How privilege impacts empathy
Who are we excluding from “user-centered” design?
I recently met a woman named Dolores*, an older Hispanic woman, living in Queens, NY with her mother and teenage daughter. As the primary provider for her family, she had come to the organization where I was volunteering to get assistance applying for jobs online.
The organization’s mission centered around getting people back into the workforce. Participants were paired with volunteers for guidance through the process. As a designer (and millennial), my task was simple. I’d help Dolores use job search engines find jobs she wanted to apply for, then update her resume and submit the applications for her.
In my work, I’m used to my colleagues asking for help with updating text on a prototype or describing the functionality of a signup flow, but it’s never been something as critical as finding employment to provide for a family. As the conduit between someone and their livelihood, I felt the gravity of the situation and her need for immediate help. I didn’t want to get it wrong.
Adding to the pressure I felt was the experience of using overly-complicated sites to find jobs and submit applications. And, add to that, I was explaining the whole process to someone who was unfamiliar with the web, let alone clunky UX and poor user interfaces.
There were so many little steps required for each job application, including making small tweaks to her resume each time as well as crafting a new cover letter. Every site had a slightly different application structure and set of requirements.
I tried to move quickly to make sure I submitted on behalf of Dolores as many applications as possible. After we’d gone through a few, I started to breeze over some of the instructions. I became familiar with her basic details: First name. Last name. Email. Phone number. I stopped asking. I wanted to help, of course, and I wanted to make the process seem easy, even as I struggled through the mire.
A couple of times, I looked over to see if her face understood I was moving through the process without consulting her, but I could tell she wasn’t completely aware. She sat quietly next to me as I worked, which included checking her email when an application required. Can you picture that for a moment? Interpreting and translating design mechanisms to a person with no experience or reference for something as commonplace as email. It seemed completely foreign to her. It was almost as if she couldn’t read, or didn’t speak the same language.
And that’s just it. She doesn’t speak the language.
The disconnect
My privilege became clearer to me after spending a couple of hours with Dolores wading through countless required fields, fine print, error states, submit buttons, copying and pasting, and document uploading. The process was inconsistent and clunky at best. In the worst cases, some sites were downright unusable. The systems I was required to use made a lot of assumptions about my level of skill.
It opened my eyes to the state of these systems as they exist today and how badly we’ve made them. I was filled with shame when I thought about Dolores having to use these apps for access to basic resources that she and her family depend on. Acting as her hands and eyes, I realized how out of touch designers are with her world. It called to mind words like “literacy” and “fluency” and what impact that has when it becomes a barrier to access.
I’m confident in my skill to design for people who’ve purchased the newest iPhone XSomething, but what about those who are accessing websites on desktop PCs in public spaces? I’m not even sure I’ve used one of those in testing, let alone as part of my regular habits. And I took a job that encouraged me to look ahead to the future of apps and devices, focusing on newer and flashier innovations.
As our computers get faster, and storage gets smaller and tools make us more efficient, we’ve been shifting the world towards a model of digital-only access to services. Gone are the days of paper, and in some cases, interactions with humans. As Virginia Eubanks points out in her book, employing technology to deliver services to low-income people in the name of efficiency and automation has shown to worsen inequality.
She posits that removing responsibility for dealing with this inequality and lack of access seems intentional, and a direct bypass of empathy. “One of my greatest fears in this work is that we’re actually using these systems to avoid some of the most pressing moral and political challenges of our time — specifically poverty and racism,” she says.
Impact on empathy
Tech folks by and large take digital fluency for granted. We speak a language most people are not proficient in. While it’s hard to imagine having such a large blind spot when we tout “empathy” as much as we do, there are some basic interaction translations that are missing from our general discourse.
Our ability to empathize is directly tied to socioeconomic status. Studies have shown the more economic privilege a person has, the less empathic understanding they show when relating to others (Kraus, Cote & Keltner, 2010).
Designers look for ways to optimize, and we try our best. Empathy is our ethos and gospel. We call it our “secret weapon.” We are obsessed with putting users first, and we take pains to incorporate a series of methods and tools in our process to understand them. Empathy is what enables us to be vulnerable and ask what is going on beneath the surface while remaining open to the difficult truth we may find. Indi Young says before we can begin to practice empathy, we first must do the legwork required to enable us to be empathetic.
Given the amount of effort it takes, how much empathy are we actually infusing into our work? Are we really practicing what we preach? Do we visit our local libraries and attempt to check our email on public machines? Are the browsers modern enough to support our designs? Are we including different types of people in our research? Have we identified our blind spots, the places we unconsciously overlook and should double check?
“Well, first things first: User needs. An empathetic service would ground itself in the concrete needs of concrete people. It’s not about innovation, big data, government-as-a-platform, transparency, crowd-funding, open data, or civic tech. It’s about people. Learning to prioritize people and their needs will be a long slog. It’s the kind of change that happens slowly, one person at a time. But we should start.” — Jake Solomon
Shifting (Y)our Perspectives
There are steps we can take in our everyday work to begin challenging and changing our participation in this problematic system. For me, it was my volunteer experience that raised the question: How much has my privilege been affecting the way I design solutions?
We as designers should begin to talk about and acknowledge our privilege, and the lens through which we view the world, to connect to how that impacts our way of thinking and relating. We should own the responsibility of broadening the definition of digital fluency to effect change; we cannot continue to launch products into the world without considering digital fluency level, especially when we create experiences for public services that are migrating into digital spaces.
It’s imperative to bring cultural competence into the work we do as UX practitioners, as we are the bridge between people and services. We must deepen our cultural awareness and be conscious of the role it plays in the services and tools we design.
Now what?
I want to take a minute to acknowledge how overwhelming this is. The work of dismantling systems of oppression is massive. So, we’ll start with the first step.
Begin by examining your personal biases, your own privilege, and be honest with yourself about whether you’ve considered a problem from the perspective of those who experience disenfranchisement and marginalization.
Here’s are some other ideas that will help you get started:
- Step outside of your normal experience and volunteer
- Attend a workshop, conference or talk on cultural awareness
- Read some new perspectives
“When some are excluded or lack the knowledge, income, equipment, or training necessary to participate fully in public discourse, they must overcome obstacles to access to ensure fairness. In other words, fairness also demands remedies to redress historic injustices that have prevented or diminished access in the first place: for, just as there can be no fairness without equality, there can be none without justice.” — American Library Association
I’m grateful for the opportunity to build experiences for new and interesting products and design solutions every day. It’s great that I can log in to Instagram to connect with my friends when I want to share moments in my life. Email has revolutionized the way we do business, and cloud storage has become an essential part of life, but we need to start solving the big problems.
Digital literacy isn’t just about learning to check email or create a Facebook account. It’s about having access to resources and knowledge that allow people to thrive in today’s world. The future can’t be about devices in hand or use of social media or conversion rates, it needs to include the ability to complete tasks necessary to ensure the safety and security of a family’s well being.
The path to real change begins by acknowledging our participation in developing products and systems that reinforce economic inequality and racism, whether directly or indirectly. The truth is, we’re responsible.
*Changed name
