At Splash, I’m part of a group of wonderful folks who put accessibility front of mind — we even have a cool slack channel called #accessibility-squad. We meet monthly to talk about accessibility in tech, and to identify steps we can take to make our product more accessible and inclusive.
Recently, myself and a fellow design peer were chatting about how we can get ahead of these challenges, instead of addressing them as they arise. This brought us to create a list of questions we can ask ourselves as we’re designing with the intent of eliminating our biases.
Here’s what we came up with:
Who is represented visually?
Who is represented contextually?
Who is left out?
Who is most directly affected by this design?
Who makes decisions about this design?
Who deserves recognition for this?
What is represented visually?
What is represented contextually?
What is left out?
What potential for identification is there in this design?
What is another perspective for this design?
What is an alternative?
What are areas for improvement?
What research could back up this design decision?
Where have we seen similar concepts?
Where in the world would this design be deemed problematic?
When is this unacceptable?
When would this cause a problem?
When has something like this design played a role in history?
When can we expect this to change?
Why does this work?
Why does this not work?
Why would this design influence a person?
Why should people know about this?
Why is there a need for this now?
How does this design relate to current socio-political events?
How will we know when this design is successful?
How can the research involved in this design be verified?
How does this benefit others?
How might this harm others?
How can we make this better, given all of the above?
Okay, I know what you’re thinking — that’s a ton of questions! And you’re absolutely right. In order to eliminate our biases, we as designers need to think critically; and critical thinking requires a level of thoroughness that is inherent in the world of design thinking.
Now, depending on what you’re creating — whether it’s a UI iteration, an illustration, a design system component — you don’t need to answer all of these questions. This list is meant to be a resource that you pick and pull from in order to properly service your project.
How do these questions actually put my biases in check?
Let’s use a real world example of some of these questions put to the test.
At Splash, I wrote an article about how to throw accessible events, and in that article I talked about some questions an event planner can include in their RSVP form.
After writing that article, I started thinking about the Splash forms tech and how we don’t really set up our hosts for success in the realms of accessibility and inclusion. Unless someone happened to have read my blog post, or unless they themselves were an accessibility advocate, they wouldn’t have an opportunity to consider adding questions around accessibility and inclusion for their event. This thinking all fell under question 30 - How might this harm others?
After I answered one question, I noticed a domino effect as other questions naturally began to follow. I looked at what we were designing for our forms tech and asked myself the following from the list above
Who is left out?
What is represented visually?
What is represented contextually?
What is left out?
What is another perspective for this design?
What is an alternative?
What are areas for improvement?
Where in the world would this design be deemed problematic?
When is this unacceptable?
When would this cause a problem?
Answering all of these questions eventually led myself and others to this design for what Splash calls our question bank tech — which is simply a modal that displays banks of relevant, recommended questions for a host to add to their form:
Once we landed here, we went back to my list and applied the following questions:
Why would this design influence a person?
Why should people know about this?
Why is there a need for this now?
How does this benefit others?
How might this harm others?
These questions and their answers not only helped reduce some bias, but also helped me as a designer to tell a story of about my decisions. By using the list above not only are we enabled to produce better, more scalable designs, but we’re also able to ground ourselves and become advocates for our choices.
💙 Special thanks to Alex Zahradnik, the designer at Splash who played a big role in coming up with these questions! Check out his work here.