97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 19. See Beyond the “Average” User

Hillary Carey

As designers, leveraging standpoint theory can help us value, promote, and integrate the perspectives of diverse people and contexts. It says that people who navigate systems from the margins have a better understanding of them. They see the boundaries and are more aware of how things work because they bump up against the edges. Overlapping and compounding experiences of race, class, gender, nationality, religion, ability, and sexuality shape people’s life experiences. Therefore, drawing on other perspectives helps to challenge what we otherwise take for granted.

Think about the systems you design. Who moves through them with the fewest barriers? Describe that person. Are they typically white, affluent, able-bodied, cisgender, and English-named? Does your system break when someone outside those norms tries to navigate it? In their book Design Justice (MIT Press), MIT professor Sasha Costanza-Chock describes these fictional personas as “unmarked users.” Costanza-Chock describes the painful experience of being a transgender person navigating physical and digital systems that don’t acknowledge their body. TSA screening systems and data systems that pull from historical records that misgender them force security agents to indicate “male” or “female” based on an initial glance. This inflexible interface forces the cognitive load ...