Diversity by default in design - ixda - Berlin - Sept 2018
1. Diversity in design.
Content warnings:
Misgendering, Ableism, Racism, Visual representations of Transgender people,
LGBTQIA+ representation, Agesim.
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Diversity in design
2. Hi, I’m Eriol. (Ehh-roll)
Non-binary, Trans person.
(Regardless of what people may
think I ‘look’ like)
Designer. (many job titles…)
They/Them/Their’s pronouns.
Mx (instead of Mr/Mrs/Ms)
Queer person.
‘Invisible’ disability/illness. (PTSD)
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Diversity in design
3. “Tools are never
completely neutral and
their settings reflect the
cultural bias of the
technicians that calibrate
them.”Pg. 90 - Politics of Design by Ruben Pater
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Diversity in design
4. Helping people raise their voice and those
who serve them to listen and respond
better
A tool to help other teams reach each
other everyday and in a crisis. On any
device.
Diversity in design
We were able to map all the health facilities in Kathmandu
Valley before the earthquake, which will undoubtedly help the
relief workers’ ability to deliver supplies and help save lives.
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27. Stress-cases
Also known as:
“The people that need
our empathy and
attention the most”
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Diversity in design
28. Two in five LGBT people (39 per cent) who identify as non-binary
have experienced a hate crime
…Someone at school called Max a "girl-boy." Later, Max walked upstairs to the third floor of the
house and stepped out onto the balcony, weighing whether or not to jump. More than 40% of
transgender or gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide.
Max, 13 years old, identifies as agender — neither male nor female.
Survey by the National Centre for Transgender Equality:
Out of almost 28,000 respondents, more than a third chose “non-binary/genderqueer”
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Diversity in design
29. As designers, we are at the forefront of how
products serve users, but also how the digital and
physical world represents and reflects back at
users...
...we have a responsibility to be inclusive, sensitive
and understanding with what we design, and
endeavour to help non-marginalised folk foster their
acceptance and expose them to systems that
include, rather than exclude.
Diversity in design
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30. I’d give myself a C+ for inclusion.
Maybe a B if I’m feeling nice….
Diversity in design
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31. Ask other people when it’s safe and
encouraged to do so. Practice compassion.
Read widely from marginalised people.
Make mistakes and ask for clarification.
Be prepared to apologise but understand and respect boundaries.
Seek out events, meet ups and places where you can learn. Ask for permission
and state your reasons. Don’t just turn up unless it’s stated that’s ok.
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Diversity in design
32. Question your words and assumptions.
Think about why and where these come
from.
Ableist and gendered language is the hardest to work on:
“That website is crazy” “That’s stupid/dumb” “Hey guys, how is everyone?”
“There she is”
Seek alternatives and ask for clarification:
“That website is disorganised and messy” “That’s not a good solution for this
case” “Hey team/folks/friends, how is everyone?” “There they are/There is Eriol”
Diversity in design
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33. Talk about issues not just with
marginalised people. Practice compassion.
If you’re white, talk about race with other white people.
If you’re straight/cis-gendered, talk about LGBTQIA+ issues.
If you’re able-bodied, talk about disability and neurodiversity issues.
Diversity in design
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34. https://www.ellpha.com/ - Gender Balance through AI
https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/measuringequality/genderidentity/genderidentityu
http://cassolotl.tumblr.com/post/168336693365 - Pronoun tips for Binary Men and Women
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/less-than-or-equal/id890268267 - Less than or Equal a podcast geeks facing in
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Diversity in design
Hinweis der Redaktion
In this talk I will be covering:
Illustration/photography
UI & UX
All from a marginalised perspective.
Some of these are my own experiences and some are covered in some related reading
This talk presents a lot of questions that there aren’t necessarily answers
I hope to provoke thinking around these topics
Recap content warnings
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Name, years in industry, workplaces.
Job roles that have been both specific (UI specialist) and more general.
There are many ways of identifying outside the gender binary such as ‘a-gender’ or ‘gender-fluid’ and can mean, depending on the individual that they feel neither ‘man’ nor ‘woman’ or they fluctuate between the two.
I’m happy to be asked questions, especially If there are terms and subjects that are new to folks here. Also I’m happy to be approached after the talk today and digitally about the topics covered.
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I focus more on the things that I have personal experience of, which is why this talk focuses on gender representation, trans inclusivity and LGBTQIA+ representation.
