Rosenverse
What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research

Gold
Friday, March 12, 2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Share the love for this talk
What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research
Speakers: Megan Campos
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 2 Intro
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Kit Unger
Theme 2: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jennifer Kong
Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Christopher Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Jayne Engle
Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
2022 • Civic Design Community
Sharon Bautista
Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Anna Avrekh
User Research, Design, and Product - A Love Story
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Abbey Smalley
Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Andrea Gallagher
The Problem Space
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Christian Crumlish
From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Kevin Bethune
Gatekeepers and Servant Leadership
2020 • DesignOps Community
Mila Kuznetsova
How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jen Cardello
Learning Velocity—The Insights Speedometer
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Jeff Sussna
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Scenes and Radically Adaptive Experiences
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Trisha Causley
[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold

More Videos

Elana Chapman

"Accessibility audits check the box for compliance; usability testing ensures a good user experience."

Elana Chapman Li Wen Huang Divyen Sanganee Annabel Weiner

Getting started with accessibility research

February 20, 2025

Vincent Brathwaite

"We cannot ignore the ethical implications that come with the power of AI."

Vincent Brathwaite

Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams

October 22, 2020

Chris Hodowanec

"If we can do many of these UX roles, we’re unicorns, but it still takes the same amount of time."

Chris Hodowanec

Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner

November 16, 2022

Bria Alexander

"There’s no need to take any notes, because we have sketch notes, session notes, recordings available on Rosenfeld Media website."

Bria Alexander Louis Rosenfeld

Opening Remarks Day 2

March 26, 2024

Adam Cutler

"Behavior over time is your culture; it’s how you choose to behave and incentivize others to behave."

Adam Cutler

People + Places + Practices = Outcomes

June 8, 2016

Sabrina Mach

"Bringing design on an equal eye level with technology and with business is the starting point."

Sabrina Mach Nina Wainwright

How to Design Your Design Operating Model

September 29, 2021

Jilanna Wilson

"Human connection is a basic need that doesn’t get paused just because someone works remotely."

Jilanna Wilson

Distributed Design Operations Management

October 23, 2019

Jacqui Frey

"Sometimes you have all the best ideas, but it’s not the right time, and that’s OK."

Jacqui Frey Dan Willis

Panel Discussion: Integrating DesignOps

November 7, 2018

Dean Broadley

"The end of history illusion is that we think we're done evolving, but we vastly underestimate future change."

Dean Broadley

Not Black Enough to be White

January 8, 2024