What reading Design Justice has taught me about user-centered design
This spring, I volunteered to help Kathryn Grace and Laura Yarrow facilitate a virtual book club for members of the user-centered design community to come together and read Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Now that we’ve finished the book, I wanted to share some reflections on what I’ve learned and would like to implement going forward, in the hopes that others find this useful too.
What is Design Justice?
Design justice is a framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people. Design justice focuses explicitly on the ways that design reproduces and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, settler colonialism, and other forms of structural inequality). Design justice is also a growing community of practice that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community-based, Indigenous, and diasporic design traditions, knowledge, and practices. — Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice
I expect this definition of design justice to resonate with what many would consider to be good user-centered design. The clue is in the name — we’re centring users in our design decisions; we’re creating products and services that meet those user’s needs. Right? RIGHT? On reflection of reading Design Justice, I think it’s fair to say that user-centered design does a lot to consider what users need, but there is so much more we could do.
Check your power and privilege
User-centered design, or UCD, recognises that users do not use products and services in a vacuum. Users are people and people are complex. This complexity plays out when users bring their lived experiences, with their emotions, values and behaviours, into their interactions with the things we create.
If users don’t operate in a vacuum, then neither do UCD teams — we’re people too! We all have our own experiences, values and beliefs that impact the decisions we make — not only in our day-to-day lives, but also at work. Although we look to gather insight from users at many stages of the design process to help inform design decisions, for instance in user research interviews or usability testing sessions, at other stages we often don’t. And that’s a problem. Decisions are manifestations of power, and when we don’t involve users in all of our decision making, we maintain an unequal power structure between UCD teams and users. UCD teams do the designing, whilst users have design done to them.
To use some concrete examples: I have never worked on a project where a user is involved in scoping a new project, or feeding back on something crafted very early on, like a research plan or discussion guide. This risks UCD teams missing vital opportunities to focus on a more pressing problem space, or to ask a critical question that will support better design solutions. And even if UCD teams had all the training in the world to create the most innovative and creative solutions, what that would never replace is lived experience and intimate understanding of the problem in question. This is why I’m committed to getting users involved as early as possible in projects, so my own blindspots and biases are hopefully spotted — and resolved — earlier, leading to more effective outcomes for users.
Another thing I am doing is being more explicit about how my power and privilege informs my work. Often, power and privilege go hand in hand. UCD teams may have the privilege of never having to use the products and services they design — particularly when thinking about targeted public or charity services, like some I’ve worked on previously. Also, recognising that we need to build greater diversity within UCD teams*, an all-too-common scenario is that the privilege of typically white, male-dominated, cis-gendered, middle-class UCD teams may lead them to create things that cause harm to those unlike them.
[*A point on diversity. It’s not enough to just have it — we have to do something with it. And that can’t be the responsibility of new, diverse team members to advocate for inclusive design decisions — that’s a burden that needs to be shared by all, and particularly those who already benefit from their privilege.]
Design Justice describes Joy Buolamwini’s work on the systemic racial inequality designed into facial recognition software [side note: Joy’s Netflix documentary, Coded Bias, is excellent and deserves a watch]. As a white person, I have never had to worry that my skin will not be detected by facial recognition. This is seemingly a privilege not only afforded to me, but also to the researchers, designers and developers involved in projects like this — otherwise, these software may have been able to recognise darker skin tones just as well as lighter ones.
An example closer to home is NHS.uk, which is consciously looking to do something about the racial inequalities in its design, after it came to light through user research that some health conditions present differently on different skin tones and, as a result, earlier content was not relevant to all who needed it.
These examples aren’t intended to shame those who have been involved in them — in fact, in the case of NHS.uk, it’s a great positive that this is being addressed. But, to quote my good friend and ex-colleague Aneta Perehinets, who also joined the book club, this is an opportunity to reconfigure what it means to have power and privilege — encouraging greater accountability for UCD teams. After all, she told me, “even if we weren’t always getting it right before, we can become better designers now.” And this is really the point. To try to be better. This is what I want to do, by checking my own power and privilege and looking to adjust for that by integrating users more deeply into my work, challenging assumptions or unconscious bias along the way, and encouraging design decisions to be more explicit.
