Does it sometimes happen to you that you can’t make sense of a new app? That everything is frustrating and not intuitive? Maybe the app was developed by someone who thought purely of himself as a user rather than of the real user: you. All too often, software is not adapted to the target group that needs to use it. I would like to make a plea here for ‘diversity by design’.
There are plenty of examples of how a designer’s lack of empathy can have dramatic consequences. To name but one: at the beginning of this century, it was found that women were 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car accident. This was not due to chance (or a lack of steering skills): car seats and belts were designed with male drivers in mind, and it was not until 2011 that female models were used as crash test dummies.
Diversity is not only about male/female: it is also about cultural diversity, or age, or origin. We know that facial recognition systems barely manage to recognise people with dark skin. Imagine that a self-driving car would only consider white people to be people it needs to brake for.
If you know that 92% of programmers are men, does this automatically mean that women have a harder time using software? Unfortunately, too little research has been done on the subject. A number of small-scale studies do show that women react differently to colours and menu structures of websites than men. These differences in the taste of a diverse target group should be taken into account when, for example, designing customer journeys in a CRM system. Also colour blind and visually impaired people are often overlooked when designing user interfaces.
As far as I am concerned, men of any age can design apps for young female anorexia patients. And I would also allow 16-year-old girls to develop tools for car mechanics. In itself, it should not matter who designs software. But I would urge them to involve their target group in the design of the apps from the start. This can be done either by letting them provide input in focus groups, or by using the various populations as usability testers. As long as the input is taken into account and it is not assumed that the users have no choice: they will have to use the applications, like it or not! Period.
Diversity ideas, ideals and considerations must be seamlessly built into methodology, the work environment, decision-making, professional choices and interpersonal relationships. They must be present from the beginning and not added for reasons of trend or temporary popularity.
Companies often spend large sums of money on change management projects, in order to increase the user acceptance of new software. Change management, however, must not be an excuse for software that did not take the diversity of the target group into account when it was designed. Writing good software is done by keeping the users in mind from the design stage onwards. This may require extra time and effort. But you will achieve success more quickly. All too often, diversity is not seen as essential in a project. And if designers do not see diversity as an essential, structural and functional element, there will never be diversity by design.
It took years to discover that poor car seat design cost women their lives. What if we soon find that software that does not take diversity into account, also costs lives? Shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to avoid that right now?
This blog was first published on Data News as ‘Diversiteit van bij het prille begin’ and ‘La diversité d’entrée de jeu’.