Reconsidering LDR from the scope of Inclusive Design

This article is also a practice to write a post within 15 minutes.

Designers are familiar with the provocation of Inclusive Design: Disabilities are often temporary or situational. Similarly, most couples can experience temporary or situational geographical separation for a short or long while, from time to time. Be it a business trip, or a Thanksgiving holiday with their own family. Or it can be some situation like: I live in Oakland, you live in Sunnyvale, while we fall in love in San Fransisco.

As I look through the SaaS companies targeting at couples, I discover a few that stand out from the rest: they do not see couples as their one and only type of users. Their applications can satisfy the needs of individuals, friends, and even families as well, which open up a much bigger market for themselves as a commercial service provider.

Image courtesy of Twine

Take Twine for example. This rising financial management app brands itself as "A saving and investing app for two". But it never means you have to use the app in a pair. Twine encourages everyone to sign up individually. The individual brokerage accounts can be later linked to other individual accounts to form a joint goal. Notably, this model is created through iterations. They blogged about this change in way of financial collaboration just in late October.

Trying out the "Inclusive Design" mindset in LDR problems becomes very inspiring for me. It also turns into a principle that I want to follow. LDR is a universal problem — There are just over 7 million couples in the US who consider themselves in a long distance relationship(1), and we can all be in LDR sometime somewhere. So why not provide a universal design solution? The product shouldn't disqualify you as a user if you are not officially in LDR.

Therefore, I am now picturing a SaaS concept that looks welcoming enough to all types of couples, even people in strong friendship. Nevertheless, it should demonstrate a strong sweet spot when users transition from a state where they are geographically close to each other to long-distance separation. This software service will work well for all users in a valuable relationship, while it will work even better if faced with the challenge of LDR.

Reference

(1) Long Distance Relationship Frequently Asked Questions 2018, Guldner, G. T. (2018):

Twine official website and blog

https://twine.com/

https://twine.com/blog/reimagining-collaboration/