Equitable design starts with recruitment
Within UX, Design Research, and Design Thinking, there has been a push to rethink methods and processes with an eye toward equity and inclusion. These approaches are broadly referred to as equity-based design.
Amidst efforts to improve inclusivity, I’ve found that participant recruitment — an area I believe to be critical if we are to lay the foundation for a truly equitable design practice — is often overlooked.
A little background
The equity-based design movement manifests in many forms and is currently being driven by a range of talented designers. Creative Reaction Lab’s Equity-Centered Community Design, Liberatory Design, and Design Justice are great examples. All of these aim to push designers to question their own role and power in the process of design, and to question the process itself. These approaches have sparked critical exploration in the field, though none propose to have a definitive answer.
My work has been informed and strengthened by this community for years, so this piece is intended as a “yes, and” addition. I will refer to this larger idea as equity-based design throughout this piece.
I’ve seen the power of equity-based process improvements firsthand. Truly including and ceding control to participants leads to radically different solutions. But without deeply examining the process of choosing who gets to participate in addition to what that participation looks like, we’re missing a crucial opportunity. The real magic emerges when we prioritize equity in both the ‘who’ and the ‘how.’
In my experience, recruiting for design research is the hot potato. It’s often one of the first things design teams outsource, as it can be a massive time suck, incredibly hard, and very little fun. Whether it gets handed off to the marketing team or an outside recruiter, seeing a designer jump at the opportunity to recruit for their study is rare, but matters.
Why recruiting equitably matters
Recruiting might be one of the most dreaded tasks for design teams, but it’s also the one that can make all the difference when it comes to equity. We can change how we engage participants, but until we address who ends up ‘in the room,’ we’re just making changes on the margins.
While working on a tool that helped high school students determine the net price of college, I learned how a passive approach to recruiting can skew everything that comes after. At first, we worked primarily with local high school principals to find students. Unsurprisingly, they wanted to show us their best and brightest, so my participants ended up being a parade of exceptional students — truly fantastic kids, but if I stopped there, our product would be only about helping the students who already had access to support. When I asked to talk to struggling students, principals hesitated.
No one wants to show you the kids who are struggling. And forget about the students who cut school and are at risk of failing. Principals couldn’t get them in the room with me even if they wanted to. By failing to interrogate our recruiting habits, we build products that protect the status quo — often helping ‘A’ students get farther ahead and ‘B’ students bump their grades, leaving the rest behind. Nothing I did after recruiting would critically change the products that were built. They were doomed to perpetuate and exacerbate the existing system the moment I let the principals select my participants. The same has been true across every industry and project I’ve seen.
My bad recruiting habits not only excluded certain voices, they actively prioritized already privileged students. Every designer and design process has its flaws, but by choosing the path of least resistance in recruiting, we are spending the limited time, money, and effort we have to put toward improving equity to make changes in the margins, rather than getting to the core of the problems we’re trying to solve.
When we eventually got to work with the students who struggled, we learned that the tool we’d created was ineffective for them. It relied on parent participation and a preexisting understanding of the college landscape that most students did not have. Instead of helping students find a school they could afford, most took away the message that college wasn’t for them. It wasn’t until these students were in the room that we could understand what was actually needed to help them reach their goals.
What makes current recruiting methods inequitable?
Recruiting is hard. It’s time-consuming, often tedious, and we rarely know exactly how long it will take. When my design projects take longer than expected, it’s usually due to recruiting challenges. But I’ve learned it’s better to take the time to get it right than to slot in people based on convenience.
My early recruiting woes made me curious about why the process so often fails, and led me to make equity-based recruiting a priority. I’ve tested and implemented solutions in multiple settings: internally, with clients specifically looking for more equitable research practices, and in projects I’ve run for clients. Along the way, I’ve distilled a few common reasons why recruiting fails, and key ways to make the process easier.
1. Rapid timelines
The speed at which design projects are expected to recruit is one of the biggest challenges. I’m sure at this point I have quite a few designers screaming as they read that they’d be lucky if they get any time for research, let alone enough time to recruit. The impact is also felt by the participants. But our tight deadline doesn’t mean the people who we really need to talk to share that urgency. On most social impact projects, the people we’re trying to include are deeply time-limited by long work hours, family responsibilities, and other factors.
Solutions: One of the best ways I’ve found to handle this is to shift recruiting to an ‘always-on’ approach. Planning for at least one or two sessions a week means I can schedule farther out for participants who need more notice and get quick turnaround for those who don’t know their schedule until the week of. I’ve gotten comfortable scheduling sessions without all the project details, trusting that we’ll come up with something to chat about. This shift has also forced me to rethink my screeners. I now opt for ones that help me understand who the participant is broadly while being easy to fill out, and then I adjust it as our needs change.
As part of the ‘always-on’ approach, I encourage my clients to build a broad sign up screener with a consistent link that they continually promote. This makes it easier to get someone scheduled who otherwise wouldn’t make it through the flow in time.
