Summary
Characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, and disability status can have a significant impact on how we experience the world, and how the world experiences us. In UX research, diversity is the first thing to vanish from the recruit when the going gets tough; I will talk about what we miss when that happens, and what researchers can do about it in their own practice. This presentation will demonstrate why a diverse recruit is imperative for a strong user research study, provide examples of what we miss when the recruit is homogeneous, and offering tactics for addressing the issue.
Key Insights
-
•
Researchers often undervalue race, ethnicity, gender, and sex in recruitment compared to other demographic criteria like age and location.
-
•
Homogeneous recruitment pools are usually predominantly white, cisgender, and economically middle class, limiting representativeness.
-
•
Ignoring demographic diversity risks reinforcing dominant cultural perspectives and missing key user needs and experiences.
-
•
Demographics such as race and gender significantly shape lived experiences and thus influence how users interact with products and services.
-
•
Specific and non-flexible demographic quotas improve success in recruiting diverse participants from third-party recruiters.
-
•
Recruiters often treat demographic criteria as optional, requiring pushback and clear communication to prioritize diversity.
-
•
Diverse research teams help identify recruitment barriers and blind spots that homogeneous teams may overlook.
-
•
Recruitment strategies must extend beyond familiar networks and include culturally appropriate outreach to marginalized communities.
-
•
Even when diversity isn’t the study focus, recruiting representative participants can surface critical differences in experience.
-
•
Overrepresenting marginalized groups in samples can compensate for historical overrepresentation of dominant groups and reveal nuanced insights.
Notable Quotes
"If we just decide to ignore demographics we're missing huge swaths of the participant experience and an opportunity to better serve our users."
"Demographic criteria is generally considered less important compared to project-specific or contextual criteria in recruitment."
"The viruses don't discriminate based on race, but our healthcare system does."
"We often center the point of view of dominant demographics and ignore the needs of those we never speak to."
"Recruiters have become conditioned to treat demographic criteria as flexible or optional, and I want to say they shouldn't be."
"If seeing a diverse participant pool is important to you, it's your responsibility to make sure your recruiters use it as a priority."
"We can't say with certainty what needs or pain points we missed when our recruits weren't demographically diverse."
"Age carries with it obvious visible differences and lived experience, while race often involves less visible but equally impactful structures."
"The best we do should be open to improvement and evolution to better serve clients' target audiences."
"When you have findings that serve smaller populations, it often tends to serve the broader population as well."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Jackie Ho talks about how to keep teams accountable and aligned while maintaining their autonomy."
Jemma AhmedTheme 2 Intro
January 8, 2024
"Starting meetings with simple icebreakers or sharing pronouns and locations really breaks the ice and builds relationships."
Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie PerrotResearch is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build
November 17, 2022
"You need someone human deciding what information is good enough and tagged well for AI to surface it."
Kate Towsey Jake BurghardtResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
October 16, 2025
"Flexibility is the network's ability to reconfigure itself and yet retain its goals; scalability means expanding or shrinking size with little disruption; survivability means withstanding attacks to nodes or codes."
Gordon Ross12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
December 8, 2021
"Creating space to name what we’re experiencing without guilt allowed us to unload some of that emotional weight."
Ariba JahanTeam Resiliency Through a Pandemic
January 8, 2024
"A gardening metaphor fits culture better than cold, invisible icebergs because it highlights nurturing and growth."
Stephen AndersonPuzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges
May 27, 2021
"Relationship management is a skill that you can take anywhere, in research Ops or even working at a hotel front desk."
Noel LambCultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
March 21, 2022
"Discomfort and growth cannot coexist. You have to embrace discomfort to push innovation forward."
Mitchell BernsteinOrganizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
September 29, 2021
"The risk of AI is that it will over-rely on past priorities and miss new, emerging signals."
Mark Interrante Harry MaxAI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
July 11, 2024