Everyone Is an Edge Case

The Average Joe is anything but average! Digital products designed for such a character are exclusionary by design, as they do not represent 99% of the population.

Average Joe is WEIRD

Most products are built for the Average Joe, an affluent, young, white, non-disabled, neurotypical adult man who is right-handed and from WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) countries. He tends to be heterosexual, but for digital products that hardly matters, except perhaps for dating apps and pornography. But how many people does that actually cover?

Most people are not WEIRD. About 1.4 billion people are from high-income countries, out of 8.2 billion.

According to the World Health Organization, 1.3 billion people have a disability, 20% of whom live in high-income nations, so that is about 260 million. That leaves 1.14 billion able and neurotypical people in WEIRD places. Disabilities can be physical impairments (e.g. paraplegia), mental health issues (e.g. schizophrenia), intellectual (e.g. Down syndrome), or sensory (e.g. blindness, deafness). Many people with disabilities disengage from online platforms due to accessibility barriers.

While globally only 15% of people are estimated to be white, most WEIRD nations are indeed weird, as their populations are predominantly white, roughly up to 80%. That means we have 912 million non-disabled white people from WEIRD countries.

Out of them, half are men, so 456 million, 30% of whom are between the ages of 20 and 40, or 134 million. The top 10% are considered affluent, which means 13.4 million. 90% of people everywhere are right-handed, so that leaves 12.3 million. So, products designed for affluent, young, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, right-handed men from WEIRD countries are appropriate for less than 0.2% of the entire population. That’s abysmal!

And that is generous. Among these men, there are plenty with glasses or contact lenses (65%), red/green colour vision deficiency (4.4%), a limb in a cast¹ (<0.5%), fat fingers, or small hands, for whom the average smartphone is uncomfortable to use, just like half the population who happens to be female and therefore ignored. None of these qualify as disabilities, though they are rarely accounted for, which is why tiny fonts, low contrast, barely legible colourful charts, miniature buttons, and massive devices are common.

Phrased differently, 99.8% of the world are considered edge cases. Even if we restricted the focus to high-income countries only, the Average Joe represents a measly 0.9% of the entire market; more than 99% are still left out!

Digital illiteracy

It may come as a surprise to many people in product management that even in a nation such as the United States, up to 16% of the adult population is digitally illiterate. Such individuals may attempt to use an app or online platform but quickly abandon it when they struggle to navigate it. Cognitive disabilities or neurodivergence amplify these challenges: complex interfaces, information-dense layouts, or a lack of accommodating features, such as plain language or dyslexia-friendly fonts, can cause these people to experience cognitive overload and give up. Negative experiences can lead to individuals abandoning technologies altogether. Ageist and ableist designs can signal to older and disabled customers that a product is built for younger, fully able customers, which leads to alienation.

“Well, we can’t design for everyone, can we?” you might counter. Here’s the rub: we are not even designing for a majority. Most products are designed for less than 1% of all people.

“Still, we don’t design for that particular demographic every single time!” Indeed not, but let’s be clear: even apps or platforms with mass appeal are ultimately designed by a minority (e.g. affluent men) for that same or a similar group, regardless of the personas on a whiteboard. Even if we conservatively assume that a product only requires a subset of the Average Joe attributes, the target audience shrinks from a majority to a small minority in an instant. After all, WEIRDos are not representative of humanity. It is rare for neurodivergence to be a factor in the design of products, even though 19% of the population in high-income countries are and one in ten suffers from dyslexia.

Average Joe does not exist

The Average Joe represents a person that does not exist, especially not across borders. Mathematically that is trivially true: a single value in a probability distribution has measure zero. The US Air Force figured out that particular truth the hard way in 1952 when they discovered that no pilot was exactly the average of ten different body measures used to design the cockpit and their gear.

A truly average person is neither male nor female (or a bit of both), and definitely not white, which is why bias against non-white, non-male people in facial recognition software is particularly egregious. Although it is hardly surprising: VR devices are calibrated to the typical male interpupillary distance, so that women are more likely to suffer from motion sickness from extended usage. And Apple Health launched without the ability to track menstruation, though that is relevant to 2 billion women of reproductive age globally. Edge cases, right?