Mitchell Wakefield believes accessibility is product strategy, not a side requirement

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After leading UX research on NHS Login for 28 million users, this product advisor argues that the best digital products are built around the people most often left out.

Mitchell Wakefield first understood the cost of bad design before he was working on products used by millions.

At a small digital agency in Newcastle, he worked on products for schools and healthcare. The work showed him something that stayed with him. Poor design was not just annoying. It could shut people out of services they needed. It could turn a simple task into a barrier. It could make a person feel as though the system was never built with them in mind.

“That was the first time I really saw how design could harm people,” Wakefield says. “If a product is inaccessible, the user is the one who pays the price. They lose time, confidence, access, and sometimes dignity.”

That realization became a through-line in his career. Wakefield, a UX researcher and product advisor, has built his work around a harder product question: what happens to the people a product was supposed to serve?

He does not treat accessibility as a final review step or a box to check before launch. He is interested in what a product asks of people, who it helps, who it leaves behind, and what those choices reveal about the company that built it.

“Usability is not enough,” he says. “A product can be technically easy to use and still be unfair, exclusionary, or quietly harmful. The deeper question is whether it gives people agency.”

That question became urgent during his time at NHS Digital. Wakefield led UX research on NHS Login, a product used by 28 million people to access health information. The scale changed the nature of the work. A mistake was not confined to one narrow user group. A poor decision could affect people across age, disability, confidence level, health status, and digital skill.

Healthcare also made accessibility impossible to treat as a secondary concern. For NHS Login, accessibility carried legal weight, but Wakefield saw it as more than compliance. It was a moral requirement because the product sat between people and their own health information.

“At NHS scale, accessibility cannot be an edge case,” Wakefield says. “The so-called edge cases are real people trying to do something important, often under stress. If the design fails them, the product has failed.”

Wakefield formalized that perspective through his MSc in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of York. His work with Professor Helen Petrie, a leading accessibility researcher, led to a peer-reviewed ACM publication. That chapter gave him a strong academic foundation, but it also kept him tied to practical outcomes. Research mattered because it could change how a real product worked for real users.

“I loved HCI because it gave language to what I had already seen in practice,” he says. “It was never just about making products easier. It was about understanding people deeply enough to design with respect.”

That is why Wakefield argues that accessibility is an imperative strategy in technology. Many teams still treat it as a late-stage requirement. They check contrast ratios, add labels, review compliance, and move on. Wakefield sees that as a narrow view. Products built for people with the highest needs often become stronger for everyone.

Clear language helps more than users with cognitive or literacy challenges. Better navigation supports more than screen reader users. Reduced friction helps people in stressful moments, distracted environments, or unfamiliar systems. Inclusive design can widen the market, build trust, and expose problems that would otherwise stay hidden until they become expensive.

“Accessibility is not charity work,” Wakefield says. “It is good product thinking. If your product works for the people most likely to struggle, it usually becomes more resilient for everyone else.”

That belief also informs how he talks about UX research itself. He believes the field is often misunderstood as a discipline of button placement, onboarding flows, and minor friction fixes. Those things matter, but they are not the full job. The real work is understanding what the product does to people.

A health portal can look clean and still fail disabled users. A gambling app can be easy to use and still push behavior in the wrong direction. A financial product can feel smooth while hiding risk or confusion. Wakefield thinks strong product teams need to ask harder questions about who benefits, who is exposed, and whether user needs and business goals are working together or quietly pulling apart.

“The interesting product questions are rarely just about whether someone can complete a task,” he says. “They are about what the product reinforces, what it rewards, and whether the person using it is being respected.”

That way of thinking carried into the private sector. At CloudKitchens, Wakefield became the first UX research hire, reporting to Travis Kalanick and building the function from zero. It was a different environment from NHS Digital, but the same principle applied. Research had to be close enough to the business to affect decisions. Reports were not enough. Insight had to change what teams built.

Wakefield ran loyalty, rewards, and competitive research across the gaming sector. These products made the behavioral stakes impossible to ignore because small design choices could influence when people returned, what they believed, and how protected they felt.

That experience sharpened his view that product design cannot hide behind the language of engagement. A product can be engaging for the wrong reasons. It can hold attention while creating patterns the company should question.

“Engagement is not automatically good,” Wakefield says. “The question is what kind of engagement you are creating and whether you would still defend it if you had to explain it plainly.”

Today, Wakefield works as Growth Lead, Product and Research Advisor at Golden Egg Media, helping companies in regulated and behaviorally complex industries decide what to build, who to build for, how to position products, and how to grow without leaning on manipulative patterns. His scouting work with Andreessen Horowitz gives him another view of the same question, since many early-stage teams are now trying to turn regulation, accessibility, and trust into product advantages rather than afterthoughts.

The contexts have changed across his career, but his core question has not. Whether the product is a public health login, a growth-stage platform, a sportsbook, or a new AI product, Wakefield wants to know how design shapes human behavior, trust, and access.

He believes better products start with the people most likely to be missed. They start with disabled users, stressed users, low-confidence users, regulated users, and users whose needs do not fit the neatest version of the roadmap.

“If you want to build something that lasts, look at who your product fails first,” Wakefield says. “That is usually where the most important product work is hiding.”

For Wakefield, accessibility is not a corner of the product process. It is one of the clearest tests of whether a team understands the people it claims to serve.