Perspectives from Black Designers

Continue to celebrate the #PowerofBlackDesigners

In 2019, a report by AIGA uncovered a statistic that has become a rallying point for organizations — only 3% of designers are Black. Nonprofits like Design to Divest and Where are the Black Designers? are making the culture and practice of design more inclusive. We, at Salesforce, are making progress and we are transparent about how much work there is still to be done.

We have a long way to go before diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is embedded in our design discipline. Hiring and retention are enormously important, including diversifying the pool of candidates, making the interview process more inclusive, and retaining great talent. Inclusion starts with hiring but it doesn’t stop there; it needs to become rooted in the design process as well.

The journey toward cultivating equality at work starts with listening to and valuing the perspectives of Black designers. In celebration of Juneteenth, Senior Design Lead Terrence Williams amplified the perspectives of Black designers in the #PowerofBlackDesigners social campaign. But inclusion doesn’t happen by focusing on Black perspectives one day or month out of the year — it happens by centering inclusivity in our habits and our choices every day.

Naomi Menahem, Lead UX Designer at Tableau, believes in creating a psychologically safe space for all designers to show up as their whole selves and impact the design space with their experiences and expertise. To explore the opportunities and obstacles facing efforts to embed inclusion in design, she interviewed four Black professionals working in the design space today: Daniel Baah (Engineering Manager at Google), Paul Lazarus (Senior UX Manager), Jovon Rossman (UX Associate Director at AT&T), and Ryan Whitley (Senior Software Engineering Manager at Tableau). The content of this article reflects their personal opinions as designers, not the companies they work for.

Read on to explore their perspectives on inclusion in research, the product development process, culture — and why relationships matter when creating an inclusive design process.

Why is embedding inclusion in the design process important?

Jovon Rossman — People say, “You are not your customer.” I think what they’re really talking about is inclusive design. You are not your customer so you have to go out and get a diverse set of opinions from a diverse set of users to create successful products.

Daniel Baah — An essential part of the design process is knowing your customers and meeting them where they are. Who are your customers today, and what will they look like in the future? Companies that operate on a global scale have the unique challenge of building products for everyone — which puts inclusiveness front and center of the product design discussion.

When is it best to incorporate inclusion in the design process?

Ryan Whitley — In our department, they often talk about ‘pushing things to the left,’ like ‘push testing to the left,’ for example. This means, move something earlier in the process. I think inclusion should be pushed to the left of every project. It should be baked into the process, maybe during the scoping phase.

Being thoughtful about inclusivity early on in the design process leads to more mature designs and less reworking, or “bolting on” of features. It’s important that it’s not an afterthought or something teams scramble to do at the end of a project.

There’s a team of agile coaches at Tableau. You can ask for them to be embedded in your team for a certain amount of time to teach you as you go through the product development process. If we have an inclusivity team, they could get embedded with our teams while we’re ideating and going through the process, like the agile coaches. That would be great.

Bringing inclusion into the process early on makes your products better, more successful, and more profitable.

What does it mean to prioritize inclusion in the design research process?

Ryan Whitley — In terms of product, what’s important is that you understand the people that you’re selling to. If you’re selling to a particular demographic, and you don’t have anybody who represents that group in your company — how can you ensure that you know what they want?

Paul Lazarus — We have to understand why we collect data the way we do. More specifically, when we leverage historical records of data, we inherit the skew that we have in our cultural lenses as a community or a society. So with historical data, it’s trickier to be inclusive. Teams can try to talk through a diverse set of user bases to get a well-rounded opinion, but if we don’t have an inclusive lens towards that data, important people will continue to be left out by our data collection practices.

Jovon Rossman — I encourage my team to be cognizant of diversity in sourcing participants for research. They might pull demographics of who they think the customer is, but if I’m going down the list and if I see the demographics of the participants are too similar, I tell them we might need to run another screening. We need to make sure we are considering a mix of perspectives within our target and not making decisions based on one subset of our primary user base.

What are some ideas for embedding inclusion in the product development life cycle?

Daniel Baah — Internal employees are great candidates for initial testers for new software, products, and services; however, not everyone should be eligible. Rather, it’s important to target people with specific backgrounds and skill sets, so the feedback comes from a diverse set of people. These targeted backgrounds and perspectives can prevent products from being developed with limited perspective.

Be strategic about open-source projects. Empower your community by encouraging contributions and transparency. For example, if you have a code of conduct on your GitHub page that outlines the expectations for being a contributor, it should include values around inclusiveness in the design and the development process. Clear rules help set the playing field for other people to understand and join the project, or not.

What are some of the ways organizations can think about creating a more inclusive culture?

Daniel Baah — I think folks first need to understand that changing the culture at your company doesn’t have to come at the expense of your frontline business. It just means that you’re shifting how people think and interact with each other.
Invest in your people and their differences. Find spaces to celebrate who they are. Create an environment that brings people together. Think deeply about your hiring practices and pipeline. Does it represent the type of company that you strive to be?
You should be transparent about where your company is in terms of diversity. That transparency needs to be data-driven, as in we need X people by X year. And then we want to see your updates every year.

Jovon Rossman — Within my team, I try to take the judgment out of it, which is not always easy. Luckily as a designer, I’m used to objectively looking at and critiquing things. I try to make soft landings, which means no matter what you say or what you do, there’s nothing that we can’t correct as long as you’re willing to be part of the team and collaborate and learn.

Soft landings! What if we made it less harsh when people say something that’s off? What if we didn’t attack them? What if we just let them say it and say it’s ok? And then learn from it.

In an effort to create a more inclusive design process, why do relationships matter?

Ryan Whitley — Teams shouldn’t work in isolation. For example, to avoid having a US-centric product view it’s important to form relationships with partner teams in other parts of the world who can reflect local user needs and behaviors. The same goes for having relationships with internal teams with a diverse makeup; they can provide insight into how various user groups interact with the product.

Paul Lazarus — I can’t help but connect how it all started with human-centered design. To put it simply we were making cool things but we hadn’t figured out how to sell them. Because of profit we really wanted to understand the user. It was a good thing to get us to talk to the user.

Now we see the value of being customer-centric, but what comes next? Can we have some kind of breakthrough in design that’s not just from the perspective of ‘this is what we want.’ Instead, can we get to a time where we talk about ‘what do THEY want’ and ‘what do WE want’ and how does that intersect? How can we authentically build together?

Resources

We promote inclusive resources as much as we can. Check out some of our favorites:

• Salesforce has an online course about Inclusive Design.
• Design to Divest is a Black-led collective of designers, artists, technologists, and strategists designing equitable futures by divesting from inequitable institutions.
• Antoinette Carrol has a design thinking seminar that talks about removing white supremacy from design thinking. She also has cards that you can download from her website.
• Artefact came out with ethical cards that you can download for free.
• Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google’s Product Inclusion Team by Annie Jean-Baptiste

A big thank you to the featured professionals Jovon Rossman, Ryan Whitley, Daniel Baah and Paul Lazarus for sharing their knowledge and expertise. Thank you to Naomi Menahem for pulling this story together, and sticking with it!

Thank you to Margaret Seelie and Madeline Davis and Terrence Williams for putting in all the extra hours to put this article together. Thank you to Sarah Forde for sharing resources and knowledge around Inclusive Design.

Check out Tableau at www.tableau.com

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