Written by by Vijay Govindarajan, Kinya Seto, Tojin T. Eapen and Christine Moorman, February 9, 2026
Innovations created for users with accessibility needs can be amplified to unlock universal value. This process, “design amplification,” begins with products designed for people with physical disabilities such as vision, hearing, motor, or…more
In 2003, when plumbing fixtures industry veteran Rob Buete first encountered the “walk-in tub” made by a startup called Safety Tub, he burst out laughing. A bathtub with a door? It seemed like a joke, or at best a clunky contraption for frail seniors who couldn’t step over a regular tub.
Buete was spectacularly wrong. As he told us in an interview last year, he would soon learn a profound (and profitable) lesson.
When a friend landed the East Coast distribution for Safety Tubs and brought him aboard, Buete learned that thousands of leads for tub sales were flooding in from AARP Magazine ads. After the first customer called in tears, Buete became a believer. One woman told them she hadn’t bathed in a tub in over a decade. “I remember her name to this day,” Buete says. By 2005, Buete and his friend had acquired Safety Tubs.
Then Buete noticed something interesting: A considerable share of the demand was not coming from the tubs’ intended market of older people with mobility constraints. Demand exploded to include all kinds of people with all kinds of wants and needs. Overweight people found the tubs life changing. Athletes wanted the hydrotherapy benefits. People suffering from arthritis, back pain, and joint issues, regardless of age, requested installations. Features like massaging water jets, soothing air bubbles, and chromotherapy attracted health-conscious consumers and younger buyers seeking relaxation and muscle recovery. “We realized we weren’t just selling to an older population,” Buete explains. “We had something much bigger.”
Today, what Buete initially considered a joke is a $750 million market, with premium tubs and installations commanding more than $20,000. Safety Tubs, where Buete served as CEO, was acquired by American Standard, which, in turn, was acquired by LIXIL (where Kinya is CEO). Buete now leads American Standard and Basco brands for the Americas region at LIXIL, which sells the walk-in tubs.
This story reveals a powerful and underdeveloped opportunity: Innovations created for users with accessibility needs can be amplified to unlock universal value. We call this process “design amplification.” It begins with products designed for people with physical disabilities such as vision, hearing, motor, or cognitive challenges and transforms those products into mainstream offerings. Unlike universal design—a design philosophy originating in architecture that says that designs should meet needs of all users, including disabled ones—profitability and market expansion are goals of design amplification.
Most companies develop products for mainstream customers for a very good reason: They represent the largest and most profitable segment of consumers. Disabled customers, on the other hand, have largely been dismissed as niche segments with limited opportunity. Design amplification flips the conventional product logic. Instead of starting with the biggest and most profitable segment, the design process starts with constrained users (i.e., disabled people) and expands outward to create substantial value for everyone.
To uncover the intentional and strategic aspects of design amplification, we looked at over 150 archival examples of design general cases and conducted a deep study of the design amplification process at LIXIL across several products, including American Standard Walk-In Tubs, KINUAMI Foam Shower, Well-Life Kitchen, DOAC Smart Door, and INAX Bidet Toilets, and interviewed the company’s design and business leadership.
Based on our research, we explain how companies can use design amplification to turn constraints into marketplace wins.
The Four Levels of Design Amplification
When disability is tangled up with stigma or treated as charity, the market for products aimed at disability is limited. But when disability is viewed as a driver of innovation, the market can be vast.
Designers of products for disabled people are often forced to question core assumptions. In the case of walk-in tubs, for example, one question was, “Why does waterproof have to mean a rigid wall that doubles as a permanent barrier?” Once the extreme need had been served by turning the wall into a door, other needs could be met. These evolved in stages, each reaching broader markets while keeping the core benefit intact.
Our research illustrates that solutions for disabled people can create value across three expanding circles: to other marginalized groups; to people with temporary or situational constraints; and to mainstream consumers who appreciate the enhanced experience. Designing for the edge can indeed scale to the center.
Level 1: The marginalized user
Design amplification starts by addressing the unique needs of a target group whose constraints demand inventive solutions.
For Safety Tubs, that group was seniors with mobility limitations, many of whom faced safety risks in traditional bathrooms. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among older adults, and most of those falls occur in bathrooms. The walk-in tub’s core features—a watertight door, low threshold entry, built-in chair-height seat, strategically placed grab bars, and slip-resistant floor—neutralize those risks.
Level 2: Other marginalized users
Once a solution proves effective for the initial target group, there are often opportunities to serve marginalized users facing different, but related, constraints.
Safety Tubs learned this lesson quickly. As the company began selling directly to consumers, orders started to come in from overweight customers, for whom walk-in tubs offered a more dignified alternative to too-small traditional plumbing fixtures. The company also soon added wider and outward-opening doors to ease wheelchair transfers.
