SAS Design: Building a Diverse and Inclusive Design Team
The SAS Design Team is a dynamic and high-performing group of user experience designers and visual designers pushing the boundaries of product design for analytics. A large part of our success can be attributed to an open, diverse, and inclusive culture. We are a team of designers who bring varied perspectives to our projects from rich and diverse backgrounds.
In 2008, SAS initiated the R3 program (Recognize, Recruit, Retain) to increase diversity. From that program, we hired Khaliah Cothran from NC A&T, a top-ranked Historically Black College & University (HBCU) in the country. She completed two internships with us while pursuing her Ph.D. After receiving her doctorate, Khaliah accepted an offer for full-time employment as a user experience designer. Since then, she advanced in her role as a designer and has taken up a management role! Khaliah has been giving back by supporting the Diversity Outreach program at SAS. At an HBCU STEM Connect event for college students from seven North Carolina HBCUs, she shared information about careers in design, what our team does for SAS, our customers, and the skills needed to be successful in the design field. As a panelist on the Sampson County Upward Bound Program, she spoke to high school students about STEM careers, the importance of education, and pursuing a college degree.
The R3 program has evolved into the award-winning “United in STEM: Diversity” internship program, led by our first Diversity and Inclusion Manager, Danielle Pavliv. In 2018, Danielle led a new initiative focused on employing autistic students, by launching the SAS Autism Spectrum Internship Program. Again, SAS Design was an early partner to train and hire for neurodiversity. SAS partnered with TEACCH to provide valuable training for managers and mentors to support the interns. We soaked up all the information on understanding autism and the broad range of abilities of those on the spectrum, interviewed candidates, worked with admins to select the right office space, and had our first intern join in the summer of 2019. Chris Rackley joined through this program which saw him designing a significant new feature in our flagship reporting tool, SAS Visual Analytics. This led to a permanent job offer which happily, he accepted! The program gained us an excellent talent and opened the team up to normalizing neurodiversity — the natural variation in how our brains work. Like Khaliah, Chris has been helping in the community to raise awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity. More recently he organized and hosted a set of panel discussions on autism: Autistic Gold: Normalizing the Autistic Narrative.
In 2020, on the back of George Floyd’s murder, race and social justice issues came into focus while we sheltered indoors from a raging pandemic. SAS arranged for experts on race issues to speak to employees. The Black Initiatives Group, an employee inclusion group, led a popular in-house discussion series on race called BIG Fridays. Inspired by this, Elisabeth Parker led our own discussion within the design team. “Productive Conversations about Race” became a regular series curated by Elisabeth and fellow colleagues. These conversations provided a place of trust to talk about topics and events which were otherwise difficult to approach. The conversations were not always easy, but they got designers talking and listening. Individuals were heard, and the team got to better appreciate the backgrounds and struggles of team members. These conversations have already led to new ideas for hiring and partnering with HBCUs.
There were personal efforts as well. A group of designers led by Sierra Shell started Windows and Mirrors a book drive partnering with a local book store with a goal to expose middle school students to the wide breadth of human experiences that mirror the diversity of the United States, including Black people, People of Color, and other marginalized groups.
Accessibility is an important aspect of software development. The SAS Accessibility team ensures that everything SAS has to offer can be enjoyed by users of all abilities. Designers work closely with this team to make sure accessibility is designed in from the ground up. In addition to making the total customer experience more accessible, it helps designers gain insights by considering problems from the perspectives of users with a wide range of abilities.
Designing enterprise software helps us see first-hand how diverse perspectives are vital to creating robust products usable by a wide group of people. A culture of inclusion helps retain top-class design talent typically diverse in its own way. Additionally, diversity prompts us to recognize and reflect on our own unique differences which becomes a powerful catalyst for personal growth. We recognize that diversity is the natural state and removing obstacles to it is necessary for the growth — of individuals, teams, and the organization!
