How to be a Diversity & Inclusion activist as a designer
These days, being an advocate is not enough. How can designers be better activists for diversity & inclusion? Use this checklist to create inclusive experiences that are accessible to all
In one of my recent projects, I was exploring ways to help a global e-commerce product increase the conversion rate such as the percentage of site visitors who placed an order. Because that’s how the success of a design is measured, just like other online shopping sites. A lot of time and energy was spent on finding ways to optimize the conversion rate.
Since this site serves a diverse customer base, I started to wonder if we could make our current illustration style more inclusive to reach more customers?
That’s how my restless Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) research journey started.
A Google search on ways to increase Conversion Rate compared with ways to improve Diversity and Inclusion yields over 200,000,000 results. And instead of a nice featured snippet, we see a list of recommended academic papers when searching for D&I. It just wasn’t as easy as just looking for good methods to optimize the conversion rate.
This puzzling research gap reminded me of how far behind we are on our journey to embrace diversity & inclusion, even these days. 2020 in particular has been extremely challenging for people of color in America, from hundreds of police brutality instances (e.g. the shooting of Breonna Taylor, the killing of George Floyd, etc.) to the anti-Asian sentiments in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Just a few weeks ago, an Asian American CNN reporter had three back-to-back racist encounters within an hour. These incidents are increasing awareness of issues around race, gender, inclusion, and more.
Designers alone won’t be able to fix all the social inequality, but it’s time for us to complete the shift from user-centered design to human-centered design.
People interact with products and services created by designers every day, from physical objects like cars to digital apps like Instagram. A survey in Britain showed that the average adult will spend 34 years of their lives staring at screens.
Design is a powerful force that affects people’s daily lives.
Bringing a human-centered lens can make a positive impact by being mindful of D&I when making design decisions. Creating illustrations that represent a diverse group of people is one of the steps we can take to make the design more inclusive.
So I started to compile a list of tasks and watch-outs that designers could simply apply and audit against product/service design work, digital experience in particular. And this checklist becomes the heart of this article, a practical guide for designers to help ensure D&I is built into any future-state experience.
Note that, I intentionally used the word “activist” rather than “advocate” in the title of this article, because we need to make the change happen, now.
Along with the 10 areas we can improve D&I in design, you’ll also find some statistics and quotes in this article that I collected from D&I activists & advocates to help explain the importance and why.
For a checklist only version, please visit this page(work-in-progress).
This list will continue to evolve we keep learning and practicing activism through design, because Diversity & Inclusion is not a checkbox, but a long-term investment that we need to work on every day.
“Inclusive design: A design methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity.”
1. Build a diverse and inclusive team
If everyone in a group shares a similar background, it’s very likely that you will come up with the same ideas and make the same mistakes. To create a solution rooted in inclusive design, you’ll need a diverse and inclusive team. Research has shown that decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.
“When building teams, you aren’t just assigning resources — you’re framing your approach to the problem. Each team member brings their unique perspective and expertise to the team, widening the range of possible outcomes. If you want a breakthrough idea, you’re more likely to get it with a diverse team.”
There are many traits in terms of diversity; race and gender are just two common ones. Other factors include, but are not limited to: age, ability, culture, disability, ethnicity, region, religion, and education. Personality also has a part to play.
According to Matt May, hiring people with diverse backgrounds is only part of the story. As the Head of Inclusive Design at Adobe, he emphasized that a truly inclusive team requires effort to empower underrepresented groups. Pixar has created a very successful example. Its empowered employees are always open to communication and constantly looking for ways to improve. Ed Catmull shared in detail how he created this culture in his book, Creativity, Inc.
“Diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.”
— Vernā Myers, cultural change catalyst
2. Recruit research participants from a diverse background
Design is grounded in research findings and research must be inclusive. Feedback should be collected from a diverse group of participants. Even when creating a business that has a specific target audience like Hispanic Americans, you may consider other diversity factors such as age and location.