2. Negative beliefs about participants who don’t show
One of the most insidious challenges to recruiting is a belief that the people who don’t show or respond are flaky, lazy, or simply uninterested. I hear it a lot when I work with younger participants in particular. Everyone would rather recruit the class president because the class president shows up. But by falling into this trap we perpetuate the cycle rather than design against it. Is your participant uncommunicative, or are they dealing with a family crisis? Did they flake, or are they struggling with anxiety around a new setting and new people? What can you do to flip from viewing these as challenges you don’t want to deal with to seeing them as the challenge to solve?
Solutions: Simply writing good policies is the best first step to improve this. While I was working with Better Future Forward, one of their biggest concerns was bothering potential subjects — so they’d email once and then mark them as uninterested. But we realized students often don’t check their email or forget to respond when they meant to. They also can feel deeply awkward responding if they feel like too much time has passed. So we shifted their policy to a three-time touch, with clear language in each message suggesting it was okay if the recipient forgot, and that they’d always have the option to be removed from the list. Some of the most impactful participants I’ve worked with are ones that answered on the third attempt.
One of the participants who impacted my work at Edquity took three months to schedule including two reschedules and a no-show. I could have written her off (and for many other projects, my timeline would have necessitated it), but she kept responding, and it became clear she was canceling on me for the exact the reasons I wanted her input — she was a single mom juggling a child with complex health needs and college. She understood what needed to change in her life and that of so many others in ways that most class presidents wouldn’t have.
Similarly, we created policies around no-shows, rescheduling, and interruptions that were clear, and reflected what we understand about our students — specifically that they have busy lives, and talking to a random stranger on the internet is less important than a final exam, caring for family, or even a good night’s sleep. These changes come across in every aspect of the process: how research gets described, letting participants know how to cancel or reschedule if need be, and how we check in if a participant doesn’t show. Participants notice, and it means our no-show rate is substantially lower and participants come in more interested in engaging.
3. One-and-done participation
I was trained with the dogma of only having a participant in once for fear of tainting results. If someone user-tested too many times, they’d catch on and add bias. It took me years to question this despite the fact that it could make work with design participants highly transactional and extractive.
Solutions: Do away with the rule*. Once you’ve put in the work of equity-based recruiting, don’t throw it away by immediately declaring someone ineligible to participate again. In my experience, multiple sessions build trust and openness that rightfully isn’t there the first time. This also adds a level of accountability for the team, as we know that the person who shared their biggest challenges will be back in our lives and expect to know what came of their vulnerability.
In my work with Better Future Forward, we found this approach radically changed our experience and outcomes. The team wanted to hear from students who had not had a good experience with their service in the hopes of informing their upcoming redesign. We managed to recruit six students for three months of sessions — three sessions and three at-home tasks each. That consistency and recurring touch point gave students reason to believe we were actually listening. Knowing the sessions were planned changed how the team approached designing — making sure we could show students throughout the process how their last round of input had been directly integrated. We couldn’t have done that with a one-and-done approach. Luckily, this helps with the quick timeline challenges as well, since participants who know what to expect are more likely to answer emails or texts.
*Obviously use common sense. If you need someone who has never seen the product, get someone new. But there are likely plenty of other reasons to bring participants back for other elements of your work. As a freelance designer, I have had participants come back on different projects allowing for that trust to carry over even if the project has changed.
4. Same old recruiting methods
Did you post a link to Twitter and Facebook? Did you ask the same people to share with their network? Those might be the best approaches for you, but they also might be bringing bias to the pool already. ‘Hard to reach’ folks are hard to reach for a reason. Often times the people I’m looking for are too busy to find helpful resources, let alone be looking for opportunities on social media.
Solutions: When working with new clients, I first try to identify which of their most important participants are hardest to engage, and then build recruiting practices around them. For example, in higher education, we frequently run into a steep gender divide driven partially by demographics (there are more women in college, women are more likely to bear the childcare burden and suffer from a pay gap, etc.) but not enough to explain how few male students sign up. So we often go out of our way to find male students. In the past, I’ve reached out to fraternities and other male spaces on campus to recruit. Whenever we do get male students in our pipeline, we ask if they’re comfortable referring friends in explicit ways, making sure referrals aren’t a continuation of our network, but of theirs. I’ve even asked female participants who tell me about their boyfriend’s financial struggles to ask if they want to participate. I once recruited my Lyft driver after realizing he fit the requirements. By removing the one-and-done rule, we build more genuine relationships with participants which makes them more open to referring their peers, often on their own accord. Understanding who is hard to find and prioritizing them is critical to changing the recruiting process.
This is not a comprehensive list of the challenges of recruiting for equity-based design. Recruiting is demanding work, but it is critical to the outcome of every design we do. By failing to question who is in the room, and who we didn’t make enough effort to include, we will continue designing for those with access despite our best intentions.
