Designing for equity: a focus on internal or staff facing products

Faiza Peeran
4 min readSep 10, 2024

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Using a targeted recruitment approach to introduce equity into internal staff facing services.

Reproduced with permission of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, N.J.

We know the reality is that we live in a society where some people and communities face more barriers than others — including when accessing government tech and services. In the public sector, we’ve keen to make sure our public facing products are more accessible and equitable for those who use them. But when we’re designing tools for internal staff or practitioners, are we giving them the same consideration?

I’ve been interested in exploring how we can better introduce equity into user centred design for a while now. However, most of the work I’ve done has been for public facing products and services. Working across the NHS and now in the probation service, I’ve also noticed that there’s a big gap in our approach to equity when it comes to internal or staff facing products. Talking to others in the sector it seems to be a mix of a lack of visibility (as products are not public facing) and a lack of budget which can be tied to this. It’s also time consuming work and due to the above, can be a lower priority for teams.

However, I’ve been attempting to address this problem in my current project, by experimenting with a targeted approach to recruitment. This aims to focus on internal staff who might face the most barriers to using the product we’re designing.

The team I’m working in is replacing a legacy tool which helps to track and manage someone’s progress while they’re on probation. Our main users are probation practitioners, who work with people on probation to support them through their journey. We’ve recently ramped up our user research with practitioners as we’ve moved into the beta phase of the project and are testing our journeys more regularly. I’ve taken advantage of this regular cadence of design and user research to trial this new approach.

We know practitioners from minority ethnic backgrounds,for example, are underrepresented in the probation workforce. They also face more barriers to others working in the service. The HIMP report into race equality in probation reported that 40% of staff from minority ethnic backgrounds did not believe there was an inclusive enough culture in the organisation. Staff interviewed reported that they felt that complaints or grievances were not fairly dealt with. 60% also said they did not believe there was equal opportunity in staff recruitment, with data showing high proportions of underrepresentation in management roles.

Although we might not immediately draw a link between this and digital tools and services, we can’t assume that the technology we build is independent to discrimination or barriers at work. This is something that I’ve wanted our team to strongly consider as we’ve been designing and building. So I’ve started targeting rounds of testing with practitioners from these communities to make sure we’re not creating or reproducing any of these unintentional harms in our product.

Other groups of practitioners I’ve specifically involved in research include staff who experience neurodiversity (such as ADHD, autism or dyslexia) and who might also use assistive technology. Practitioners that we’ve spoken to have told us that the design of older or legacy tools have had a negative impact on the ability to do their work, making things more difficult or time consuming. Testing our designs with these groups has enabled us to identify any barriers in our product that might specifically cause challenges in their roles or responsibilities. An example of this is a preference in changing background colours on screens, which we’ve recently flagged with our design system team.

Working in this way has given us really valuable insight for our product. From the work we’ve done, it’s clear that by considering the needs of people who face the most barriers, we can improve the service for everyone. We can also identify where certain people might need specific support — and ensure that anything we design doesn’t reinforce discrimination people might already experience. Every time we play back our research insights, I’ve been including this as part of our narrative. It’s helped strengthen our reasoning for this work and gather buy-in from our team and our stakeholders.

This approach hasn’t been an exact science by any means, or a perfect approach. But it pushes us to recognise that even though our products might not be specifically aimed at the public, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to equity and accessibility. The staff who work on our public sector services deserve the same quality and consideration that we would afford the public. I’m hoping that this sort of experimentation shows we can all have an impact on addressing this in our teams.

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Faiza Peeran

Senior User Researcher at the Ministry of Justice. Formerly NHS Digital and Citizens Advice.