Creating Inclusive People Processes Using Design Thinking
How Design and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion go hand-in-hand
Have you ever had an interaction with a piece of technology- be it hardware, software or even a basic household tool, and been struck by the ease or simplicity with which it helped you accomplish your goal?
Every day we interact with good design and in most cases we’re not even aware, because the experience is seamless.
But for a segment of the population this is not the status quo. For many, even basic daily tasks become impossible or highly challenging due to the default way that products and experiences are designed. This is where inclusive design enters the picture.
What percentage of an average population encounter difficulties when engaging with conventionally designed tools & systems?
In design and engineering the “heritage of accessibility” refers to old school modalities of universal design which usually involved incremental adaptation, or accessibility features tacked on as an afterthought. This “one size fits all” thinking stands in stark contrast to the relatively new concept of inclusive design — which is a framework that informs the design process from start to finish.
Inclusive designs follows “one size fits one” thinking. It changes and molds to the user and the way they interface with the world or the experience. Starting with the inclusion of people who are most often excluded, it turns the failures of universal design thinking on their head and allows for a more even application of design principles.
This concept is important, because as humans we all have implicit biases. Designers may consciously and unconsciously allow those biases to inform how they design things, products, experiences and services. Sometimes these individual sensibilities inform design process for better, but more often, they result in the alienation and exclusion of certain user groups.
While the basic premise behind inclusive design is to design products that are usable by the greatest number of people, that doesn’t necessarily mean meeting every accessibility standard for every group, which would be impossible. It means designing your product or service with an understanding of who could be excluded based on the design choices you make, and/or seeking to be useful to communities that traditionally are overlooked by conventional design principles.
But why should we care about Inclusive Design?
Designing with a diversity of ways in which people may participate in an experience contributes to a greater sense of belonging overall and in specific spaces. Understanding how and why whole groups of people are excluded is key and can lead to more compassionate and unified societies. And finally, more widely useable products result in a broader consumer audience and higher demand for well-designed products.
The biggest way we’ve seen inclusive design theory at play in the 20th & 21st century is in allowing people with physical or other disabilities to use and enjoy the every-day products and services an able-bodied person may take for granted. More recently, inclusive design theory has expanded to consider other often excluded groups including women & gender non-conforming people, neurodiverse individuals and elders.
Credit: Sami Mititelu, unsplash
Creating Inclusive People Processes Using Design Thinking
What are some common processes inside People & Culture that might benefit from an inclusive Design Thinking lens? Here are three ways I use Inclusive Design principles when approaching common people processes inside the HR or People Ops function.
Inclusive Recruiting
Starting with job descriptions, I use a Design Thinking lens to audit internal and external-facing job descriptions for textual limiters including English language-specific, unnecessarily gendered or unclear or jargon-heavy descriptors. If you’re posting a role in multiple locations, I also examine for region-specific language or jargon that might create lack of clarity. I consult with multiple people already in the role in the same region to examine the JD for errors, omissions or lack of clarity and incorporate their feedback. I also collect feedback on external facing JD’s via an anonymous feedback form linked on every posting as well as on our Careers page.
We also can use Inclusive Design when conceptualizing and implementing the recruiting process itself. We need to ask “What about this process might make it inaccessible to people of different backgrounds and abilities?” If our intention is to make the process as inclusive and accessible as possible we need to perform a Process Audit and collect feedback from these different user groups as they proceed through each phase. It can be useful to form a user testing group that has representation across all the various diversity axes (eg. gender, race, ethnicity, region, age, identity, orientation, ability, neurotype. etc). This creates a benign, low-touch method of testing new features or process revisions.
You should also be collecting and actioning feedback from your real life candidates inside every hiring process. This should include both qualitative and quantitative methods such as anonymous surveys, feedback forms and an Accessibility Quality Check question at the close of every interview. Recruiters and Hiring Managers usually will need additional inclusive interview training on how to serve this question in a compliance-friendly manner.
Resources
A special thanks to Dr. Margaret Burnett, who joined the team to demonstrate how we can integrate Inclusive Design principles into our design and engineering processes at MistyWest. If you’re curious about the practical applications of Inclusive Design, and specifically Gender Inclusive Design, you might be interested in Dr. Burnett’s GenderMag tool.
© Rebecca Apostoli 2022, All Rights Reserved. Originally Published 03.10.2018
