Rosenverse

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."

Tricia Wang
The most popular design thinking strategy is BS
2022 • Enterprise Community
Hana Nagel
Turning Research Ripples into Waves
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Kaaren Hanson
Stop Talking, Start Doing
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Rachel Radway
The Many Paths Of Design Operations
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 1: The new product journey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dan Donald
Design Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
2023 • DesignOps Community
Sha Hwang
The First Fifty Years of Civic Design
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Andrea Gallagher
The Problem Space
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Jen Cardello
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Brad Orego
Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
William Newton
How to Lead With Data, and Without Data
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Johanna Kollmann
Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Scaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sean McKay
Coexisting with non-researchers: Practical strategies for a democratized research future
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Dem Gerolemou
Climate technology fundamentals
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Sean Fitzell
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold

More Videos

Yoel Sumitro

"Reflection in action involves noticing surprise, questioning assumptions, experimenting, and reflecting on the move."

Yoel Sumitro

Actions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers

March 9, 2022

Zariah Cameron

"If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it."

Zariah Cameron

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

September 23, 2024

Doug Powell

"Forrester found that design thinking teams move twice as fast from idea to market because they’re closer to their users."

Doug Powell

DesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change

September 11, 2025

Darian Davis

"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it's hard not to treat that individual as a problem."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Mike Oren

"The essence of strategy isn’t painting a grand vision of the future, it's deciding what not to do."

Mike Oren

Why Pharmaceutical's Research Model Should Replace Design Thinking

March 28, 2023

Jacqui Frey

"Scale is social work because it’s about creating relationships and reducing friction."

Jacqui Frey

Scale is Social Work

March 19, 2020

Kim Holt

"Clear and consistent communication really keeps design leadership accountable and promotes transparency via knowledge sharing."

Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee Xiong

A Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps

September 8, 2022

Samuel Proulx

"You own the design system, which gives you the unique ability to integrate that accessibility thinking into all of your components."

Samuel Proulx

From Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins

September 10, 2025

Laine Riley Prokay

"We wanted to be aware of extraversion, so words like energy were changed to initiative to not favor personality types."

Laine Riley Prokay

How DesignOps can Drive Inclusive Career Ladders for All

September 30, 2021