But where are you really from?

Mitigating bias as a design researcher

‘But where are you really from?’ It seems like a simple question, but for a child from a globe-trotting family, it’s a loaded one. I have always struggled to easily answer it. Are you asking my nationality, where I was born, where I am living now, or where my family lives? Each time I am asked this, I feel the need to explain myself and share my whole story.

I realised very early on in life that people often use this question to pigeonhole me into a homogeneous group, because it’s what feels most comfortable to them (intentionally or otherwise). These days, I usually end up changing the way I tell the story to match the other person’s preconceived notions and biases about my cultural identity.

The reality is that everyone has biases. I have them, you have them. Historically, they’ve helped us solve problems and make fast decisions in changing or uncertain situations. They may have even protected us from danger. But they can also impact the way we see and feel about each other. Those blind spots can have big consequences for us as design researchers.

A few months ago, I was attending a virtual conference about design research. It seemed like every time bias in design and research was mentioned, a ‘cheat sheet’ popped up with a list of the most common biases we need to be aware of as researchers. In fact, it was included in so many presentations that my colleagues and I created a game out of it.

We were told again and again that we need to be aware of these biases. But then what? There were no tips for actually addressing them beyond simple awareness that they exist. How do we manage them as people, and mitigate them as design researchers? I wondered if my unique experiences as a Third Culture Kid might help.

Reveal your blind spots

Growing up on three different continents with an international community of expats gave me a pretty broad understanding of different cultures and people. But I’ve still had implicit and explicit biases creep in. One example was when I was working on a project to understand the motivations and buying behaviours of users in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia.

I spent a number of years in Indonesia as a child, so without any prompting, I formed a persona in my head of someone shopping at a high-end mall. It was only after chatting with a team member about my research that I realised it was based on the assumptions I had built. In reality, I should have considered digital platforms and influencer behaviour in addition to bricks and mortar retail.

Revealing our blind spots takes more than awareness of the bias itself. We need to deepen our awareness of what’s going around us and explicitly acknowledge that there is always room for things we don’t know. When you’re conducting research, take some time to think about what biases might creep in, so you can reveal them and identify a way to manage them during the research process.

Move beyond demographics

In design, we use artefacts like personas to facilitate empathy and diverse thinking. But what tends to happen too often is that they are built on stories we already know about our users, coupled with a stereotypical image and some demographic data and statistics. We end up with statements like ‘Adrian likes this and works here’ and bucket users into groups based on their age, sex and profession.

It’s a cookie cutter approach and means we miss out on discovering the lived experience of our users, which can offer us deeper insights in our research. I am not trying to fly the ‘personas are awful’ flag here, but instead saying that we can flesh out personas with the stories of users’ complex lives and motivations, and use them to challenge our assumptions.

We don’t usually create personas in the design research team at Xero, but recently we did create some archetypes to understand the different journeys that users take through Xero. By talking to users about their experience outside the product, we were able to understand their mindset and group users into more useful categories. Real case studies and human stories trump stock images every time.

Ditch either/or thinking

Recently, I was writing a survey and included a bunch of field options based purely on my assumptions around which capabilities users would want in a particular feature. It was only after we received the results that I realised our options were based how we thought they used the feature. The answers to the ‘other’ option revealed an entirely different story. We had essentially created a biased pitfall.

In product teams, we often get carried away with either/or thinking. This might be useful when making urgent decisions. But what tends to happen a lot more often is that we end up simplifying complexities and forget to think of the wide variety of challenges salient to the problem. We need to adopt a both/and way of thinking, by suspending our judgements and embracing the mess.

One way to do that is to take those assumptions and turn them into questions. In the case of the survey, perhaps asking the question ‘what challenges do you currently face while using the product?’ with a blank field instead of radio buttons would have led to a better representation of the mental models of our users.

Listen, listen, listen

Growing up around so many different perspectives, I have often felt like a cultural outsider, self-conscious about not saying the right things. I worried whether people would even understand me. But what this did was teach me to listen to a range of perspectives and learn to appreciate different ways of approaching a problem.

As researchers, listening to our users is an important tool to challenge our confirmation bias. We can’t go into the field interviewing our users and only choose to listen to things that fit our needs. My advice is to set aside what you know, and transition into a space where all you do is listen to the person in front of you and learn from them.

It can be difficult at first. I remember having to explicitly tell myself to listen to other people’s views without letting my mind jump to conclusions. But over time, I ended up training my mind to listen and wait. Biases creep in when we take action based on an impulse. If we train ourselves to listen before taking action, we’re more likely to acknowledge any biases that we have learned and absorbed.

I still get pigeonholed into groups by people with preconceived notions about who I am. I also have many biases of my own, many of which I may not even be aware of. But I can make sure those biases are never carried into my design research work, by understanding my blind spots, moving beyond demographics, using both/and thinking, and listening without judgement.

We can never eliminate biases, but we can proactively mitigate them in our research. The resulting effect can be incredibly powerful — insights that reflect the diversity of customers and communities, so we can build products they love. And, of course, the ability to catch ourselves before we ask someone, ‘but where are you really from?’