Level 3: Situational users
Products initially designed for permanent disabilities can become lifesavers for those experiencing a temporary disability like a broken leg or sprained shoulder. Safety Tubs saw this when athletes and injury patients began ordering tubs for hydrotherapy. Buete, a former college soccer player, spotted the parallel between aging seniors and athletes recovering from physical strain. Both groups sought water immersion benefits, just for different reasons.
To serve this new customer segment, LIXIL added inline water heaters to keep bathwater warm for long soaks, 44-jet hydrotherapy systems including specialized hand and foot massage options, and “Quick Drain” technology to eliminate the shiver while waiting for water to empty, which can now be done in as fast as two minutes. The same features that eased pain for 75-year-olds with mobility issues attracted 45-year-old marathoners chasing faster recovery.
Level 4: Mainstream users
In addressing the sensory, mobility, and cognitive constraints of marginalized and situational users, products often incorporate intuitive interfaces, multiple sensory cues, and simplified controls. Those features extend their value to a broader audience, approaching design amplification’s ultimate goal: turning accessible design into preferred design.
According to American Standard internal data provided by Buete, the U.S. walk-in bathtubs market was valued at $757.26 million in 2022 and is expected to reach $941.61 million by 2028, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.70% during the forecast period. For walk-in tubs, this mainstream adoption occurred when safety features transformed into luxury differentiators. The low-threshold entry that prevented falls became “spa-style accessibility.” The built-in seating designed for stability became “ergonomic relaxation positioning.” But mainstream buyers were also drawn to superior durability and year-round convenience compared to outdoor Jacuzzis, which typically last only a decade, require extensive winterization, and suffer frequent maintenance issues.
The Design Amplification Playbook
While many breakthroughs occur by chance, firms can deploy a disciplined process to replicate success in mainstreaming products originally designed for marginalized users. Based on our analysis of innovations that involve design amplification both at LIXIL and other companies, we’ve developed a structured methodology. The five-step framework, which we call the Design Amplification Playbook, is a replicable process that can be applied to any product in any industry.
We illustrate the strategies in the playbook using the hypothetical redesign of one particular product feature: the packaging system for a hypothetical brand we call ThriveQuench Sports Beverages (a Gatorade competitor).
Step 1: Begin with a focus on permanent limitation or disability.
Rather than designing for the “average” user, begin by choosing a permanent disability as your primary innovation lens. This might be complete blindness, profound deafness, severe mobility limitations, or significant cognitive impairments. The key is to focus on eliminating a single well-defined barrier that will serve an initial market. This barrier serves as a powerful creative constraint to force breakthrough thinking. When designers can’t rely on conventional solutions (visual cues, sound alerts, fine motor skills), they find new approaches that often prove superior for all users.
For example, if ThriveQuench’s design team were to select total blindness as their starting constraint, they would learn that 36 million people worldwide are blind and likely cannot independently access nutrition information, flavor identification, or expiration dates typically found on consumer-packaged goods (CPG).
Step 2: Examine the user journey under the focal limitation.
After choosing the constraint, teams must systematically examine every touchpoint in the user journey from discovery through completion. This requires granular behavioral documentation: What physical motions are required? Which cognitive processes are involved? Where do breakdowns occur?
ThriveQuench’s mapping process would trace every user interaction, from selecting the product on the shelf through disposal. By shadowing blind customers through their entire beverage experience, ThriveQuench’s journey mapping would reveal barriers at every stage, from distinguishing flavors in crowded store refrigerators to checking expiration dates at home to understanding nutritional content during workouts.
Step 3: Map benefits for marginalized, situational, and mainstream customers.
Here’s where major insights emerge about potential customers across all four levels of design amplification.
Cross-disability patterns reveal that solutions for one disability can often solve problems across multiple types of permanent disabilities. For instance, teams might realize that solutions to improve the navigation for blind users also help people with cognitive processing challenges. In the case of ThriveQuench, designing a product whose information is easily accessible to the blind can also help wheelchair users who are unable to reach for products and need to read labels from a distance.
Journey mapping can also reveal interconnected situational needs. Vision constraints mirror challenges in glare-filled environments, dark spaces, or during multitasking. For ThriveQuench, the team might identify situational users such as non-native speakers and international travelers navigating unfamiliar labels.
Universal appeal reveals the greatest marketing opportunity. The key insight is that accessibility features can deliver benefits that all users find valuable and turn accommodations into aspirations. For ThriveQuench, the mainstream opportunity lies with busy shoppers seeking quick access to key label information.
