Using UX Skills in DEI Efforts
Or Why HR Needs UX!
Identifying assumptions Recognizing the importance of context Familiarity with creating inclusive and accessible experiences I’m really excited to talk about my favorite things UX and making progress in creating equitable and inclusive experiences.
To start, I want to share a few skills that I believe are important not only in traditional UX work but also in employee experience.
Three that I’m going to talk about are:
Identifying assumptions Recognizing the importance of context Familiarity with creating inclusive and accessible experiences UX skill: Identifying and challenging assumptions
This is one of the most important skills that UX Researchers have because it really helps draw attention to something that others might not even realize. Identifying an assumption can prevent harm, create a shared understanding, and open up more possibilities.
In Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research she writes:
“When you make assumptions about your users, you run the risk of being wrong. When you embed wrong assumptions in the design of your product or service, you alienate people—possibly before they even have a chance to hear what you have to offer. The more obvious that wrong guess is, the more annoying it is.”
And I would say depending on the context, its beyond annoying- its harmful.
One of the ways we can call attention to assumptions is to ask questions like,
“What makes you say that?”
“Could you say more about why you think that?”
One example of what this can look like is identifying the assumption of a “shared language”. We see this alot not only in libraries but in legalese, medical jargon and many other disciplines.
Imagine being a new employee and you are given onboarding documents and every department or program is an acronym.
Depending on who our intended audience is, using language that is not accessible to that audience will cause the feeling of exclusion. The sense of, “this is not for me.” Exactly what you don’t want in an onboarding experience.
Another example of identifying and challenging assumptions is with job candidate evaluations. I’ve had the experience of receiving feedback forms that ask for my rating on a variety of aspects of a candidate’s presentation or interview.
Two questions that immediately appeared problematic to me were:
Rate the candidate’s “professionalism” Rate the candidate’s communication, including non-verbal communication .
Professionalism assumes a shared understanding of what “professionalism” is. To me, this question is opening the door to all kinds of biased thinking.
“Non-verbal communication” also encourages the observer to interpret things about a candidates posture, eye-contact, expressions, and other behaviors.
“That woman didn’t smile very much”
“They didn’t sustain eye contact”
“They were very fidgety”
These responses can be ableists, sexists, and culturally biased.
Sometimes its helpful to address these biases by leveraging your role or expertise. You might say something like, “in UX we’re always looking for biases and assumptions and I’d like to spend a little bit of time unpacking “X” because I think there might be an assumption here.
The next UX skill I’m going to talk about is the importance of understanding context.
“UX professionals will often respond “it depends”. Usually, that statement precedes lots of follow up questions;
· What’s the product?
· What problem are we trying to solve?
· Who are we designing for?”
We’re designing for people and there are so many variables to consider.
An example of where I’ve seen the need to understand context is with “engagement surveys” or other surveys used to understand a particular experience.
I’ve seen these used lately but two examples I’m going to share are with opinions/experiences about working from home and
&
How we should prioritize DEI work
Neither of these surveys asked for voluntary identification as Black Indigenous, or Person of Color or another marginalized identity. Here I think the context of who is responding in what way is extremely important. Without looking into whether BIPOC are experiencing WFH differently or would priortize DEI initiatives differently, you may be building something that works for the overall majority but misses an opportunity to see where there may be big differences in responses and dig into the “why” of those differences.
For example if BIPOC viewed retention and promotion as a top priority but the majority put recruitment and training as a top priority. It again ignores BIPOC voices. And seemingly for something that is supposed to help BIPOC