Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
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
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Diversity, equity, and inclusion are distinct concepts: diversity is who is present, equity is who should be present but isn’t, and inclusion is ensuring all voices are heard.
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Focusing solely on diverse recruitment without investing in retention leads to a leaky bucket where diverse talent leaves prematurely.
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Hiring practices biased toward visually polished portfolios overlook strong candidates with valuable but less flashy skills, disadvantaging underrepresented groups.
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Diverse representation decreases at senior levels due to systemic challenges in career advancement and biased evaluations.
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Having design and research staff report to leaders who understand their function is critical for their career growth and inclusion.
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Products should be designed with input from diverse users by intentionally recruiting varied research participants and using globally accessible language.
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Employee resource groups and visible investment in diverse communities help underrepresented employees feel welcomed and supported.
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Allies not personally affected by bias play a crucial role by speaking up and calling out homogenous hiring practices.
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Transparent growth roadmaps and assigning promotable work prevent underrepresented employees from being sidelined with non-impactful tasks.
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Maintaining DEI best practices requires continuous conscious effort; it’s easy for organizations to slip back without vigilance.
Notable Quotes
"Diversity means who is in the room, equity asks who wants to or should be in the room but isn’t, and inclusion asks have everybody’s ideas been heard."
"Diversity is not just about how people look or sound, but also about their capabilities and their place on introversion-extraversion scales."
"If you don’t invest in retention, you get the leaky bucket syndrome where diverse talent keeps leaving."
"Requesting glossy portfolios up front risks excluding candidates with strong problem-solving skills who may not have had opportunities to showcase visual design."
"Design and research people must report to leaders who understand their functions, or else they get assigned irrelevant tasks like social coordinator."
"Bad data in, bad data out — making sure research participants are diverse by race, gender, tenure, and location is crucial for inclusive products."
"Nothing about us without us — cultural content should be created and tested with people who represent that culture."
"If you see homogenous candidate pipelines, ask people to pause and rethink who they are putting through."
"Allies in the room who are not affected by bias are critical voices to help call out inequities."
"Creating clear roadmaps for underrepresented talent shows investment and helps prevent them from being viewed as a means to an end."
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