Diversity & Inclusion Checklist

If everyone in a group shares a similar background, you will likely come up with the same ideas and make the same mistakes. To create a solution rooted in inclusive design, you’ll need a diverse and inclusive team. Research has shown that decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results. And a truly inclusive team requires effort to empower underrepresented groups.

Diversity factors

• Ability
• Age
• Culture
• Disability
• Education
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Personality

Inclusive team

• Actively look for problems to solve to improve your team and their environment
• Empower underrepresented groups

Further readings:

Creativity, Inc by Ed CatmullHow to Implement Inclusive Design in Your Organization by Matt May

Design is grounded in research findings and research must be inclusive. Feedback should be collected from a diverse group of participants. Even when creating a business that has a specific target audience like Hispanic Americans, consider other diversity factors such as age and socio-economic differences. One easy step to take is to be aware of the impact of the researcher’s identity and background since it could influence how comfortable our participants feel about discussing these topics.

Diversity factors

• Ability
• Age
• Culture
• Disability
• Education
• Ethnicity
• Family structure
• Gender
• Marital Status
• Politics
• Race
• Region
• Sexual orientation
• Socio-economic differences
• Values
• Year of Experience

Watch-outs

• Does the interview script contain any inappropriate or hard-to-understand language?
• Will the researcher/recruiter background have any impact on the participant's willingness to discuss the topic?

Further readings:

Closing the Experience Gap by Nanako Era

When building a persona, we should focus on capturing information that will be directly relevant to the problem we’re solving, such as pain points and user needs. When the persona's demographics don’t matter to the solution, let’s challenge the bias and be inclusive in our selection of persona image and name. Make sure to choose diverse photos and give them names that represent various ethnicities and nationalities.

Watch-outs

• Avoid names from your team members
• Choose a easy-to-read name
• Consider names that represent various ethnicities and nationalities.
• Does demographic information matter to the problem?
• Use underrepresented groups to represent persona when inequality exists(e.g. gender, race) in persona's profession

Further readings:

What makes an effective persona by Samantha Stone

Communication is not just what you say, but also how you say it and how it’s heard. We should be mindful of the words and copy we used in our designs, from the way it’s written & spoken to the actual content itself. While maintaining the brand identity, consider using more standard and plain language, so that you are able to communicate effectively with more people.

Internationalization and Localization

• Accommodate the right-to-left reading pattern
• Avoid for culture-specific/geo-specific metaphor
• Avoid jargons, idioms, and acronyms
• Color Usage
• Ensure multi-language support applies to all communication channels
• Offer multi-language support

Bias watch-outs

• Avoid sexist language, including gender biased use of pronouns (he, she, etc) and nouns (use firefighter instead of fireman)
• Challenge ageist labels, use 'older adult' rather than 'senior citizen', or simply say 'people'
• Give gender-neutral names to virtual assistants
• Offer choices when it comes to select voices for virtual assistants
• Use gender-neutral phrases in virtual assistants' responses, including chatbots. Unless the gender is specified

Further readings:

Inclusive Language Guide by University of South Carolina Aiken

To ensure that D&I is included in the product development lifecycle in a sustainable way, we should begin adding D&I to business requirements, design critique criteria, and quality assurance (QA) testing. When a design language system exists, consider adding inclusivity as one of the design principles, to encourage practicing Diversity & Inclusion in design.

D&I checkpoints

• Business requirements
• Design critique
• Design principles
• Quality assurance testing

Critique rubric

• Add value
• Be consistent
• Consider situation
• Give control
• Offer choice
• Prioritize content
• Provide comparable experience

Further readings:

Inclusive Design Principles by Paciello GroupEmpathy Prompts by Eric Bailey

We are not our users. This is a mindset that we need to keep reinforcing. Our brain is designed to automatically generate cognitive illusion and bias as a result of our understanding and assumptions of the world. We should keep challenging our assumptions throughout the design process and fight against the cognitive bias, unconscious bias in particular, that causes us to make irrational judgments and decisions.

Bias watch-outs

• Age bias
• Culture bias
• Disability bias
• Gender bias

Further readings:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

To achieve inclusive design, we create accessible content through different techniques and tools. When designing for digital products, in particular, we should go beyond just enabling people who have hearing, visual, motor, or cognitive impairments to access. We should also think about other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.

Accessibility Lenses

• Audio
• Color
• Images
• Keyboard
• Order/Structure
• Performance
• Readability
• Screen reader
• Video

Further readings:

Equal Access Toolkit by IBMDesigning For Accessibility And Inclusion by Steven Lambert

Representation matters. When creating visual assets for products that serve people, inclusivity should be a given. Representation doesn’t stop at race - culture, gender and disabilities should all be taken into consideration.

Diversity factors

• Ability
• Age
• Body type
• Culture
• Disability
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Race
• Region
• Religion

Visual asset types

• 3D modeling
• Animation
• Animation
• Emoji
• Icons
• Illustrations
• Stock images
• Videos

Watch-outs

• Be mindful of color perception across cultures
• Optimize asset file size

Further readings:

Your Face Here by Jennifer HomHow to prevent misinformation in data visualization by Claire Genoux

Design and technology are closely intertwined. Modern design relies heavily on technology to elevate the user experience. To avoid building a racist search engine or biased virtual reality simulation, we need to spend time evaluating emerging technology before introducing it to the design.

Preliminary work

• Assess source data bias when working with AI
• Evaluate ethical standards of the technology provider
• Identify potential biases that may be introduced when training the dataset
• Know your audience to inform platform/device decisions
• Research potential bias on the new technology

Bias watch-outs

• Associations Bias
• Automation Bias
• Confirmation Bias
• Dataset Bias
• Interaction Bias

Further readings:

In Pursuit of Inclusive AI by Microsoft

Accept the difference and gain knowledge about the beliefs, desires, intentions, goals, preferences, emotions, and thoughts of other people.

To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes

Further readings:

How To Be An Antiracis by Ibram X. Kendi