Diversity in Design Leads to Great User Experiences

A useful habit of mine is to consider the ways our world is getting better. That habit counters the negative news cycle and reveals what opportunities exist to make further improvements in the lives of everyone.

One thing that convinces me the world is on the right track is the current focus on diversity and inclusion in our workplaces. Diversity and inclusion initiatives have real depth now. They are not about ticking boxes, rather they are core business strategy for organizations.

Diversity and inclusion make perfect sense for a tech company. Diversity leads to equitable employee experiences and it drives innovation. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows "the relationship between diversity and innovation is positive and statistically significant."

At Lenovo, our vision is to innovate and deliver smarter technology for all, so that more people can unlock their potential. The “more people” part of that statement is crucial. The concepting and testing process of our designs must be inclusive and acknowledge a diverse population of users.

A Real-Life Example of Diversity in Design

I sat down to talk about including diversity in the design and testing process with Chris Osborne and Matt Davis, my User Experience (UX) colleagues at Lenovo. I was delighted with how deep we went on the subject!

Dilip Bhatia: Hi Chris and Matt, thanks for your time. How would you describe what you both do at Lenovo?

Chris Osborne: I have the privilege of leading the UX Design team here at Lenovo. We are engaged in design projects across all of Lenovo’s products in the Intelligent Devices Group – from PCs to smart devices. The team is global and located in China, Japan, and the United States.

Matt Davis: I refer to myself as a UX Design Engineer. I like that title because it reflects the many different areas I work in. I manage parts of the overall UX including hardware and software elements, and I integrate human factors principles to the engineering and design of our products.

Chris Osborne: The simplest way to summarize our complex responsibilities is: Our mission is to improve the UX for all our users.

Matt Davis: Precisely. UX is a rewarding field to work in because we’re often interacting with people to understand their needs and desires to help us better define and design exciting and practical products.

Dilip Bhatia: Let’s explore how diversity enriched the design and user testing for a new device we created for enterprise customers – the Lenovo ThinkReality A6, which is part of a larger ThinkReality solution. Chris and Matt, could you briefly explain what this is?

Chris Osborne: The ThinkReality A6 is a head-mounted Augmented Reality (AR) headset a user wears to help them perform complex tasks. For example, an aerospace engineer could be examining the components of an actual airframe while the ThinkReality A6 AR headset display overlays real-time information about the parts they are working with.

Matt Davis: The ThinkReality is really a complete platform – hardware and software – for enterprises to build applications to help their workers in multiple environments. It can be used to streamline training or enhance in the field experiences. To add to Chris’s example, because augmented reality is an additive experience due to the nature of its see-through design, a technician can have a clear view of their workspace and receive hands-free non-intrusive digital assistance from the platform, where they might have referenced physical materials before. Imagine performing your work while seeing “how-to” infographics or hearing audio instructions on what to do next.

Dilip Bhatia: Because we are essentially talking about a device people wear, how did you factor diversity into the design and testing of the ThinkReality A6 AR headset?

Chris Osborne: While we had a vision of what the ThinkReality A6 AR headset would look like and how it functioned, it was the testing phase that encouraged us to re-evaluate our assumptions. We aimed to avoid bias in our design by introducing a diverse pool of users as test candidates. By doing so, we soon discovered things we needed to address.

Dilip Bhatia: Such as?

Matt Davis: A diverse pool of users meant the experience of wearing a head-mounted display was different for each test candidate. There is great variability around the nose, ears, forehead, temples, and overall arch of people’s heads. Therefore, we did not want to bias towards one demographic and exclude others.

Chris Osborne: I credit Matt for identifying early on that one of the biggest variables was that people have different hairstyles. Naturally, the experience of a user with a ponytail will differ from a user with little to no hair.

Matt Davis: The development of the ThinkReality A6 AR headset inspired us to widen the scope of what we thought of as diverse test groups. We intentionally selected participants that varied by gender, ethnicity and height but we also added hair type and prescription lenses. It is difficult to elect users based on hair type but with persistence we were able to achieve this.

Chris Osborne: Everything was in service of the question: Is this device functional and comfortable for a diverse set of users?

Dilip Bhatia: What I like about that question and your insight about hair types is it challenges our own biases when it comes to thinking about the modern workforce. The ThinkReality A6 is an enterprise level tool aimed at professionals who themselves are diverse. Successful diversity and inclusion initiatives across the globe increase the diversity of talent, so technology must keep pace with and be empathetic to the unique requirements of the modern workplace.