I also talk about times when I’ve had difficult time advocating for better ethnic diversity or fighting against racial stereotypes as well as better representation of visible disabilities as well as designing accessible and inclusive technology.
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I’m a Designer at Ushahidi. Testimony in Swahili. Kenyan tech NGO.
Platform for crowd-sourcing data from people around the world. Election violence, Street harassment, Earthquake relief.
TenFour new product for teams to amalgamate the way that they communicate, critically in crisis situations and was created after the attack on the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya.
The company is diverse.
We’re talking Illustration now.
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Draw anything, Easy to represent diverse folk in your product?
New to the design industry and picking battles.
Not always as easy the longer you’ve been in the industry.
Here’s an illustration I made for a family product for a blog around Christmas time. The only specific of the brief was ‘A family doing a conga line’
A chance to include diverse folk. Different skin colours, ages, bodies and visible disabilities.
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Older person of the left of the screen. Hearing aid device.
The person on the right, red and white striped cane, used by people who are severely sight/hearing impaired.
I made 7 illustrations for this blog, this conga line was the most diverse.
It didn’t get used.
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These ones did.
Unearthing unconscious personal, or business based bias is a heavy task to take on and you have to pick your battles.
Often I sense this fear from other people I’ve worked with around having these conversations,
some are easier to have than others, include more people of colour, single parent families but shortly after this project i suggested an illustration of a ‘same-sex’ couple family and found myself in a conversation that edged around the words ‘but including that kind of family won’t appeal to our target families’
After this experience I had reservations about trying to represent other under-represented folk but continued to include what I could.
On to photography
Not an authority on race/ethnicity. This is from a book called ‘Technically wrong’ by Sara Wattcher Bottcher
But relying on Stock photography for forced Diversity can end up with inauthentic. Here you can see the same stock image But of ‘diverse people’ used on two websites
Here’s a image where the original has been manipulated to include a black student in the crowd.
I think most of us would recognise this as not good practice. If your college brochure doesn’t include any students of colour then a better way to spend your time is asking why? and doing the work involved in making that environment more welcoming and therefore diverse.
Poster - talk about
Brand
Org site images
Skeptical
Instagram/Google
Chose pictures - send samples
Chosen poster.
Also mention how depicting ‘one kind’ of poc isn’t representation and the stigma that different darker skin tones and natural hair types face. Lighting for darker skin tones is important when you’re hiring photographers, be sure they have taken picture of poc folks and they know how to light picture well so that everyone looks great in a picture.
I did a similar thing with my community - trans folks
There’s some imagery that makes me uncomfortable. *DESCRIBE THE IMAGES* I think these images are ones each person needs to decide what they feel around but remember that my search text was ‘Trans-person’.
Two images of people
perpetuate things around secrecy.
How ‘trans’ has to be something that has these obvious visual binary gender markers (bras, makeup etc.)
How do we understand and challenge the cultural whispers that say ‘A trans-woman must have these characteristics’ or ‘A lesbian must have these characteristics?’ and so on a so forth.
How do we reconcile the need for representation in visual media, without relying on stereotypes to communicate that message?
How do we move away from the kind of ‘default’ thinking that says, straight, white, male, woman, thin, able-bodied and so on.
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Especially when trans folk and non binary folk are as diverse as anyone else
Meetup.com of the London pugs group. It’s real, authentic, there are many people here that express themselves in their own ways.
Use your real customers…draw on the power of your product’s community and say you’re looking for diverse representation that is accurate to your customer base. If your customer base is not diverse already, understand there is some effort needed to fix or build that.
stock images = survey your customers or the public, use whatever platform you can and put some photos out there and ask ‘Does this image represent a diverse set of people as well as promoting our product well?’
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Making great user experiences is one of the keys to making a product successful.
At it’s root, it’s about making something usable, relevant and simple for anyone to use.
UX becomes tough when it gets tangled up with how products want to make money or are marketed.
I remember a conversation I had where there was a suggestion to ‘feminise’ a product (Not the first time I’ve had a conversation like this and probably not the last). The worry was that ‘women’ would not buy the product because it looked ‘too techy’
The conversation danced around ‘not making it all pink’ and finally landed on the statement “Just making it more female friendly” to which I replied with “Why not just friendly without the female part?”
