In our 20 years of designing mission-aligned products, we’ve released solutions that continue to impact the lives of thousands of people today. Like many other design and technology companies, we based much of our creative process in what is known as human-centered design.
According to Stanford d.school, human-centered design (HCD) is “a process, mindset, and approach to identify meaningful challenges and creatively solve complex problems.” In order to do that, we conduct research with real people (or users, as we refer to them), ideate design solutions, and validate those ideas through testing and feedback.
For a long time, this approach worked, and felt comfortable. We believed that as long as we talked to users and catered our design to their needs, we were doing right.
The truth is, it’s impossible to talk to all users. It’s impossible to design for every need. Unfortunately, this means we left some users and needs behind in our process. By choosing who was involved and who was not, we were exercising the power to decide whose voice was being heard and whose wasn’t. And we weren’t doing it intentionally.
Looking back, it seemed adopting human-centered design without being thoughtful wasn’t serving our mission to create impactful solutions in an inclusive and equitable way.
Our team recognized we needed to rethink our design process. We paused, questioned our status quo, and educated ourselves. We learned from many trailblazers in the design industry (links below), and we went back to the drawing board to really map out what our specific needs were and how we might redesign our processes to better serve them.
In that journey, we learned that designing for social impact, for the causes we design for and the solutions we envision, requires a different, more thoughtful approach. We realized there were a couple of reasons for that:
The consequences of failure are more serious
When we design for social impact, we create products that people use in critical moments of their lives, like finding affordable housing or applying for government benefits.
When for profit companies create products that are hard to use, it mostly hurts their profits. For us, if users can’t use what we design, we might be defying them access to life-altering resources such as housing or mental health support. We have a big responsibility with our users. The impact of the solutions we create calls for a more careful and thoughtful design process.
We design for underrepresented populations
Because we design for social impact, we need to design for everyone. This might include people who may be mono-lingual, have low-literacy, be a senior citizen, have limited internet access or live with a range of disabilities.
While we strive to have a very diverse team of designers (and we do!), our team doesn’t have the diversity of experience that our users have. We might not have a designer that has limited internet access or that is color-blind. If we are designing a solution for a problem to which we don’t have lived experience with, we risk coming up with a solution that doesn’t fully solve it. If we don’t have the lived experience, we need a process that includes people who do.
There are different cognitive and emotional states to consider
When we design for folks who are applying for affordable housing, who are seeking government benefits, or who are reentering society from previously being incarcerated, for example, we are designing for people experiencing strong emotions. They might be feeling fearful about the future, stressed out about the present, or experiencing trauma from the past.
All these stressors add to their cognitive load. We know from scientific research (Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) that cognition and decision-making processes are heavily impacted by emotional states. UX best practices are great, they lead to experiences that are simple, intuitive, and user-friendly. But that's not enough for this audience – they need experiences that also are supportive, empathetic, guiding, and compassionate.
The design team at Exygy started imagining a design process that uses human-centered design as a foundation, but borrows elements and activities from other design processes, such as Equity-centered Design, Inclusive Design, and Trauma-informed Design to better serve the needs of the populations we design for.
Thoughtful Design has 4 new principles:
CROP Organization:
In Phase 1 of CROP’s partnership with Exygy, we engineered a flexible digital infrastructure for the next evolution of Ready 4 Life, a reentry program designed to equip justice-involved individuals with tools for flourishing in their communities.
Bloom Housing:
To understand the needs of all stakeholders in each affordable housing ecosystem, Exygy supports local jurisdiction staff to develop a Steering Committee to convene stakeholders throughout the region to inform the web portal and advise the rollout of the system’s features.
City of Oakland:
The Exygy Design Team conducted extensive accessibility research and audits of the Oakland website. We also partnered with The Center for Accessible Technology and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired as they are subject matter experts.
These principles and activities, borrowed from movements like Equity-centered Design, Participatory Design, and Trauma-Informed Design, allow us to take Human-centered design to the next level and create experiences that are truly equitable, accessible, and inclusive. That is the utmost importance when it comes to designing for social impact, where leaving someone behind might mean leaving them without services that could be a deciding factor for the success of their lives.
We are still in the beginning of our journey of incorporating these principles into our processes. We still have a lot to learn and to experiment with. If you have experience exploring equitable design research processes and systems in your own work, we would love to connect and share learnings, knowledge, and failures. Our lines are open.
Interested in talking more about Thoughtful Design with the Exygy team?
Creative Reaction Lab
Creative Reaction Lab is a youth-led, community-centered movement of a new type of Civic Leader: Redesigners for Justice.
Design Justice
A free, online introductory course by Equity Meets Design.
EquityXDesign
A free, online introductory course by Equity Meets Design.
Equity Design Collaborative
The Equity Design Collaborative was formed in 2017 by organizations and individuals from across the U.S. practicing Equity Design.
Inclusive Design Framework
A set of toolkits and resources about incluse design created by Microsoft
Microsoft Inclusive Design Principles
A free, online introductory course by Equity Meets Design.
Equity-Centered Design Framework
Stanford d.school out together a framework that captures the design thinking process re-imagined to promote equity.
Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide
A Method for Co-Creating Equitable Outcomes.