Chris Osborne: Yes. I absolutely agree, as we look at our own business, our partners, and our customers, we see a lot of diversity and we naturally need to take this into account as we design our products.

Dilip Bhatia: When we think of diversity, tangible characteristics such as ethnicity, gender and now hair type come to mind. To ensure we’ve done our due diligence in testing with a varied population, are there intangible characteristics we need to account for?

Matt Davis: The beauty and challenge of UX design is accounting for the often-large variability in workspaces and range of existing tools and methods people operate with daily. With the ThinkReality A6 AR headset, because of its commercial focus, we are designing a device that could be used in a diverse range of environments.

Chris Osborne: Yes, the experience of someone wearing a headset in a warehouse who’s sorting products over the course of a single day is quite different to a field worker who has to climb a 300 foot tall pole to do maintenance and be able to connect with a remote expert.

Matt Davis: The expectation in the behavior of how the device is handled throughout the course of the day varies. And so, I would include that in my definition of diversity. Diverse experiences for diverse people.

Chris Osborne: All these variables – the tangible and the intangible – need to be factored into the finished product to reach a diverse range of the population. A lot goes into achieving a successful design. There is nuance and ambiguity around material design. Do we decide on a more rigid body, that may be heavier, but has a potential to fit a wider variety of heads, or do we go with maybe, an elastic strap, or an overhead strap that will help to mitigate discomfort, and stretch to various hairstyles?

Matt Davis: Working on the development of the ThinkReality A6 AR headset impressed upon me how important it is for us as designers and engineers to do our due diligence to ensure we are testing with a varied population. We have a responsibility to make our products and solutions as inclusive as possible, so our processes must reflect that.

People Are Diverse and So Are Their Experiences

Dilip Bhatia: I would like to explore the idea of diversity of experience. You both touched on this when describing the different use cases and work environments of the ThinkReality A6 AR headset. How important is the life experiences each of us bring to our interactions with technologies?

Matt Davis: I believe individual life experiences broaden our understanding of what diversity is. What is a user’s history with technology? Do they prefer voice interactions to more tactile experiences? These questions are especially important for a device like ThinkReality, which is a combination of hardware and software.

Chris Osborne: I’m glad you asked that question. As humans we tend to categorize other people based on their appearance as an easy mental shortcut. If we increase the selection of people in user testing based on obvious markers of diversity, we could unintentionally exclude the not so obvious. Those are the life experiences Matt described. You only discover people’s previous experience with technology through extensive research and what we have found is that including as many different users in the design process as possible is the best way to eliminate bias.

Matt Davis: Diversity of thought and experience benefits our product teams too. I believe the different experiences we have growing up and how we navigate through life helps us bring diverse points of view to our work as designers and engineers. People often ask me, “Matt where do you get your ideas from?” The truth is, while I have professional qualifications, it’s probably the time I spent as a child pulling things out of the kitchen drawers and seeing what I could make on the kitchen floor or observing a thrill ride at a theme park and wondering how it worked is what prepared me for my role. I’m fascinated with the details in design, capturing what makes an experience or product unique, and leveraging these insights to help push the envelope of our solutions. My diverse set of experiences influenced the way I think about and interact with technology.

Chris Osborne: That’s a great point of view, Matt. We all have different experiences that contribute to the balanced diversity of our team. Fun fact – before I joined Lenovo, I worked for Honda for 20 years. My focus was human factors as they related to cars, motorcycles, and power equipment. My final project there was in aerospace. I contributed to the design of the cockpit for the HondaJet.

Dilip Bhatia: Those are great stories, Chris and Matt. Is there anything else that we might unintentionally exclude when considering diversity in design?

Chris Osborne: I think it is important to understand that a lot of historical data companies use to design products might be out of date because they do not reflect diversity. A perfect, or should I say, not so perfect example is a popular payment solution a tech company designed. The credit limit offered to male applicants of the payment solution was much higher than female applicants. Gender bias had entered the development of the product because of reliance on outdated data to program the algorithm that made decisions.

Matt Davis: That example Chris gave shows how important it is to discover hidden biases. If we hand over decision making to algorithms, we must eliminate bias and false assumptions from the data those algorithms are trained on. I guess you could say that we need diversity of data.

Making Diversity and Inclusivity Part of Our Mission

Dilip Bhatia: A challenge to ensuring our designs are inclusive is making a business case for our decisions. If we want to make a product accessible and useful to a small group of users, what case can we make when an immediate return on investment may not be obvious?

