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Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
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Wednesday, June 9, 2021 • Design at Scale 2021
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Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
Speakers: Anna Avrekh , Amy Jiménez Márquez , Morgan C. Ramsey and Catarina Tsang
Link:

Summary

Enterprises like Compass need to design experiences for an incredibly diverse audience. These customers pose challenges to our ideas about happy paths and edge cases. How do we build tools for customers with such diverse needs and wants? And how do we build the right teams with the broad perspectives that can best serve these customers? Learn how research can build diverse perspectives and backgrounds into user testing and other research methods. Understand how designing tools for diverse and justifiably demanding customers helps make product design better. Expand our notions of diversity both within the enterprise and with all the customers that the enterprise serves.

Key Insights

  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion represent distinct but interconnected concepts: representation, access, and voice respectively.

  • Recruitment efforts often overshadow retention, leading to a ‘leaky bucket’ where diverse talent leaves prematurely.

  • Portfolios can introduce bias favoring visually flashy design over impactful but less flashy skills like information architecture.

  • Advancement barriers cause senior roles to remain less diverse, creating a cycle that impedes hiring diverse senior talent.

  • Managers unfamiliar with design functions may misassign tasks that do not contribute to career growth, especially for underrepresented employees.

  • Short-term gaps in representation can be mitigated by investing meaningfully in the growth and promotion of existing diverse talent.

  • Product research must include diverse participants and avoid localized language to ensure inclusivity and global relevance.

  • Inclusive product design benefits from diverse perspectives to avoid cultural missteps and better serve broad audiences.

  • Allies who are not personally affected by diversity challenges play a critical role by calling out biases in hiring and team decisions.

  • A supportive diversity framework includes employee resource groups, transparent career roadmaps, and bias-aware interview processes.

Notable Quotes

"Diversity is who is in the room, equity is who wants to be or should be in the room but isn’t, and inclusion is if everyone’s ideas have been heard."

"Design portfolios often bias towards visual appeal, which can overlook crucial skills like information architecture."

"Without opportunities to grow and thrive, diverse talent brought in will just leave—the foundation must be retention as much as recruitment."

"If your manager doesn’t understand design, you might end up as the social coordinator instead of advancing in your career."

"The higher you go in tech, the less diverse it becomes, which makes hiring diverse senior talent especially challenging."

"Bad data in, bad data out — if research participants aren’t diverse, product insights and design will miss critical user needs."

"Nothing about us without us — cultural content must be authored and tested with people from that culture."

"If you see resumes or portfolios that look homogenous, pause and question the hiring practices before moving forward."

"Allies who are not affected by bias have power to raise their voice and call out bias in panels dominated by white men."

"Investing in the existing talent by mapping out growth and promotion roadmaps shows real commitment to diversity."

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