Biases and UX: A short review of Earring Magic Ken’s success.
This one starts with a tiktok- and you should hear me out.
Dr. Theresa Kadish recently shared in a tiktok how researchers stuck in a heteronormative* lens simply couldn’t classify or understand mycology because the majority of mycelium does not present or behave in a binary. When you can’t see beyond a binary, what isn’t doesn’t fit is classified as an ‘outlier’ rather than real data.
A great case study in this is a contemporary one: the Barbie movie. What? Yes. But to make my case, I’m going to drag you back to the 1990’s to meet ‘Earring Magic Ken’, the best-selling Ken doll ever. This particular Ken famously came about because Mattel, having a mainly heteronormative* product research team sent out a survey asking kids what they found cool, and kids reported back: the club scene (or MTV). So, as all good product research goes- your next step is to build a moodboard. The researchers compiled photos of club goers’ outfits and pulled the most common or stand-out fashion items. Among those was (unbenounced to the researchers) a ‘sex accessory’ used as a necklace (-according to Dan Savage. You can google it, you don’t need me to spell it out here). This accessory really could have been any chrome ring on a necklace, but popular culture quickly took Dan Savage’s remarks and ran with it: Queer folks streamed into stores looking for this Ken, and Heteronormative folks rallied against this and the series of recent Kens whose fashion was contemporary masculine, not a midcentury masculine.
Earring Magic Ken hit the shelves and simultaneously flew off of them. Mattel had unknowingly created a gay icon -and in some ways- gay visibility. Earring Magic Ken was the fastest selling and the shortest run Ken (though some argue a 6-month window isn’t unusual for doll design turnover). Once Mattel heard that their Ken dolls were being collected specifically by the Queer community, they received pushback and he quickly did not return to stores. What Mattel was passing up on was a proven market: the Queer market.
Due to this particular Kens popularity, some stores had raised their prices by half, then by double. Folks were willing to pay to get Earring Magic Ken at rates that they otherwise might balk at. If you created a product that suddenly could make you twice the revenue (and lets be clear, beyond the supposed ‘sex accessory’, this Ken was simply considered by Mattel to be non-binary presenting. They didn’t say his sexuality was intended to change, just that his outfits were more appealing to their target base of girls between the ages of 3–13. So for all intents and purposes, lets classify this under light-UI-changes.) would you walk away from where the data was taking you?
So why am I connecting this to the Barbie movie of 2023? Because Earring Magic Ken is in the Barbie movie, but sans his infamous (and frankly- non descript) accessory. This is something that bugged me because, despite a 30year time-lapse, it feels like Mattel is still avoiding acknowledging the Queer market. And I get it, Barbie is a family movie, and you could be afraid that necklace, even as a nod, would receive outcry and accusations. But I think, 30 years later, we could’ve found a solid way around it. The avoidance of directly referencing Queerness is holding Mattel back from a major market.
Mattel made a product after User Research, Market Research, and UI moodbaording. They got an incredibly positive (user-base) response, and gained a whole new sector of users. But because this response wasn’t solely heteronormative conforming, they dropped Earring Magic Ken and quickly moved back into a more conservative fashion for him. When we loop back to UX, I see this as having an incredibly successful update to your product, but instead of taking the data and building on it, you revert to your old UI and user experience and thus return to your previous profit margins and problems.
To loop back into Dr. Theresa Kadish’s tiktok, I think when we talk about removing personal biases when interpreting the data in UX, we don’t say the quiet parts out loud.
Leaving things unspoken often leads to them being unheard.
Listening to Dr. Theresa’s tiktok had me realize that while we breifly touch on what biases are, and the categories they can come from (race, religion, culture, ableism, sexuality, identity, etc.), we don’t often do a deep dive into how those can present and skew our data. As UX designers and researchers, we are expected to be impartial, but as the saying goes “How can a fish tell it’s in water?”
Maybe we shy away from diving into biases talks because they are deep, powerful, and sometimes scary places to be. Biases as people are- are complicated. But it’s important to say the quiet parts outloud, especially when you are learning. If you cant see why you are interpreting the data the way you are, how is the product to grow outside of your image?
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* The term ‘heteronormative’ can apply to a pattern of behaviors, but also to internal biases where an individual sees heterosexualism as the baseline, default, or main story arcthrough their day-to-day life. Heteronormativity is not to be conflated with heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is a sexual orientation whereas heteronormativity is a bias towards the binary, or hetero outcomes. In the case of Dr.Theresa’s tiktok, this presents as researchers being unable to see sex as anything except ‘male + female’ reproduction. In the case of Mattel, I am not assuming anyone on their past nor present team’s sexual orientation, but I am pointing out that their team was far enough removed from Queer culture to not realize the outfits they were considering for Ken (and chose) were signals of the Queer club culture. When going through their moodboard, they saw the outfits through a heteronormative lens and so moved forward under those biases and assumptions. Nothing about that was harmful, but the reversal away from Earing Magic Ken and the shying away from his representation today I personally do see as some toxic heteronomativity. It’s an act to preserve a heteronormative presentation, and therefore perpetuating a bias through their actions and in the ways they can- their product.
