2018 UX Trends
Lack of Diversity affecting business
The global debate on cultural acceptance, diversity and inclusion that took over the media in 2017 has raised the topic inside design firms as well. And a few of them have started to act.
2017 was the year of sexism scandals in the Silicon Valley. The year engineers published out outrageous memos on how women are simply not biologically shaped to code. The year the world started to pay attention to the importance of empathy in business and beyond.
Luckily, UX Designers are trained to design with empathy in mind. The whole reason why User-Centered Design exists as a discipline is that the audience of a product is inherently different than the designer who created it. They have different ages, genders, religious beliefs, cultural backgrounds, political views, They come from different cities or countries, But most importantly: they think different than you.
User-Centered Design — and its mindset of bringing users into the design process — exists to reduce gaps between who is creating a product and who is using it. UX is about closing the gap between people.
When you don’t close that gap, you end up designing Snapchat filters that stereotype Asians, or a set of emojis that don’t include interracial families, or the Chinese man in New Zealand who couldn’t have his passport photo recognized in the online system because “subject eyes are closed”.
There are two broad strategies you can use to close that gap:
- You can reduce the gap, by incorporating user research methodologies into your design process. This allows the team to find out, ahead of time, if a certain feature in your product is not working for a certain audience segment (e.g. testing the aforementioned Snapchat filter with the right users before launch would have saved the company leadership a lot of trouble).
- You can prevent the gap, by hiring a diverse design team. This doesn’t eliminate the need for user research, but having a plural team can help ensure different perspectives are taken into consideration. A designer with an interracial or mixed background would have raised their hand when reviewing the set of emojis above.
We have written quite a lot about Diversity in Design at the UX Collective in 2017. We actually stopped all publications for an entire month to focus on articles that explore how to bring Diversity to Design, and how to use Design for Inclusion — featuring the work and vision of really smart people and organizations like @timothyhykes, LadiesthatUX, Jen Heazlewood, Rachel Thomas and Sabrina Fonseca.
In 2017, forward-thinking companies started to take more tangible action toward more inclusive teams, processes and methodologies: Airbnb launched a toolkit for designing inclusive experiences, Microsoft announced a framework for Inclusiveness in Design — and there are tons of bottom-up initiatives emerging from the community itself, like Dreamer Stories showcasing beautiful portraits (illustrated by Pablo Stanley) of young Americans recipients of DACA.
Food for thought: what if your next side project was less focused on design gradients and more on taking action towards a more inclusive design industry?
Let’s make 2018 the year when diversity and inclusion stop being only a topic at design conferences, buzzwords on a slide, or a box to be checked by HR, to becoming actionable within design companies and teams everywhere. What are you doing about it, today?
