DEI within Human Centered Design

You can get sued if your website or app is not accessible. Yet, you can make a website or app that lacks diversity, equity and inclusion and no one bats an eye.

Schedule a DEI by Design discovery call today.

Most people are familiar with metrics and the need to measure products against company goals, best practices and specific standards. The metrics that tend to matter most to companies with an external audience are things like abandonment, conversions, customer acquisition cost, retention, customer lifetime value and average revenue per user. For enterprise apps, those with an internal audience, metrics tend to be focused on views, usage, most popular content, number of clicks, and findability.

What if in addition, you also measured:

• Classism
• Gender Identity
• Culture
• Neurodiversity
• Normatives
• Race
• Language, and
• Accessibility

User experience design has become an important part of company strategy. Its focus on Human Centered Design is what makes it so important — yet many companies today aren’t aware of a glaring gap in UX design:

Human Centered Design is broken
if it’s not diverse, equitable, inclusive and intersectional.

Let’s break that down.

 

Diversity is the presence of differences that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective.

Equity is the process of fairness. The policy that one would implement to ensure processes and procedures promote justness and impartiality.

Inclusion is an outcome to ensure those that are diverse actually feel and/or are welcomed. Are you, the institution, and your program inviting?

Intersectionality is the practice of understanding that different aspects of a person combine and create overlapping areas of privilege and oppression.

Understanding this prompted us to develop the DEI Product Index to measure diversity, equity and inclusion of an app or website. We look closely at every detail and measure a product against 78 different points of diversity, equity and inclusion and intersectionality.

Here are some examples of what we’re seeing:

Products using stock images of mostly white people in their mid-30s living a happy life with their spouse and children. Most of these images contain people who are well-dressed, well-groomed, thin, and able-bodied, and that’s not representative of who we truly are as people. Even when apps or sites contain diverse groups of people, they often perpetuate colorism, where the skin tone of all people is relatively light, heteronormatievs where everyone is in a heterosexual family and agism where everyone is under 40.

We are also seeing the use of complex language and multi-step instructions creating barriers for a person who is dyslexic, newer to the English language, has low-working memory or ADHD. For these groups, filling in a long multi-step form can be agonizing. Sites and apps full of screens that require a user to recall information over several minutes results in user frustration and abandonment. Imagine what it was like for a child with dyslexia or low working memory who went to school online this past year and you’ll have an idea of how impactful this type of experience can be for someone with cognitive or other differences.

If you don’t fit into one of these groups or know someone close to you in one of these groups, then these may seem like small and harmless trade-offs. What’s happening is much larger than it seems.

Here is the size of the audience impacted:

• 2.2 billion humans are visually-impaired worldwide
• 1.2 million humans are non-binary
• 1.4 million humans are transgender
• 33.8 million humans are multiracial
• 50 million humans are senior citizens
• 1:8 humans are neurodiverse
• 1:4 humans are physically-impaired

Here’s what you can do about it to take action for your products at your company:

1. Create personas and user journeys for marginalized groups
2. Write use cases and user stories that are reflective of those personas
3. Interview within marginalized communities as part of user research and testing and provide accommodations for people who may need them