“Don’t start by building a new table; start by coming to the table”
I already talked about getting users involved earlier on in the design process, so the right problems are identified and solved. Another reason is so UCD teams can build their awareness of what’s already happening out there, so we don’t attempt to reinvent the wheel. Design Justice speaks a lot about the power of community, and how many communities — that is, groups of users sharing a lived experience —regularly look to solve their own problems, often to great success. So it could be that, rather than always approaching a problem with an ‘innovation culture’ type mentality — the notion that new and shiny is always better — we should consider when maintaining or improving an existing solution is more sustainable.
An important way to build this contextual knowledge is to prioritise engaging with users in spaces familiar with them. This also builds greater rapport, which I’ve found to be especially critical when conducting user research on more sensitive subjects. In fact, a few years ago, I co-designed a mental health product with young people. Most of our sessions were in schools or youth groups — spaces they knew and felt comfortable in. I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but Design Justice explains the importance of this. Because when we bring users to unfamiliar spaces, spaces that are often quite sterile e.g. traditional usability labs, it can feel strange and uncertain. Already in usability we remind users that we’re testing the product and not them, so perhaps thinking about how our spaces may create feelings of ease/unease is good to consider too.
The book also talks about where we organise collaborative initiatives like hackathons, and how we must pay more attention to the logistics of design spaces, including who can attend or not attend, and who will feel comfortable or uncomfortable there. If we want truly inclusive participation, then we need to think about things like if there are childcare or breastfeeding facilities, if food and drink is readily available, if the bathrooms are accessible. If, in some instances, we really must build that new table, then let’s ensure everyone who wants to come to it can.
Show users how much we value them
The most common way UCD teams thank users for their participation in a project is by giving a financial incentive. This is important — we shouldn’t expect people with lived experience to give us their time and energy for free, particularly if users are part of a marginalised group where time and energy is often already more precious. But incentives might not always be the best way to show users how much we value them.
Think about a typical user research recruitment process. It’s often important to recruit someone who hasn’t participated in this work before. They are offered an incentive for contributing, and after the research session has been completed, that might be it — we may never speak to them again. The book describes this approach as “extractive” — we extract knowledge and experience from users and we usually pay users for that extraction. Sounds awfully transactional when you say it like that, huh?
I appreciate that time is a common barrier to building full co-design into projects, but I’m keen to prioritise less extractive research methods wherever possible. I also want to think about how to develop longer-term relationships with communities and grassroots organisations, so genuine partnerships can be built to support more inclusive and participatory user research. This is actually already happening at NHS Digital when it comes to increasing participation from users that have been traditionally harder to reach.
Another really simple thing I’ve been doing for a while, but want to formalise at work, is to maintain communication with users after a session. I get that, sometimes, it’s important to recruit users who are unfamiliar with a particular product or service, to remove as much bias as possible. But there’s no reason we can’t keep in touch with them later to tell them how their contribution impacted that product or service. To show them that we really paid attention to their experience and to their needs. In some instances, why not invite them back to replay their ideas to them? This feels like the least we could do, save for creating more accountable and equitable systems of ownership for users who contribute to design decisions — a more ambitious goal in a capitalist society, but nonetheless an important one.
Good UCD is feminist
I didn’t really know how to end this post, but I thought I’d share a tweet I wrote almost a year ago, when I was musing over the links between intersectional feminism and UX. Little did I know at the time that this book had just been published!
Thinking back to the definition of design justice, if what we’re looking to do here is to be more mindful of how design can reinforce existing power inequalities, understanding how it can benefit some whilst harming others, then this mirrors what intersectional feminism is doing — highlighting the way that an individual’s different identities overlap, and in some cases this overlap can compound the amount of inequality or discrimination they experience.
As a User Researcher, and a cis-gendered white woman from the UK, I feel responsible to embed this thinking into my work. Design Justice has really got me thinking about how I can be a better researcher — and all-round human, really — so I hope this blog gives some food for thought on what you could do differently too.