This was really a comment on the user interface being cluttered and looking like a software program or something you do ‘work’ on like a word processor etc. Because the funny thing was, regardless of self-identified gender of users, the feedback was synonymous with making the experience feel less like work and more like a lifestyle management tool as well as the core feature flows quicker and a straight-forward set of screens/buttons.
I think that this kind of UX can lean into building UX with more of a marketing purpose but my worry is that experiences of products is leaning into the kind of thinking I’ll describe now:
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*Describe the image* Tea, Chapstick, Shower gel and cotton swabs.
We’ve all seen things like this
Where you have everyday items, implying that certain folk shouldn’t purchase it. It can be amusing but it can also be a fraught decision for some and for what benefit? If your a person who’s gender assigned at birth matches that your gender expression (the way you present to the world) this works for you. If not, say you’re in a gender transition then these kind of products/experiences can be isolating and distressing.
*CLICK*
I particularly find tissues interesting. Some mansize tissues with ‘strength’ *CLICK* and some other tissues *CLICK* where there is a ‘ultra soft’ label.
I honestly struggle to think of any person when faced with a sore nose wouldn’t want extra softness.
Does this further isolate people’s choices and mark certain products for specific people? And why?
So i’d just like to re-iterate *CLICK* the make something usable, relevant and simple for anyone to use.
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Talk about body shapes sizes and how to think differently about these.
Also mention period tracker apps that focus on fertility and use feminine gendered language or have visual that is coded feminine.
This example comes from a UK based student accommodation website.
It shows one section of the process to buy a room in a student flat.
There are obviously still a few problems here:
1 - What if you want to not specify, but do want to share your gender with flatmates?
2 - What is this information actually used for?
3 - Why is it mandatory (indicated by the star)
I suggested: free text field so people can write what they want to?
Placed in flats with the maximum amount of your own gender.
So if you’re applying for a 6 person flat and you select ‘male’ you’ll be placed in a flat with 5 other males.
Why do you think everyone wants to live with the same gender?
Company: We think there will be less distractions for students
Me: Won’t this happen with same sex flats too?
Behind the scenes they are separating you from a choice of actually who you want to live with, which is much more important question for a user here.
Evidence, surveys our young people are more and more identifying outside of the gender binary and have fluid sexuality yet we’re not recognising them.
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Here’s something that a lot of non-binary and trans folk dread ‘The identifying yourself alongside ID’
If your ID name doesn’t match your preferred name then theres a whole extra process you have to self-initiate to make sure you’re following the rules of a product or service.
This is most definitely harder early on in transitions and when your defining your gender identity.
You can see here I’ve not just filled in my ‘legal name’ I’ve done a pretty long sentence that details my preferred name and then the fact that won’t yet match some forms of ID I have.
Here’s another experience.
Why does Dr. have both a male and female option?!
and even though it’s not strictly a ‘legal’ option it is a recognised title.
Best advice is a free text field for titles or provide and update many options.
Non-binary folk sometimes use other titles like: Zir, Xe, Fey,
Also not good
Talk about prefer not to say and none of your business
GOOD
I just want to talk a bit about Edge cases. *CLICK* which can also be known as “we can’t please everybody”
This is such a creepy yet familiar word in the world of Design and UX.
And it covers a lot of different practices.
It’s an industry term to describe a scenario which is unlikely to happen or a type of user that is in a low percentage of overall users.
What it’s slowly becoming as well is a word to discourage designers and developers during the early stages of a project to spending time, effort and money catering to individuals of a minority which often are marginalised groups.
When we know, as people that exists within minorities and marginalised groups that we need to be included. What it means for progress and acceptance to be surfaced and recognised alongside the same kinds of people we’ve seen frequently in our products and media.
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If you need more encouragement to start including different kinds of folk, including gender identities then here are some harrowing quotes from Stonewall, The USA’s national centre for Transgender Equality and a personal account from a young a-gender person.
As designers, we are at the forefront of how products and services serve users, but also how the digital and physical world represents and reflects back at users… *CLICK*
...we have a responsibility to be inclusive, sensitive and understanding with what we design, and endeavour to help non-marginalised folk foster their acceptance and expose them to systems that include, rather than exclude.
NEXT
We don’t always get it right. Even when you’re part of a marginalised group there are parts of a diverse experience that we’ve not had the chance to talk about, experience or even realised before.
One thing I decided was important when I began feeling more excluded from conversations was go out of my way to attend events, meet-ups and groups outside of my experience. I learn something new every time.