To foster good design for older and dis-abled people and to equip designers to address their needs, we must engage with the design process in real situations. To do this, we need to know more about what the design industry actually does and, in particular, how it involves users and user information. This paper presents initial results on this from an observa-tional study of designers and a literature review and discusses their implications for the provision of guidance and user information to designers engaged in inclus-ive design.