Design & Research

1. Be ethical, inclusive, and non-exploitative at every step of the research process.

• Use an interview process that meets participants where they are.

• Prioritize research participants’ emotional and physical safety over convenience, business goals, and budget.

• When sharing research learnings via storytelling, ensure the participants know how their stories are being told. Involve them and include their voice in these narratives.

• Share final research findings with participants.

• Ensure the access, use, and collection of participant’s data complies with data privacy regulations. 

2. Recruit research participants from diverse groups and intersectionality of identities.

• Denormalize the universal user in research, emphasize intersectionality and differences along with similarities of users and groups.

• Provide appropriate compensation and incentives to research participants.

• Ensure staff is continuously trained in bias recognition, power dynamics, and diverse communication styles.

• Prioritize research with those at risk of being most impacted by being excluded from using the product/solution.

3. Understand context when designing and analyzing research.

• Keep in mind individual context by recognizing members of underrepresented communities as experts of their lived experiences.

• Think beyond the individual in problem-framing, considering cultural, social, economic, political, tech, institutional and systemic barriers.

• Be self-aware of the lived experiences, backgrounds, and biases that each researcher brings to the team.

4. Take formal accountability for the impact on those not represented in the design process and develop roadmaps to address those limitations.

• Define a set of inclusion-specific requirements for each project.

• Plan timelines that incorporate time and resources for inclusion.

• Clearly communicate inclusion tradeoffs with stakeholders. 

• Create intentional pause points in the process to check for biases.

5. Design WITH users instead of FOR them.

• Run co-creation workshops to design with users or invite users to join the team.

• Include feedback from intersectional community leaders or industry experts within the communities the solution will impact.

• Share credit with communities and individuals whose ideas directly contribute to the final solution.

6. Ensure designs and documentation of those designs are inclusive and accessible.

• Make sure that designs follow accessible best practices and current WCAG standards, including color-contrast ratios and accurate closed captioning for content with audio.

• Ensure that UX copy and internal documentation copy is written at a lower than a 5th-grade reading level (roughly equivalent to 10-11 years old) reading level to allow as many people as possible to understand the content and steer clear of industry jargon that may be misinterpreted. Avoid terms and acronyms that are not widely known outside the organization or specific to only one culture.

• Include any additional documentation and recommendations for accessibility that might be needed for assistive technology devices, like alt text and suggestions for headers. 

• Be diligent about how information is received and avoid flashes that can trigger seizures. 

Background

Vision

Bring the world one step closer to inclusive design by empowering everyone doing design and research with actionable recommendations and resources.It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Goals of these principles

• Illustrate how to apply an inclusion lens through research and design processes

• Show how people at different levels within an organization can influence and contribute to the inclusive research and design approach.

• Challenge existing research and design methodologies to ensure an inclusive approach

Organizational Requirements

Each organization has unique needs, resources, and measures of success. For this reason, we have designed a process and scorecard template, which can help teams create an action plan to implement inclusive practices at their organization.

Directions

1. Create a community-centered design team that includes representation across lived experiences, position levels, and locations (when applicable) to co-create an organizational Scorecard.

2. Define the department your team wants to create an actionable goal for within the organization. Create a new column for each additional department or project that your team would like to add.

3. (Optional) Define a specific project within the department that your team wants to create an assessment for, such as a promotional campaign in the Marketing department, product design in the Technology department, or recruitment strategy in the HR department.

4. Define a measurable goal for your department topic. This goal can be quantitatively assessed—using a date range, number of sales, percent of the increase, etc.

5. Define 3-5 action steps required to complete the goal. 

6. Assign roles to key leaders who will manage the action steps.

7. Define a timeframe that the goal needs to be completed within. 

8. Define the amount of money designated for this project.

9. Define 3-5 resources your team has available to achieve the goal. Consider workplace policies, Employee Resource Groups, stakeholders, partnerships, budgets, tools, etc.

10. Define any gaps in resources that your team needs to resolve to complete the goal.

11. Define 3-5 measures of accountability that outline the checks, balances, and potential consequences for the team if the goal is not achieved.

12. Review the progress of your goal at the halfway point towards your defined deadline.

13. Evaluate the level of success that was made towards the goal and explain why.

Barriers to Inclusive Practices

• Team members and decision-makers do not represent diverse points of view.

• There is limited reflection on bias—which can influence research analysis, insights, and prioritization of problems and solutions.

• Designers often focus on a specific target user, representing most people who use a product or a service. Without the needs and context of marginalized groups intentionally included, they’re unintentionally excluded.

  • Products are often created through the gaze of only one country, even if it is meant to be a global experience.

  • Designers use available data without checking what biases might have been present in the collection of the data.

  • Preconceptions of the target audience’s needs and problems can bias research.

  • Personas represent only a specific demographic; relying on a persona to inform design can perpetuate stereotypes and limit the understanding of the entire actual audience.

• There is often a misalignment of the business stakeholders’ and users’ needs, but there does not have to be.

  • Project timelines don’t allow enough time for inclusive recruitment and research due to a deadline-driven culture. 

  • The user's needs get lost in the requirements of staying on budget, company legacy, or timeline.

  • Business metrics or customer satisfaction metrics are often valued over other outcomes that could show the true impact and value created by a solution.

  • Metrics for success are often focused on profit over user experience.

• Unethical research processes lead to unbalanced research.

  • When there is not appropriate compensation for participants, it either exploits participants or discourages those with lower incomes from participating.

  • Biased interviewing processes can limit underrepresented users from sharing their true journey/challenges and lead to gaps in understanding.

• Solutions are often built for users instead of with them.

• Many organizations lack mechanisms for challenging and discussing top-down strategies. This can be problematic when leadership has a limited view.

• Accessibility to all groups (and intersectionalities of these groups) is not always a launch requirement. This incurs a debt prioritized only much later or never prioritized—despite clear standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

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