A lot of effort is needed on this front, because recruiting a diverse group of participants is not easy, even when required by law. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act of 1993 required NIH-funded clinical trials to include women and minorities as participants to prevent bias in clinical trials. Despite many research papers revealing that differences in demographics such as race and gender can result in contrasting effects on medication response, only 19 (13.4%) of 142 NIH-funded studies reported outcomes by race or ethnicity after 20+ years of releasing the Act. And that’s not even including the thousands of non-NIH funded studies that weren’t subject to the same regulation.
Project IMPACT (Increase Minority Participation and Awareness of Clinical Trials) breaks down the challenges into three categories: ethical and regulatory barriers, knowledge void, and lack of trust.
These same learnings can be applied to the design field. Can we get more research funding to recruit the participants we need? How can we increase awareness in D&I? Can we be more flexible with our interview schedule and make everyone feel welcome?
“Minority patients more often seek care from physicians of their own race.”
One easy step to take is to be aware of the impact of the researcher’s identity and background since it could influence how comfortable our participants feel about discussing these topics, an opinion shared by Airbnb’s Nanako Era, who leads research for anti-discrimination and In-home accessibility teams.
3. Remove bias from Personas
We tend to define personas as fictional characters that represent targeted audience groups based on user research. This definition is not wrong, but it challenges the mission of inclusive design, because of the inequality and lack of diversity in many industries.
Taking the financial services industry as an example, research from Barron’s has shown that over 80% of the industry’s financial advisors are men. Does this mean we should always create a male persona, possibly in his mid 40s? Not necessarily. Being inclusive means that we should question stereotypes, like the demographic section of the persona.
Will knowing the demographics of the persona bring any value to the design?
In fact, this study found that demographic information can have the least impact on design compared with psychographic or behavioral data. In other words, understanding the different pain points between new and experienced financial advisors will bring more value than just being aware of their gender.
When building a persona, we should focus on capturing information that will be directly relevant to the problem we’re solving, such as pain points and user needs. When the persona’s demographics don’t matter to the solution, let’s challenge the bias and be inclusive in our selection of persona image and name. Make sure to choose diverse photos and give them names that represent various ethnicities and nationalities.
4. Optimize content to a language that speaks to everyone
Communication is not just what you say, but also how you say it and how it’s heard. We should be mindful of the words and copy we used in our designs, from the way it’s written & spoken to the actual content itself. While maintaining the brand identity, consider using more standard and plain language, so that you are able to communicate effectively with more people.
I recalled a lively discussion at work one day when we were trying to find a non-American centric term for “home runs” to describe an easy-to-implement and high-impact idea that falls onto the upper right quadrant of a prioritization matrix. The term didn’t resonate with 6 international workshop participants whose first languages were not English. In the end, we settled on alternatives like “obvious choices”, which everyone could understand.
Avoiding idioms, jargons, and acronyms is one approach to internationalize and localize content inclusively. Optimization also involves accommodating the right-to-left reading pattern. And don’t forget to apply multi-language support to all communication channels, you wouldn’t want French-speaking customers to receive a welcome email in English once signed up for a service.
In a world where almost everyone can connect through the internet, you never know where (location and traffic channel) your next customers may come from. Even between US and UK English, you will want to translate “fries” to “chips.”
In addition to being concise and clear when delivering a message, it’s also important to avoid bias in the language. Here are some watch-outs:
- Avoid sexist language, including gender biased use of pronouns (he, she, etc) and nouns (use firefighter instead of fireman)
- Challenge ageist labels, use “older adult” rather than “senior citizen”, or simply say “people”
- Give gender-neutral names to virtual assistants (Siri and Alexa reinforce gender bias)
- Offer choices when it comes to select voices for virtual assistants (e.g. Google Assistant is a gender-neutral name, but the default voice is female)
- Use gender-neutral phrases in virtual assistants’ responses, including chatbots. Unless the gender is specified
The Department of Diversity Initiatives at The University of South Carolina has a practical guide on areas to focus on and be aware of when writing/speaking.
