About
A structured, proactive approach to designing for DEI.
Want to plan and assess your product's user interactions from a DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) lens? This toolkit can be used to evaluate platforms where users interact with other users. It will help you understand how users can interact on your platform, and how those interactions can facilitate either diversity and inclusion or harassment, discrimination, and bias.
Technology is not neutral.
DEI isn’t just about company culture. Specific user interactions can be designed in ways that include diverse users and mitigate bias. Numerous platforms have come under fire for design choices that enable biased modes of thought and action.
Your users deserve an equitable, inclusive platform. It is in both moral and business interests to create one.
Our Story
Graduate capstone project in designing for DEI
This was created by Rachel Feltes, Megan Peaslee, Meghna Nayak, and Sara Koeck for our graduate capstone project in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. We are all UX Researchers or Designers.
We created this toolkit over the course of our Master's thesis project. Our Capstone sponsor, Carina, asked us to evaluate their platform and see how they might design features differently to support equitable interactions. When looking for a tool to guide us, we couldn't find one. So we created our own.
We conducted extensive research by analyzing literature on DEI, completing a competitive analysis, talking to industry experts, and talking to marginalized users affected by the platform we were evaluating. Our abstracted findings turned into this set of DEI focused prompts.
Many thanks to our sponsor, advisors, classmates and everyone who contributed to this project