Building Collaborative Networks to Support Women of Color in User-Experience and Technology Design

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bit.ly/SIGDOCKeynote

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The Mentorship Program

A pilot study to develop a sustainable mechanism for intervening in the lack of WOC representation in the UX research workforce by developing a collaborative network and mentoring model for supporting WOC in UX.

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• How can our students, who may not have direct access to the tech industry, be mentored and encouraged to pursue careers in UX and technology design?

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• What skills (both soft and hard) can our students be equipped with in order to enter the technology industry after graduation?

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• What can the technology industry, and UX research specifically, learn from the skills, backgrounds, and experiences of WOC in order to more effectively diversify its workforce and designs?

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Project Overview

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• Weekly meetings and UX lessons with mentors
• Fellows got feedback on their projects as we discussed UX tools and strategies
• Final convening in Seattle, where fellows and mentors met with tech industry professionals to get additional feedback on projects.

www.bridgingfronteras.weebly.com

Chicana Feminism and UX

• Testimonios
• Are a way that people document their lived experiences and typically denounce injustices that they have encountered caused by oppression, challenge dominant ideas of knowledge, validate experiences, acknowledge the power of human collectivity, and commit to racial and social justice (Perez Huber, 2009).
• Platicas
• Conversations that take away the formality of interviews and set a more friendly environment to help build relationships and honor participants, or the testimonialistas, as co-constructors of knowledge while also allowing them to share their lived experiences, or testimonios, in a mutually beneficial, friendly environment (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016)

Implications of Chicana Feminism in UX

• Incorporating testimonios through platicas as a part of usability testing with marginalized users allows researchers to take a closer look into the personal lived experiences of marginalized groups and can help us produce knowledge that incorporates these groups into the center of the process

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• Platicas are spaces that are conducive to listening with empathy, because they offer participants a space where participants can talk about issues or injustices that they face without feeling like they are the problem

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• Our job as listeners is not to fix anyone or solve their problems, but rather to listen intently and provide support through our presence and time

South Asia, Critical Digital Archiving & UX Research

• Project Title: �Rethinking South Asia via Critical Digital A(na)rchiving from the Borderlands�
• Document & Theorize:�Precarities, negotiations, and affordances of building a digital archive through participatory approaches in the context of South Asia as a woman in Nepal and a woman of color from the “third” world country in the US.

• Bibhushana Poudyal

TC, UX, and fight against structural violence

The critical digital archive I am building is under (de)construction and is available at http://cassacda.com/

Crucial Questions:

• Following the social justice turn in technical communication, how can digital archives be a space to deconstruct essentialized representation of the gendered, racialized, and colonized bodies?
• Can digital archives be a hospitable space to the heterogeneities, pluralities, and alternative epistemologies of these bodies?
• How can UX research and participatory design frameworks, when practiced in a South Asian context, enable technical communicators in the fight against structural and systematic violence?

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Relationship building with the community rather than knowledge building about the community

• The complexities and dynamicity embedded in participatory design and UX corroborate the multidimensional nature of South Asian communities, which can then be used to help technical communicators to develop ethical frameworks for researching with Non-Western communities to fight against the painful weight of heteropatriarchal-colonial discourses constructed about Non-Western worlds�
• Relationship-building with the community rather than knowledge-building about the community should be unconditional criteria for desiring, deciding, and designing technical communication.

Ethics and Justice through Listening to the Other

Ethics and justice of working across the differences, building alliances, and smashing the power centers’ top-down model of representing diversity.

It’s necessary to:

• help one another learn
• listen to the experiences, pain, and joy that are not our own
• welcome the knowledge systems that are not our own

Justice-drive future is possible only when we train ourselves to listen to the Other.

Thank you!

Indigenous Language Interpreters and Translators

Nora K. Rivera

Factors at the Core of UX

(Adapted from Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb, usability.gov)

International Unconference for Indigenous Language Interpreters and Translators Organizing Team

Indigenous Interpreters & Translators

Design Thinking Process

*Adapted from Stanford University d.School

Indigenous Interpreters Unconference

UX Core Principles

• Acknowledged the various cultural, social, and political contexts of Indigenous interpreters
• Recognized ambiguity
• Moved conversations through different professional realms
• Built ideas intentionally
• Communicated deliberately
• Anchored ideas in international human rights principles

Table 3 discussing Indigenous translators training and professionalization

Implications of Indigenous Approaches to UX

• Understanding design thinking as an in-flux process of co-constructing and re-designing
• Acknowledging equitability as a key UX factor that addresses relationships of power
• Using testimonios as a powerful tool to define the problem in the design thinking process
• Having UX core principles in mind at all times

Empathy, Translation, and UX

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Tetyana Zhyvotovska

Research focus: How does translation play out in a multilingual UX scenario? What is multilingual user experience?

