyspraxic. There are things I find very hard or impossible that others find inconvenient at worst, like making and receiving phone calls. This makes it almost impossible for me to access many essential services where the default communication is by telephone.
Firms usually have the capability to support me, often very easily — by offering email communication, for example. But I often don’t receive that support. Because accessing it is really hard.
I might have to ask a person directly — that can mean giving intimate medical details to multiple people multiple times to persuade them to offer something I could have selected from a drop down menu. Or I may have to use the phone to access an adjustment not to use the phone.
And it’s exhausting. Disabled people often have the least energy to start with of anyone — and yet we have to expend more of it to use basic services than other people do.
I can often do things once, at a push, but not again and again. So I rarely contact customer services when things go wrong, for example. I have no choice but to live with the consequences. I don’t get the best interest rates because I don’t have the resources to go through the interactions necessary to switch. And sometimes, even if I have the money I may not pay bills on time because they are not communicated to me in an accessible way, and my credit record would be affected.
So daily life costs me more money than it does other people. As well as more time and mental resources. My horizons narrow. I get less out of life
No single firm can solve this problem, because the problem isn’t what any one firm can do — it’s that I deal with so many firms that I can’t tell them all individually what I need. As I put it when I speak to firms: if every company I dealt with solved its accessibility issues for every single one of their disabled customers, they would not have solved accessibility for any single one of those disabled customers — because no customer deals with just one firm.
Support Hub exists to solve this problem.
Additional resources
Downloads
A Problem Shared: a new way of building accessibility into financial services and beyond (a detailed description of the co-production process behind Support Hub, outlining the challenges faced and solutions found)
Building Bridges: A project to enable better services to create better lives for disabled people (an in-depth paper looking at how the lists of support needs at the heart of Support Hub were, and continue to be, compiled)
Articles I have written on related subjects
What are microfrictions and why do they have such a disastrous impact on disabled people?
Friction and the social model of disability: from the aggregation of marginal gains to compounding
Is friction stopping you winning at life?
Websites
WhatWeNedd.Support The open source platform dedicated to producing annual standardised lists of support needs, built by lived experience in discussion with the industries whose job it is to implement those needs