5. Make Diversity & Inclusion part of all design critique criteria
To ensure that D&I is included in the product development lifecycle in a sustainable way, we should begin adding D&I to business requirements, design critique criteria, and quality assurance (QA) testing. When a design language system exists, consider adding inclusivity as one of the design principles, to encourage practicing D&I in design.
Start giving feedback against D&I during design reviews, and make sure people of diverse backgrounds are in the room when discussing it. Be open and respectful of each other’s opinion both as the provider or recipient of feedback. Create an environment that encourages quiet individuals to share their opinions. Our designs will become more inclusive only when we start to critique and come up with ideas to improve them together.
Paciello Group drafted some amazing Inclusive Design Principles that can be used as the baseline to give constructive feedback regarding D&I. In short, those principles are:
- Provide comparable experience
- Consider situation
- Be consistent
- Give control
- Offer choice
- Prioritize content
- Add value
Another helpful resource is the project Empathy Prompts. It generates prompts for digital creators to consider when building products for others to use.
6. Question assumptions and fight bias
We are not our users. This is a mindset that we need to keep reinforcing.
It’s human nature to make assumptions in order to move things forward. And we tend to rationalize the assumptions, expecting them to be true. However, those assumptions may not always make sense.
As designers, I think we do a good job of commenting on user behaviors — for example, we usually ask if users need to see all the information displayed on the dashboard. But we rarely question a familiar design pattern that could be interpreted differently due to culture or background differences.
When designing an education grading tool, don’t assume everyone will understand a checkmark means correct, because it actually means “incorrect” in Japanese culture. It may be that we don’t have enough knowledge to ask these types of questions, but that is all the more reason why we need a diverse team in the first place.
“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness”
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, fast & slow
Danieel Kahneman, psychologist and corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, tells us that cognitive illusion, or a thinking trap is not easy to overcome, and neither is bias. That’s how our brain is designed to operate. It automatically generates this illusion as a result of our understanding and assumptions of the world.
If I were to ask you to draw a scientist, what would that person look like?
The famous Draw-a-Scientist test tells us only 0.6% of the kids who were asked to draw a scientist drew a female scientist in the original study published in 1983. The number looks better from the 1980s onwards, 28% on average. This is just one of the gender biases we have to continue to fight.
We should keep challenging our assumptions throughout the design process and fight against the cognitive bias, unconscious bias in particular, that causes us to make irrational judgments and decisions. Alicia Salvino argues that we can overcome and take advantage of cognitive bias by first understanding what bias does and then controlling the context to ensure the bias’ effect is well-contained.
7. Design for accessibility
“Accessibility is the measurable implementation of inclusive design”, writes Jessica Ivins, UX Designer & Educator. To achieve inclusive design, we create accessible content through different techniques and tools.
We should think about color contrast, font size, keyboard and so many other facets of creating accessible content. The IBM Equal Access Toolkit provides thorough guidelines — from planning, to designing, to developing for accessibility. I once spent an intense week fixing accessibility issues in an application because of potential lawsuits, so it’s very encouraging that this topic is now a priority, rather than a nice-to-have item, in many organizations.
When designing for digital products, in particular, we should go beyond just enabling people who have hearing, visual, motor, or cognitive impairments to access. As Mozilla defines it, we should also think about other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.
“Solve for one, extend to many”
8. Ensure visual assets represent diversity
Artwork should be free spirited, created without any boundaries. However, when creating visual assets for products that serve people, inclusivity should be a given.
Representation matters. I’m sure many girls are considering possibilities in politics as a result of Kamala Harris becoming vice president-elect this November. Back to the Draw-a-Scientist test mentioned in the Question Assumptions section, children’s stereotypes associating science with men have weakened over time in the US, consistent with increases in women’s representation in science.