Chris Osborne: That is an excellent question, but it is one that requires a longer time horizon to answer. I think we are fortunate at Lenovo to have leaders who are looking at the long-term benefits not only to the brand but society in general.

Dilip Bhatia: Right. By definition, our mission of delivering smarter technology so that more people can unlock their potential must encompass diversity and inclusion.

Chris Osborne: Yes, balancing diversity and inclusion with the business case is certainly easier when there is a long-term mission that is clearly defined. My confidence remains high because diversity and inclusion does not sit in a silo within Lenovo. Our Chief Diversity Officer, Yolanda Lee Conyers, has been working closely with our team to ensure that diversity and inclusion factors into our innovations.

Dilip Bhatia: Yes, this demonstrates we are taking diversity and inclusion seriously and infusing it into Lenovo’s culture. We’ve already made great strides in representation. As of now, women represent 36.2% of Lenovo’s global workforce and we’re working towards a global goal of achieving 20% female executive representation by 2020. Also, employees from traditionally under-represented racial and ethnic groups represent 32.9% of Lenovo’s U.S. workforce. We have metrics in place for representation and we can develop metrics for our products too to see how new technology tracks from a diversity and inclusion perspective.

Benefits of Diversity and Inclusivity in Design

Matt Davis: A positive flow on effect of diversity in hiring people and designing products is positive brand sentiment. That is not a vanity metric if people choose to support Lenovo as employees or customers because they agree with our values.

Dilip Bhatia: That’s a great point Matt. We live in an age where talented people can take their pick of where they want to work. If they see a company that reflects their own values, they are more likely to want to work there and contribute to the success of the organization. You could say that valuing diversity and inclusion creates a virtuous cycle.

Chris Osborne: We also want to include individuals who are differently abled. Our society is poorer if we exclude them. One of my favorite examples of technology making a difference to someone who could have been excluded is from Thorsten Stremlau, Lenovo’s Global Commercial CTO for the Intelligent Devices Group. One of the earliest project teams Thorsten was part of helped Stephen Hawking with his I.T. requirements. They helped with the setup and the environment for the wheelchair and laptop that Stephen Hawking had in place to help with mobility and communication.

Matt Davis: That’s cool. We could explore new technology applications if we design for people who struggle with disorders too. For example, can our devices help people with light sensitivity or even PTSD? There are many opportunities to make technology useful for more people. They benefit and we benefit from their contribution to society when we help enable them.

Dilip Bhatia: I think inclusive technology is a reflection of empathy on the part of designers and engineers. I like to think that over time we are becoming more empathetic as an industry, but we can’t rest on our laurels.

Matt Davis: Empathy is a great way to summarize diversity and inclusion in design.

Some Concluding Words About Diversity in Design

Dilip Bhatia: The ThinkReality A6 AR headset is proof that designing for a diverse set of people has a positive impact on the user. It’s great what the team has done with it and it shows we’re serious about making diversity and inclusion part of our design and engineering processes at Lenovo. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Chris Osborne: I feel the best way for people in the tech industry to think about diversity and inclusion as part of the design process is to consider the type of experiences we want our users to have. Imagine a beautifully designed ten story atrium inside the entrance of a hotel. To see it, you need to enter the hotel through the front, climb a set of stairs and look up. It’s a wonderful experience – you see the tops of trees bathed in sunlight and the rooms beyond. Your response is likely, “Wow, this hotel is magnificent. I’m glad I’m staying here. I don’t care that it costs $500 a night, it’s beautiful.” Now, as designers, if we place a wheelchair ramp at the side of the building, differently abled people can still access the lobby, but they bypass the atrium and we have excluded them from the full experience. It’s better to have the ramp at the front. Now the person in the wheelchair can go up the ramp and have the same ‘aha’ moment. Also, people with luggage no longer have to drag it up the set of stairs. By making the design inclusive for the person in the wheelchair, we made it better for almost every person visiting the hotel. The process is not about only catering to a small group of people, it’s about making it better for everybody.

Dilip Bhatia: That’s a beautiful place to finish on. Thank you, Chris and Matt for sharing your insights today.

About the Author

Dilip Bhatia is Lenovo’s Vice President of Global Marketing, User & Customer Experience, PC & Smart Devices. As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Officer, Dilip drives the company to achieve its goal of being the leader in the PC, smart device, data center and mobility space. Start a conversation with him here or on Twitter.