Design, Context, and Intent: Building a More Inclusive Future
Design is often described as the solving of problems within constraints, or if you’re into formal definitions, the act of creating or executing something according to a plan. I like to use the latter description when talking about design. It better reflects the uniqueness of the act; it’s intent. Intent is a funny thing because it’s focused on an outcome we imagine, but as anyone who’s uttered a poorly timed joke can tell you, good intent doesn’t always amount to a desired outcome.
In the building of the world — the designing of all.the.things — the gap between intent and outcome should be taken seriously. It’s consequences can be far-reaching and equally devastating. That, my friends, is what we’re going to dive into today: how design creates impact far beyond its intent and how stronger contextual framing can help us make better, fairer, kinder designs.
Designing with context in mind
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, 2020 is the year that should wake up every business leader, every designer, heck — every person — to the reality that much of the world we’ve designed isn’t working and hasn’t been working for many people and environments since the beginning. We’re seeing the failure of both objects and systems and the ripple effect of decisions made both intentionally and unintentionally.
That ripple effect is very real and ranges widely from small, local annoyance (why do airplane seats only have arm rests for two of the three people in the row?) to global change. Case in point: the simple interaction pattern for infinite scrolling has made its mark far beyond local ease of use and has rewired how we spend the hours of our day.
Introducing design to the world can be like throwing a basketball into a city intersection — if you’re only looking below the lights, you’re likely to miss much of the impact. That impact is real and often unequally distributed. So what’s a designer to do? Take a look at how design decisions get made and who’s involved in that process.
The difference between constraints and context
The problem begins when we narrowly define what we’re solving. The constraints we design with, at least in the field of digital product design, come to us in a document of requirements directly related to the activity our design is facilitating. Constraints, however, do not describe context. Context includes the human, physical, digital, historical, and societal particulars that, whether we like it or not, shape and are shaped by our design work.
This is the point in which we pause to understand that business requirements and design requirements default to what the business is immediately concerned with — it’s own constituents, customers, users, materials, etc. It’s time for us to broaden what we consider our context so that we may include, impact, and otherwise take responsibility for, our work in the world.
Finding context through questions
Begin with questions. Just as a writer should read more than she writes, a designer should spend more time asking questions than providing answers. Start with what you know: the basics of who, what, where, when, and how — and then follow each one of these lines of questions with WHY.
If you’re designing a mobile ticketing app for the local bus system, start by understanding who rides the bus and why, who doesn’t ride the bus and why, how the traffic route was planned, how ticket pricing works. Who staffs the buses? Who cleans them? Which city offices have ownership of the system? (Side note: it’s never one city office.) Who doesn’t have a mobile phone? Who carries pocket change to pay for their ticket? What happened last time ticket prices were changed? Etc. Pull at the threads you find until you have a broad, thick description of the surroundings of your design, it’s use, and it’s potential impact. At this point your questions should have served the purpose of uncovering not just what you need to know, but who to include and where to test your work.
Making the switch from designing for others to designing with others
All the data in the world will never replace the act of designing with people — not only your users, but also the people in their vicinity. Let’s try another example: say you’ve set out to create a new toy for preschool classrooms. Instead of working solo and then validating your design, invite kids, parents, and teachers into your process from the start. Make this group diverse — you’ll want children and parents and teachers from all walks of life, abilities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Have them contribute ideas, feel materials, take the objects to home and school. You might find that your pristine, elegant toy design — worthy of the MOMA design shop no less — is too slippery for tiny hands to grasp, cumbersome to clean in a busy classroom, and lackluster when tossed into the storage bin with other brightly colored objects.
If you’re designing that toy to look like a human, you’ve got a whole lot of representation of ethnicity, gender, shape, and culture to gauge. And thus you begin to understand the fullness of context — your person-shaped toy isn’t just a plastic plaything, it’s the means by which young children learn the world.
Designing with others is an art and it’s one that involves taking your designer ego and putting it in the back seat — it’s not your work, it’s our work and this is how we make work that caters to broad groups and environments without harm. Now, this isn’t about making everyone happy — that’s impossible — this is about making sure we build solutions that work for the most people and harm the fewest while achieving our intended impact.
Put it into practice with ethical decision making
If design is the solving of problems within constraints, to be a designer is to make a series of decisions about how to do that. Armed with your knowledge of context and your co-designers, you’ll need to put these good intents into action via the calls you make. This is a team sport and much of it will be out of your control, which is why it’s so important that the design process involves not only designers and users, but internal company stakeholders. Include your marketing team, your materials engineers, your business strategists, your employee resource groups in share outs and design sessions. This is the best way I know to ensure your design-as-intended is the design that gets implemented.
I also recommend pairing your design decisions with a follow-up plan. Hopefully, as a curious person who understands that a product launch is just the beginning of the journey, you already think about how you’d like to monitor the success and opportunities of the work. Go a step further by pairing your typical conversion, adoption, and behavioral metrics with impact assessments — how your product is impacting not only users, but their immediate surroundings.
This step is your follow-through. We don’t want to throw that basketball into the intersection and then close our eyes! Be bold, watch what happens and be prepared to adjust course. I’m very fond of follow-up interviews with non-users who are peripheral to the product. For example, when releasing SurveyMonkey Engage into the world, we followed up with end users and the employees to whom they delegated tasks. What did we find? Our v1 product was creating extra work downstream, something we wouldn’t have seen in simple usage metrics or user-only interviews.
A parting word: Perfection isn’t the goal
I would love to promise that if you honor context, ask all the questions, co-design and partner flawlessly, that your work will be wholly inclusive and devoid of harm. However, perfection isn’t possible in the messy task of world-making. Systems are complicated, people are complicated, and one person cannot anticipate all rings in the ripple effect of their work — but you can do your part to normalize the act of considering broad impact. Let’s make this the wave we start.
This article is part of a series exploring diversity and inclusion from the team at SurveyMonkey. In this series, we share perspectives, ideas, and learnings from our team that are part of this broader — more vital than ever — dialogue.
Read our first article on tips for writing more inclusive language here, and our third article on cultivating diversity, equity and inclusion here.