Usability testing allowed me (1) to create the environment in which participants got engaged with the translated content of the website, (2) to observe participants’ performance, and (3) to examine revealed potential usability issues that occurred during the process of using translated content.

Practical empathy approach: empathy as a mindset with focus on people and purpose to understand their thinking and perspectives (Young, 2015).

Empathy = Listening

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Multilingual UX

1.Types of interactions during the usability session: asking questions to clarify meaning, providing suggestions for improvement, sharing personal history, and using tools to comprehend translated information.

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2.UX session as a window into a participant’s personal story, life, personality traits, and mechanisms/strategies to cope with pressure while using multilingual content.

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3.Empathy is a key to understanding participants due to vulnerability and revealing of personal challenges/”weaknesses” of multilingual users demonstrated during the sessions.

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Implications

Multilingual UX - a complex system with different processes, people, languages, texts, and tools involved.

Considerations:

• understanding the complexity of multilingual UX as a process of communication
• understanding the role of translation as an integral part of multilingual UX
• practicing a variety of active listening techniques, including empathy, to develop a deeper understanding of multilingual users and their UX practices

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Implications

Implications

• Visa requirements on both industry and academic job applications should be addressed and made explicit (see Walwema and Carmichael, 2020)

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Implications

• Issues of accents, gender, and racialization influence how women of color are perceived in the tech industry, and can impact how women of color engage in networking opportunities or other aspects of the job application process.

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Implications

• It’s important to shift the ‘top-down problem solving’ rhetoric currently used to describe diversity in tech if we really want to make the tech industry an inclusive space for women of color.

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Implications

• While it’s true that humanities skills are critical to successful UX research, many job applications for UX positions require computer science or engineering degrees by default. This requirement alienates applicants from non-traditional backgrounds who, like the women showcased in this project, can very much contribute to tech design, but who may not have backgrounds in computing.

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Where do we go from here?

• Policy implications regarding recruitment of WOC in tech and barriers in job application criteria
• More connections are needed with WOC in tech at different stages in their careers
• Building a bigger network of mentees, where previous mentees serve as mentors

References

Bloom-Pojar, R. (2018). Translanguaging outside the academy: Negotiating rhetoric and healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean.

Conference on College Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of English.

Cardinal, A., Gonzales, L., & J. Rose, E. (2020, October). Language as Participation: Multilingual User Experience Design. In

Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (pp. 1-7).

Fierros, C. O., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2016). Vamos a platicar: The contours of pláticas as Chicana/Latina feminist methodology. Chicana/Latina Studies, 15(2), 98-121.

Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and

pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277-310.

Jones, N. N. (2020). Coalitional Learning in the Contact Zones: Inclusion and Narrative Inquiry in Technical Communication and

Composition Studies. College English, 82(5), 515-526.

Jones, N. N. (2017). Rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs: The business of race, agency, and cultural empowerment.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 319-349.

Kapor Center and ASU CGEST. 2019. Data brief: Women and girls in computing. Web.

https://www.wocincomputing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/WOCinComputingDataBrief.pdf

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (1981). Theory in the Flesh. This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color, 23-24.

Rose, E., & Cardinal, A. (2018). Participatory video methods in UX: sharing power with users to gain insights into everyday life.

Communication Design Quarterly Review, 6(2), 9-20.

Pérez Huber, L. (2009). Disrupting apartheid of knowledge: testimonio as methodology in Latina/o Critical Race research in education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(6), pp. 639-654.

Rose, E. J., Racadio, R., Wong, K., Nguyen, S., Kim, J., & Zahler, A. (2017). Community-based user experience: Evaluating the

usability of health insurance information with immigrant patients. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication,

60(2), 214-231.

Rose, E. J., Edenfield, A., Walton, R., Gonzales, L., Shivers-McNair, A., Zhvotovska, T., Jones, N. N., Garcia de Mueller, G. I., &

Moore, K. (2018, August). Social Justice in UX: Centering Marginalized Users. In Proceedings of the 36th ACM

International Conference on the Design of Communication (p. 21). ACM.

Walwema, J., & Arzu Carmichael, F. (2020). “Are you Authorized to Work in the US?” Investigating “Inclusive” Practices in Rhetoric

and Technical Communication Job Descriptions. Technical Communication Quarterly.

Williams, M. F. (2010). From black codes to recodification: Removing the veil from regulatory writing. Amityville, NY: Baywood.

Wilson, Shawn. (2008.) Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing, Black Point, NS, Canada.

Thank you!