Credit: Fortune Magazine/Ultimate Software — 100 Best Places Workplaces for Diversity

There’s no doubt that every product team wants to create products or systems that work well for everyone. The reality is there’s often a wide gulf between that desire and the outcome. Too often our products don’t work equally well across diverse groups or they don’t treat everyone fairly. One such recent shortcoming was illustrated by object-recognition algorithms from several popular cloud services. Using a global dataset, these services made 10 percent more errors when identifying common items, such as hand soap (i.e., a soap bar versus a soap dispenser), in lower-income households. Furthermore, they identified items in US households with 15 to 20 percent greater accuracy than those in Somalia and Burkina Faso. Assumptions abound.

Designing emerging technologies requires a deeply responsible approach. We need to intentionally seek out diverse voices and heed different perspectives. Doing this throughout a product’s lifecycle will help with fairness and democratization of our technologies.

Diversity and innovation — a bigger picture

A mindset that intentionally seeks out diverse perspectives drives innovation — and the bottom line. Studies have shown that companies with employees and leaders who are broadly diverse, across traits such as gender or ethnicity and cross-cultural experience, are 70 percent likelier to report capturing new markets. In a 2017 international survey of 1,700 companies across eight countries, researchers found that companies with higher rates of diversity (i.e., migration, age, career path, gender identity, education, industry) had on average 19 percent more revenues and a 9 percent increase in profitability (measured in earnings before interest and taxes). This makes sense. The broader the representation within a group, the better equipped that group is to address the needs of a wider range of people.

But there’s an odd insularity in the tech industry. Silicon Valley, home to much of the best-known innovation and impressive profits of the past decade, reports a workforce that is 83 percent male and 94 percent white or Asian. Where’s the incentive for increasing diversity here if incredible innovation and profits result without regard to it?

There’s a holistic response that counters this Silicon Valley conundrum. It’s the social case for diversity, an argument that zeroes in on true benefits that go well beyond today’s innovation and short-term profit: Fairness and inclusiveness create a resilient, healthy, and more prosperous society. And when all groups across society are respected and treated equitably, that is the best scenario for the business. Social cohesion naturally leads to economic growth — it’s a win-win.

Defining diversity in product design

To design products that work best for everyone, we need to practice challenging the status quo in each and every phase. Fortunately, there are the blueprinted phases of design thinking that help us keep fairness and inclusiveness central to our work. Design thinking is a continual process, seeking diverse voices throughout the entire development life cycle.

Mapping your technology’s ecosystem of stakeholders and its broader reach — others who potentially may be affected by the technology — is a critical first step in design thinking 101’s empathize phase. The mapping exercise allows you to visualize the full range of people your technology will affect, from the intended direct stakeholders(e.g., end users, business decision makers) to indirect stakeholders (e.g., bystanders, vulnerable populations, the project team and its sponsors). Mapping has a dual purpose: It allows you to see the beneficiaries of your project and it identifies where you need to assess and mitigate for possible harms on behalf of your stakeholders.

Mapping for diverse voices helps you identify areas of your technology’s potential impact on people and society.

Diverse Voices checklist

As you make room for diverse voices in your project, the following is a stakeholder checklist that will help you design with sensitivity to the values of others. People hold different views and value systems. The range of stakeholders includes your project sponsors and makers to your end users and special populations who will be directly or indirectly impacted by your project. When you consider the full array of potential stakeholders for a specific product, it can shift how you approach design. This checklist will help you identify your possible stakeholders and concretize critical elements of empathizing in your design:

1. Direct stakeholders

These are your true end users. You must understand their needs, pain points, and context to be able to build appropriate technological solutions. Ignoring this fundamental early research leads to classic and costly errors, such as the low-tech example illustrated by Gillette a few years ago. It turns out that successfully testing a low-end razor among Indian students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not very useful research when your intended market is rural India, where people shave with little or no water while balancing a handheld mirror in one hand.

Scrutinize demographic differences within your end-user community. Look at characteristics such as age, gender identity, ancestry, socioeconomic status, educational level, accessibility needs, tech literacy, and privacy concerns. Practicing inclusive design empowers you to draw on the full range of human diversity as you learn about multiple perspectives that apply to your project.

2. Indirect stakeholders

Consider who may be indirectly affected by your technology. Indirect stakeholders present an infinite set of possibilities, depending on your technology. They could, for example, include people whose jobs will be affected. When designing Microsoft’s Custom Neural Voice service, it was clear that voice actors’ livelihoods could be at stake with a neural text-to-speech technology that could realistically mimic the sound of their voice. We interviewed voice actors to get their perspectives to help us develop a plainspoken disclosure document that supported their ability to truly understand what they were being asked to consent to.

Will bystanders be impacted by your product? When designing head-mounted displays to be used in public spaces, the comfort of the wearer is not the designers’ sole consideration. Perhaps your project needs to account for institutions, past or future generations, or elements such as historic buildings or sacred spaces among its indirect stakeholders. Mapping this terrain can be a complex but essential undertaking.

3. Marginalized and vulnerable communities

Underrepresentation can be characterized by personality traits (such as introversion), gender identity, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and many more possibilities (see Figure above). Voices from these groups can be present among direct or indirect stakeholders and it’s crucial to invite participation from a diversity of perspectives. Unintended consequences can result when an oversight occurs. For example, Uber drivers going through gender transition have been suspended from their Uber accounts, leaving transgender people unable to work when Uber’s Real-Time ID Check failed to correctly match their faces with the photo on their driver’s license.

4. Human rights experts

It is invaluable to invite feedback from those who may raise objections to a project. Human rights experts can be especially invaluable in product shaping. They can extend a team’s understanding about what might lead to that product being rejected or misused by the public. Microsoft’s Global Human Rights Statement is meant “to ensure that technology plays a positive role across the globe.” When working on Custom Neural Voice, we invited a panel of human-rights experts to review our approach to the service offering.

5. Domain experts

Designing emerging technologies often means we’re also creating applications in novel domains. To build our knowledge and identify our gaps in understanding we must be able to draw learning from people with significant achievements and time in the field and people with expertise in analogous domains. Examples include working with a sociolinguists when building speech recognition models or collaborating with experts in military ethics when building technology for national defense.

6. Your product team

Teams with diversity have been shown to be smarter. What does your team look like? Do your people come from different racial and cultural backgrounds? What’s the gender balance? Does membership extend beyond engineers and project managers? Do you have representation from human-centered disciplines, such as user researchers, social scientists, and designers? We are challenged in a positive way by working with people who are different from us. Studies have shown that teams with diverse membership tend to focus more on facts to inform their decisions and help individuals break free from entrenched thought. Innovation naturally results.

The big picture

It takes time, deep thought, and vigilance for a team to work their way through the Diverse Voices checklist. But considering the consequences of your technology for all stakeholders, direct and indirect, is well worthwhile. Yes, a commitment to seeking out diverse voices can lead to well-designed products and improved market share, but let’s remember the bigger picture. Embracing diversity is about much more than driving innovation — it’s the foundation for a healthy society.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.