Inclusive App Design Activity

Great apps start with great ideas.

Inspire your students’ great ideas with an hour‑long Inclusive App Design Activity. Learners will identify problems they care about, then plan, prototype, and share app ideas that everyone could access and understand.

Each step features additional resources and tips to simplify the lesson for early learners or extend the activity using the Everyone Can Code App Design Journal for grades 4–8 or the Develop in Swift App Design Workbook for grades 9 and up. Learners also have the option to experiment with code for their app ideas in the Swift Playgrounds app.

Download the App Design Journal (25.4 MB)Download the App Design Workbook (59.9 MB)

Introduce the activity.

10 mins

Introduce your students to inclusive and accessible app design.

Explain that students will come up with an app idea based on something they care about, and build a prototype of part of their app.
Learn more about Apple’s approach to inclusive design by watching the first 6:28 minutes of The Process of Inclusive Design presented at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Have students take note of a few aspects or “axes” of diversity — such as age, disabilities, or language — to use during the activity.
Inclusive app design is about making people feel welcome and considered. Accessibility is about the design of something so that it can work for all individuals.
Although each person’s perspective is unique, inclusive design and development benefits from focusing on a few axes of diversity. This can help us think more broadly than our own experiences. As with all design, designing an inclusive app is an iterative process that takes time to get right.
Diversity axes can include class, culture, ethnicity, language, education, political, philosophical, and religious beliefs, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disabilities, whether you are right- or left‑handed, body measurements like height, and also environmental conditions like location, internet connectivity, or access to technology devices.
Talk about why inclusion and accessibility are important in all parts of app design.

When they’re ready to begin the activity, students can work in small groups or independently. If students are working in small groups, have them break into their groups at this point. For each section, students can track their process with pen and paper, slides in Keynote, or voice recordings.

Brainstorm.

10 mins

Have students brainstorm topics they care about. Ask them to:

Make a list of topics.
Choose a single topic from their brainstormed list and identify where there’s an opportunity for an app to help.
Reflect on their own identities and experiences along the axes of diversity they chose. Consider how their identities and experiences might be similar to or different from someone else’s.

Support

To help students with this step, use the Brainstorm Purpose and Brainstorm Ideas templates in the App Design Journal.

Simplify

Choose one axis of diversity for learners to focus on. Think about what will make sense and be relatable for your students.

Extend

(+40 mins)

Encourage students to go further by looking more deeply at their audience and the root causes of the problem. Use the Discover and Analyze sections of the App Design Workbook.

Learn more about how to design inclusive content for an app by watching The Practice of Inclusive Design presented at Apple’s WWDC.

Plan.

10 mins

Outline the app and detail one user activity. Ask students to:

Make a list of a few things someone would do in their app.
Identify one core activity a user would do in the app.
Return to their chosen aspects of diversity and think about the user activity from multiple perspectives, responding to one or more of the following questions:
- How will this activity be welcoming to a wide variety of users?
  How will this activity support people who use the accessibility features, such as VoiceOver, within your app?

Support

To support students with this step, use the Brainstorm Ideas and Accessibility sections of the App Design Journal.

Simplify

Help students focus on one core user activity related to why someone would want to use the app.

Extend

(+30 mins)

Have students explore the Event‑based Programming coding exercise in the App Design Workbook and practice making a button function using SwiftUI code in the Swift Playgrounds app. Ask them to reflect on the buttons in their app, then write accessibility labels for the button they just designed so that someone using a screen reader would understand the context for it.

Prototype.

20+ mins

Design and prototype one part of the app. Ask students to:

Sketch or describe 1–3 screens to show how a user would complete the core activity they identified in the previous step.
Consider the following questions for the content in their prototype screens:
- Would the text, visuals, and audio work for a broad range of people?
  Are there any groups of people who might have trouble using anything on the screens?

Optional One‑minute App Icon Challenge:

Take one minute and challenge students to sketch an app icon.

Support

Review the instructions for using Keynote to make a working prototype using the Build section of the App Design Journal.

Extend

(+30 or more mins)

Ask students to download and complete the first challenge of Swan’s Quest: Voices in the Dark in Swift Playgrounds to learn about and use Apple’s accessibility APIs. In Swift Playgrounds on Mac, choose File then Import Playground to open the downloaded file. Refer to the Swan’s Quest, Chapter 1: Voices in the Dark video to get started.

Then ask them to try the Composing Views coding exercise in the App Design Workbook to practice making an app function using SwiftUI. Invite students to use what they learned in Swan’s Quest and the coding exercises to try bringing their app prototype to life using Swift and SwiftUI.