Hiring managers: How to make your UX team truly inclusive in 2021.
By: Christina Lall
Tags: Hiring, Business, UX, Diversity In Tech, Accessibility

Benefits of inclusive hiring for both your team and business.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Imagine for a moment, that you spend your life constantly adapting everything from the way you brush your teeth to the way you socialize, work, and play. It takes a lot of time, energy, and planning to accomplish tasks that other people can do without a second thought. Having a disability makes you approach problems differently. It makes you think more creatively. It amplifies your other senses and skills to compensate for the ones that are not the same as your colleagues. You’re always thinking with accessibility in mind because you depend on accessibility to survive.

This is just the tip of a massive iceberg of skills disabled designers possess. Skills that you can’t learn from a 1-hour webinar — because they’re rooted in life experience.

Photo by Marcus Aurelius from Pexels

Dear Leadership: You have the power to infuse accessibility into your design team with your next new hire.

Inclusive hiring can boost your team when it is part of a greater strategy to make accessibility a priority in your design and development practices. Without a seat at the table, and space to be heard, there is no real impact for disabled UX designers. Listening to people who are disabled is a shift towards equity and a truer reflection of the world around us. Society is comprised of many different races and orientations —varying levels of ability intersect these underrepresented groups. Representation absolutely matters, especially in tech.

“You cannot possibly be reaching the needs of your consumers when the makeup of your company is not reflective of the community you serve.” — Kimberly Bryant, Founder and CEO of Black Girls Code

Silence can be very loud when it comes to designing for disability.

I mentioned in a different post that you can draw a straight line from the lack of diversity and inclusiveness in some teams to the lack of empathy and accessibility in the designs they create. When you aren’t considering the needs of people that are different from you, the result is UX design that is exclusionary. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t believe that every company that has issues with accessibility does so willfully — however, when a lack of accessibility is brought to your attention there comes a point where you either decide to do something about it or continue with exclusion habits. Exclusion habits which Kat Holmes mentions in her book Mismatch — are perhaps the darkest dark pattern in UX. Exclusion habits enable whole teams to avoid accessibility responsibility by saying “Well I didn’t make the rules, and I can’t change them. This is just how things are done here.”

“Exclusion habits stem from a belief that we can’t change aspects of society that were originally set into motion by someone other than ourselves.” — Kat Holmes, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design

Teams can put a stop to exclusion habits by taking a real look at their teams and making conscious hiring decisions towards equity and inclusion. It’s pretty hard to ignore the needs of a group when someone from that group is sitting in the room and participating in the ideation process.

Exclusion habits and a lack of progress related to inclusiveness harm a company’s credibility and shrinks their market reach considerably. People who are disabled are not alone, they are surrounded by friends and family who care about whether or not companies, in turn, care about their loved ones. Their brand loyalty shows where they spend their hard-earned money.

There are 61 million adults in the US with disabilities, and according to the American Institutes for Research, that is a nearly 500 billion dollar market that you’re leaving on the table by not making your product accessible.

Apathy and dark patterns result in a bait-and-switch experience.

A team may appear to create UX design “for everyone”, but apathy and dark patterns around accessibility trick users who expect equity and present them with a mismatched experience compared to non-disabled people. People who are disabled feel that exclusion strongly when products, sites, and services block them from taking part in life.

As UX designers (not just visual designers) it’s our job to uncover the user experience and learn from that. Accessibility is a facet of the user experience that we cannot ignore. We can create design that makes a difference by including people who really live these experiences in our teams and our UX design practices. We have the opportunity to stand out as companies that genuinely connect with our employees and customers by showing that we care about their needs through our behavior, not just our words.

Edit: I misquoted the business market as $500 million, it is actually nearly a $500 billion market. This has been updated. (11/23/20-CL)