Summary
Characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, and disability status can have a significant impact on how we experience the world, and how the world experiences us. In UX research, diversity is the first thing to vanish from the recruit when the going gets tough; I will talk about what we miss when that happens, and what researchers can do about it in their own practice. This presentation will demonstrate why a diverse recruit is imperative for a strong user research study, provide examples of what we miss when the recruit is homogeneous, and offering tactics for addressing the issue.
Key Insights
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Demographic criteria like race, gender, and socioeconomic status significantly impact user experiences but are often considered less important than visible traits like age or location in research recruitment.
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Homogeneous participant pools (mostly white, middle-class, cisgender individuals) persist because demographic criteria are treated as flexible or optional during recruitment.
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Ignoring demographic diversity risks centering dominant cultural perspectives and missing unique needs, which can limit the effectiveness of research outcomes.
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Explicitly setting non-negotiable demographic quotas (e.g., minimum number of non-white participants) improves recruitment diversity with third-party recruiters.
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Recruiters often default to convenience samples; strong client insistence is required to shift their priorities toward representativeness.
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Diverse research teams can better identify recruitment barriers and help reach underrepresented user populations.
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Case studies in healthcare research demonstrate that racial identity shapes patient experiences in ways unrelated to other factors like profession or age.
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Not knowing what insights are missed by lacking diversity is a critical blind spot in user research.
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Recruiting diverse participants requires going beyond familiar networks, including engaging with specific communities and non-English speakers.
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Purposeful overrepresentation of marginalized groups in research may help correct historical overrepresentation of dominant demographics.
Notable Quotes
"We’re actually talking about increasing the representative numbers for communities who are frequently absent or excluded from research."
"If we just decide to ignore demographics, we’re missing huge swaths of the participant experience and an opportunity to better serve our users."
"Those criteria that have more invisible economic, social, and political structures around them are on the less important end, while visible structures like age are ranked higher."
"The viruses don’t discriminate based on race, but our healthcare system does."
"Recruiters have become conditioned to treat demographic criteria as flexible or optional, and I don’t think they should be."
"If you go into a study knowing that you want to recruit a diverse participant pool, be upfront with the recruiter and push back if they can’t meet those needs."
"We can’t pretend that people’s behaviors and experiences exist separate from the identities that society attaches to them."
"We don’t know what we missed by not yielding demographic diversity — that’s a blind spot in user research."
"Wider audiences equal more dollars — expanding diversity isn’t just ethical, it’s good business."
"Stagnation isn’t good for everyone at best and can actively do a disservice to our users at worst."
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