Universal Principles of UX

25

Diverse teams create better solutions.

Design is run by white men. To be exact, 76 percent of people who design for the web are white, and 58 percent of them are men. That obviously is not representative of our society and leads to bias issues.

When Apple’s voice assistant Siri was first introduced in 2011, I remember thinking how sexist it was to make an obedient, submissive, compliant, personal assistant female. But with only 22 percent of jobs in artificial intelligence being held by women, I imagine that there probably weren’t enough female voices in the room to offer an alternative perspective.

Alternative perspectives are an advantage. According to research by social scientists Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, teams with differences in demographics, ...