Day 1-Fast and Fearless Inclusive Research

— The title of the talk is a misnomer
  • Pieces of work shouldn’t be fast
  • It takes time to understand our bias and lens
    • It will be a long and drawn out match
  • But by engaging with the space, we can change the way we work all the time

 

— I’ll start this presentation with a story from the book Invisible Women:
  • A town in Sweden required snow-plowing every year, and one year the town broke from the default snow plowing pattern
    • The default pattern had an enormous toll on women in the town, and the town’s budget
  • Once the town understood this, and changed how they plowed their roads, town saved billions, by reframing something they had been doing all along
— The planning department of the town was following best practice of plowing major roads first and then sidewalks, and as far as the town council knew they were providing for everyone
  • But they couldn’t see that women are more likely to walk/bus/ride a bike and combine trips
  • All things much harder in three inches of snow, which lead to accidents and injuries

 

 

— There are examples of this kind of error all all over, in every domain.

 

— We see it in the design of seat belts and car crash dummies, which result in cars being more dangerous when women are in the driver’s seat, due to their different body type. Other examples include:
  • Idea of Facebook Oculus VR headsets not accommodating Black hairstyles
  • Voice-recognition systems recognizing only the voices of straight white men
  • Arrest matching algorithms arresting people of color at a higher rate than what should be happening
  • Heart-attack protocols based on research with men than women
— So why does this keep happening in groups of highly trained professionals, often with researchers in the room?
  • People have learned about bias, objectivity, analytical problem solving—but why do they keep catching risks/harms after the fact?

 

— All of these errors stem from the fallacy of a default option
  • These defaults surface from a lack of diversity or empathy
  • UXRs might learn about bias, but they might default to default assumptions when under pressure and in a time crunch, which is almost always

 

— In our jobs, time and resources are limited and they are the opposite of deliberate and inclusive work

 

— Daily, we are under pressure to work as cheaply and effectively as possible
  • This pressure is not benign and impacts who and what we work with
— We need to move from frame of ‘fast’ to ‘inclusive’ to see who is missing, and what are we not missing
  • But how do we do this in the real world?

 

— Well, we need a frame to do this

 

— But what is a frame and how do we need one?

 

— In cognitive science, once a frame is set-up and piece of info triggers it, the frame acts as a guide to help us direct what we see, and also what we don’t see

 

— Undeveloped frame creates problems, as we can’t see what key Information we are missing

 

— Historically, there is a lot of work of changing the frames we use, but we have gotten stuck in moving from information to implementation
  • Great deal of work that needs to be done to overcome long-held gaps

 

— So how can we implement concepts under realistic constraints?

 

— Similar to pluriversal design, these recommendations are not a sure-fire solution, but a helpful option to get you going
  • As a quick warning, will get into text-heavy slides, but we will go through them at a high-level

 

— First, let’s ask ourselves questions, as this often the most serious way to cause change in ourselves
  • Our questions are broken into groups to focus on historical and structural lens questions, organizational questions, and personal questions
Questions we need to ask include:
  • At the ‘Historical and Structural’ level, who do we need to listen to?
  • At the ‘Organizational’ level, how can we carve out the space to do so?
  • At the ‘Personal’ level, who else we need to involve  in this work (and how)?

 

— You can ask these questions on your own, or you can do this within an industry environment

 

— The exercise we will go through deal with grasping positionally, understanding marginalization, and identifying key goals for next steps
  • Help us reckon and see our bias
— Final step is to move forward with that understanding into action

 

— So how do we do this as a team?

 

— For first part of activity, we start with either defining positionality or marginalization
  • We identify who we are, and what our lens is (both individual and for the  team)
    • Where is representation, where is it lacking
    • This includes bringing in more diverse perspectives

 

— There are multiple ways to do this, as open-ended qualitative feedback exercise, and aggregate themselves to predefined levels of power
  • See the resources page for this talk
— If you want to do this in a large group, you can use an anonymous survey
  • Goal is to recognize where people are, and how to reckon with it

 

— Regardless of approach, here are the main steps to follow
  • Set learning tone for the team— give people space to react what they are going through, and providing pauses when needed
  • Steps 4-5-6, are crucial, as team needs to reflect and discuss as a group, as we are seeing a lot of overlap
    • We need to explicitly identify which perspectives are missing