The illustration team at Airbnb tackled this challenge very well. They spent a lot of effort to create a style that ensures authenticity and represents the diversity of their audience.
“When the existence of different identities, skin tones, body shapes and abilities is not taken into account, that is an act of the erasure of that community.”
— Elizabeth Rushe, Account Manager at 99designs
Charts can be an overlooked item among the visual content. Since data visualization has grown as a popular technique to tell a story, we should also look for ways to prevent false insights due to biased view.
Asses bias in all visual assets to avoid misinformation, including but not limited to:
- 3D modeling
- Animation
- Data visualization
- Emojis
- Icons
- Illustration
- Photography
- Stock images
- Video
Representation doesn’t stop at race — culture, gender and disabilities should all be taken into consideration when creating visual assets. Research confirmed that exposure to other-race faces increases liking for strangers of that race, so representing a diverse group of people in visual content can have a significant impact on minimizing bias. Our job is to use artwork to eliminate bias.
9. Choose technology wisely
Design and technology are closely intertwined. Modern design relies heavily on technology to elevate the user experience.
Technology enhances our life, but it also brings up many ethical issues, such as racist artificial intelligence (AI). I still remember the day when the Google Photos app inappropriately tagged 2 Black Americans as Gorillas. And a new study from MIT and Microsoft researchers evaluated 3 commercial classification systems, revealing some shocking data: “Darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%”
When choosing to leverage any algorithm or dataset to create a smart experience, whether it’s a chatbot, a cognitive search engine, or something else, it’s our responsibility to make sure there is no built-in bias.
While immersive technology, such as virtual reality (VR) has made promising progress on cultivating empathy, Law Professor Mary Anne Franks questions how much bias we may have introduced to the virtual world from the real world. She also suggests that complex virtual environments can also cause accessibility issues for people with intellectual disabilities.
Keep these things in mind when designing with cutting-edge technology:
- Know your audience to inform platform/device decisions
- Research potential bias on the new technology
- Evaluate ethical standards of the technology provider
- Assess source data bias when working with AI
- & Identify potential biases that may be introduced when training the dataset (Humans enter inappropriate language into a chatbot to train it to say offensive things.)
10. Be curious and diversify our standards of beauty
Last but not least, curiosity will help us be open and keep learning from each other. We can only create an inclusive design when we have some knowledge about the beliefs, desires, intentions, goals, preferences, emotions, and thoughts of other people.
“To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes”
While we explore and learn from people who are different from ourselves, I believe this will transform the way we see the world. As a result, once we as designers begin to diversify our definition of beauty, we’ll be able to create design that is inclusive.
I wanted to close this article with a frightening fact that I learned from Caroline Criado-Perez’s book Invisible Women. When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die than a man. Why? Because car manufacturers are defaulting to using only a male figure to design and develop a car.
Designers cannot fix those invisible biases immediately, but we can design a better way to reduce tragedies like the story above.
So, when we design the next car, let’s start with building a diverse and inclusive team. Make sure we research and test with women and other under-represented groups. Consider creating a persona who has a hearing impairment. Ask if the copy in the manual is easy to understand with no inappropriate use of words. Discuss openly and honestly with the inclusively hired team and iterate based on feedback. Challenge any assumptions with bias. Set a fair price or price range so more people can afford it. Ensure any built-in voice assistant will be able to understand everyone equally.
As a designer who interacts with enterprise clients on a daily basis, I fully understand that making a product/service fully accessible and inclusive is a daunting task. However, we can still individually challenge ourselves to design a solution that is more inclusive within the targeted audience. We can help drive further improvements in those issues through the work we do every day. And it’s possible, when we do this, that we will consider a missed demographic that may help the business grow immensely and boost conversion rates eventually.
It’s up to all designers to be activists for diversity & inclusion so that we can design a better world for all.
To view the checklist only, please visit the site here(work-in-progress). This list will continue to evolve as we keep learning and practicing activism through design.
