97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 20. Work Together to Create Inclusive Products

Al Lopez

Our goal as user experience professionals is to create products that resonate with our audience of users. We never want to create a product that leaves a user feeling as if the product was not built for them. To create products that resonate with our audience of focus, we must have diversity of thought. Diversity of thought comes only from diverse teams. Part of our responsibility as UX professionals is to be advocates for diversity. It is the ethical thing to do. If ethics aren’t reason enough, think about how global and connected our world has become. To keep up with today’s global society, UX professionals and companies must push for diverse teams.

When people talk about diversity, what does that actually mean? Many people consider gender and ethnicity when thinking about diversity. But there are also age, religion, culture, sexual orientation, ability, and lived experience, just to name a few more categories. Inclusive teams contain people from various backgrounds, and teams with diverse backgrounds create more diverse solutions.

There are several ways UX professionals can include more diversity in our day-to-day practices. One way we can increase diversity is just by including actual diverse people in our studies and designs. Why can’t a fictional persona be named Khadijah? If you are testing usability of a site, ...