This comprehensive mapping shows us how accessible information design that’s helpful for the blind can become a competitive advantage that differentiates ThriveQuench across all customer segments.
Steps 1 through 3 help to identify the total addressable market. This should be done before the first solution concept is even sketched in a notebook. This upfront strategizing can justify the investment case for R&D resources, reduce risks, and improve outcomes.
Step 4: Design for scalability across all levels of amplification.
In this stage, the focus should be on developing solutions that systematically address each amplification level while maintaining scalability and market appeal.
Emerging technologies such as AI-powered interfaces, haptic feedback systems, voice recognition, NaviLens (a type of accessible QR code), and exoskeletons (wearables) can enable design amplification at scale.
For ThriveQuench, a tactile NaviLens placed on every bottle would enable blind users to locate and scan product information through touch (Level 1). When activated, these codes could trigger audio narration on a phone app in the user’s language, delivering nutrition facts, allergen warnings, and flavor descriptions. NaviLens technology also serves other marginalized users, such as wheelchair users accessing information from a distance (Level 2), and situational users, such as tourists needing multilingual support (Level 3).
For mainstream appeal (Level 4), ThriveQuench can enhance the content delivered via NaviLens codes to include fruit origin stories, athlete endorsements, and workout playlists. This creates a comprehensive digital ecosystem that appeals to health-conscious, tech-savvy, and sustainability-focused consumers, transforming basic product information into an engaging brand experience that commands premium positioning.
Step 5: Validate with all customer segments.
This stage involves comprehensive testing of the proposed solution across all customer segments in realistic settings. Teams should measure task success rates, completion times, cognitive load, and error frequency across all groups. They should test voice interfaces in quiet rooms and noisy environments and evaluate tactile controls with users who have limited grip strength and users wearing gloves in winter. They should continue iterative refinement until products perform well across all user categories without compromising functionality for any group.
For ThriveQuench, this step would involve conducting parallel testing with blind customers evaluating tactile design and audio clarity, international tourists assessing multilingual support, busy parents testing one-handed scanning capabilities in actual grocery store environments, and consumers seeking health-related information. These diverse perspectives guide iterative refinements to icon sizing, audio pacing, and durability of raised, tactile elements on the packaging, ensuring that the final product performs reliably across all user categories without compromising any segment’s specific needs.
Gen AI can support the five-step Design Amplification Playbook by identifying overlooked opportunities and enabling rapid iteration. To support this, we’ve developed a custom GPT to augment product designers’ creativity. When designers generate multiple early concepts for marginal or situational users, gen AI image models can virtually bring these ideas to life, visualizing product use and simulating interactions without physical prototypes or participant recruitment and accelerating convergence on the one concept worth investing in for costly field trials.
Call to Action
The numbers for marginalized users alone make the case: Over 1.3 billion people worldwide live with disabilities. But the bigger win comes when products designed for a limited target market thrive in the mainstream. Design amplification offers the potential to unlock meaningful commercial and social value. Yet most companies continue to treat accessibility as a niche market rather than an innovation catalyst.
To summarize, leaders should take three actions to leverage accessibility as a competitive advantage:
Embed accessibility constraints into your innovation process.
Don’t relegate disability considerations to post-design compliance checks. Instead, begin every product development cycle by selecting a specific disability as your initial design lens. This approach provides strategic intelligence gathering about unmet needs that your competitors are likely ignoring.
Invest in amplification-ready technologies.
Technologies such as AI interfaces, haptic feedback, voice recognition, wearables, and smart sensors shouldn’t be viewed merely as enablers for accessibility features. Instead, they must be viewed as the potential foundation for rich next-generation user experiences. Companies that master these technologies for marginalized users are better positioned to serve mainstream markets as these technologies mature.
Restructure your customer research.
Replace focus groups of “average users” with ethnographic studies of users with extreme limitations and disabilities. Observe a wheelchair user interacting with your app or document how arthritis affects product handling. The insights from these sessions can reveal innovation opportunities invisible to conventional market research.
Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty; and Senior Advisor at the strategy consulting firm Acropolis Advisors. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. His latest book is Fusion Strategy: How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future. He is a two-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best HBR article. Ten of his articles have been HBR all-time bestsellers. Follow him on LinkedIn.
@vgovindarajan
Kinya Seto is the CEO of LIXIL, the global manufacturer of pioneering water and housing products, including brands such as GROHE, American Standard, INAX, and Tostem.
Tojin T. Eapen is the founder of the Center for Creative Foresight (CForesight) and a Senior Fellow at The Conference Board. He has advised several Fortune Global 500 firms on idea management, strategic foresight, and sustainable innovation, and he was previously on the faculty of the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri. He is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2026.
Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She is founder and director of The CMO Survey.