— Then we have steps the team needs to take to adjust plan, and expand your stakeholder group,  and contact outside experts
  • This can include a plan to conduct additional background research
    • i.e Put into plan secondary research to round out understanding

 

— Goal will be to explore relevant marginalizaitona and intersectionality
  • This is relevant no matter the domain, as we need to see who we focus on

 

— This activity will change depending on industry and domain
  • Answers will depend
    • On what you know
    • What you know you don’t know
    • Everything else falling through cracks
— By making this explicit, we can evolve how we work
  • We’ve done this as homework with stakeholder and gave someone a micro-journey assignment
  • We’ve even done this as a live exercise and think of process for team

 

— Some key steps  are listed above. Make sure to:
  • Set a tone for learning
  • Step 6 is crucial, to help focus on specific research question, by identifying key intersections to focus on
    • Instead of collecting all characteristics, we talk to participants who will be at cross-roads of intersections you want to study

 

— By seeing key areas of marginalization, we find people who embody multiple components of marginalization
  • This helps us see info that’s lacking and gaps in knowledge in industry, and what to answer before moving forward
— Plan for time in plan to adjust, as first pass won’t capture everything you need to capture
  • Modify the plan based on the steps you take

 

— Then, you figure out the next steps to take to figure out who is doing the research, and difference between the group and who we will focus on

 

— We need to consider whether we are recreating extractive practice inadvertently
  • So we need to ask
    •  How does the team lens differ from those we wish to work with?
    • HMW best center the expertise of the participants?
    • What methods do we need to consider?
    • What partnerships can we form?

 

— The goal here is to make change, and adjust to allow perspectives and lenses, and figuring out how to involve these perspectives throughout the process
  • Sara Fatallah has an excellent talk on just that
— Be prepared to alter your methods, to get the appropriate expertise from who to talk to

— So how to apply this in industry? Let’s have a quick case study from the real world

 

— UXR worked at major retailer to include in-store options within digital experiences offered
  • Store’s efforts at inclusive efforts and marketing were not translating to the online domain
— As team considered this, thought of issues that could emerge, and hypotheses the team had
  • Thinking of how to make all people feel welcome
— But the researchers couldn’t talk to everyone, so they dug into case studies— and realized designing for margins was the most impactful approach

 

— Teams wanted to increase sales, capture online shopping

 

— So the team considered their positionality
  • The team had experience with retail, along with of identities of people who had been historically marginalized
— But the team needed to ask who was shopping in-store, and who wasn’t shopping at all?
  • How could we center the experiences to understand info in general for clothing

 

— This led to a few changes:
  • Team had diversity in some ways
    • But lacked mobility diversity and neuro-diversity
  • They built inclusive stakeholder group into the process, and worked together with them as a team, focused on participants with level of marginalization
— The team focused on several of factors
  • Body size
  • People undergoing gender transitions
  • Diverse mobilities
  • Sensory sensitivities
—Focused on co-creation methods to build a ground-up expertise

 

— The goal was to understand what people needed to know and see and what was the most important thing for them

 

 

— The findings from this study was relevant to a far broader  population
  • Stakeholder variations helped customers understand how an item would fit them, and how it would fit into their every day lives

 

— These are just some of the ways to get started, and way to think of biases proactively, instead of reactively after harm has already been done

 

— As we think about this though, recall that frames are iterative and evolving
  • Frames turn question into tool for continued change, and as context changes our frames change too

 

— The work will require space, and a tone of learning with the team, a space to reflect and notice, and for quiet voices to be heard and their expertise recognized.

 

— Remember, we are feeding multiple birds with one hand
  • These exercises can help us and our org
  • We can use those on the margin to bring greater attention to a question that the org is already focusing on
    • We can share use cases of how marginal benefits improved the broader population
    • And acknowledging the reality that group is not marginal at all
— We can transform the process in doing so

 

— Thank you for listening to our talk. Our co-workers are on line and available

 

Questions
  1. Is there any diversity you are required to include in your work?
— We think through who to focus on, and figuring out five people to talk to, and tracking characteristics of participants to see who we are not including

 

— We are still working on who to speak to