Inclusive Perspectives
Embracing diverse experiences through participatory user research
What does the “experience” behind user experience speak to? When we release a new product, we want whoever is using it to feel included, respected, recognized, and empowered.
We have high expectations for our software, but we also know that any product experience is only as good as the research that supports it. This is why we’re redesigning the way we build products at SAP — and transforming our user research practices to embrace diverse and inclusive perspectives.
Towards inclusive and participatory research
Inclusive research is participatory by nature. This means that we are involving our users to act as co-creators within the design and development process, particularly people from underinvested or excluded groups. Our goal is to conduct research with people, not on people. We want our collaborators to feel heard and seen throughout the process, and ultimately benefit from the end user experience.
We started our journey into inclusive research wanting to understand how the new interfaces or interactions we are creating are experienced by people who self-identify as having low vision, color perception differences, and as being neurodiverse. This proved to be an eye-opening experience and a great way to stress test our design. We are now expanding our recruiting efforts to include people from different cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, technological proficiency levels, and those with disabilities that have yet to be considered within the spectrum of inclusive research.
It’s important to note that inclusive research doesn’t require us to use new methodologies. But it does mean that we need to adapt the methods we already use. We are talking about reframing our approach to research entirely and making user research a collaborative process, where our participants become co-researchers to allow us to see the world as they see it. Inviting them to be our guides as they experience our products in their context.
Expanding our definition of product team
Inclusive design isn’t just the job of the researcher or designer— it is everyone’s responsibility. In fact, a key aspect of creating inclusive experiences is ensuring that the entire team is actively involved in the research process. This means also needing to make the team itself more inclusive by expanding the definition of what we understand as “product team”. We’re not just talking about involving designers, but also pulling in colleagues from product management, user assistance, and engineering into the research process. This way, we can help everyone involved in the design and development process to develop a deeper understanding of underinvested communities and turn them into advocates.
To truly transform the way research is happening across all of SAP, we need to make it easy for people to adapt the way they do research so that inclusive research becomes part of their everyday practice, no matter the job title.
The inclusive user research playbook
The more conversations we have with researchers, the more we discover the many barriers to conducting user research inclusively. Some key challenges researchers face include not being able to easily recruit participants that represent a wide range of human diversity, not knowing where to start or how to adapt research methods to be more inclusive, and the fear of doing it incorrectly or offending the participants by using the “wrong” terminology.
To remove some of these barriers, we recently launched a playbook that serves as a guide and makes it easy for user researchers around the world to make inclusive research part of their everyday practice. The playbook includes an overview of the different inclusion criteria, best practices, guidance around planning inclusive research, inclusive language best practices, resources for screening and recruiting participants, and examples and templates that demonstrate how researchers can adapt their methods to be more inclusive.
As part of our explorations into inclusive research, we recently hosted six deep dive sessions with researchers, designers, and product managers to walk through each section of the playbook in more depth. The questions and feedback that we received from people attending the session have helped us to further enrich the playbook — and inspired us to produce mini guides that give examples and practical tips for each phase of the research process. I’m excited to share more insights into the playbook with you in the coming months.
The way forward for user experience
With our commitment to inclusive research, and ultimately to product inclusion, we hope to create product experiences that all people love to use. We know that to realize this ambition, we must start by collaborating with people who represent a wide range of human diversity throughout the entire product design and development process. When we collaborate with people representing a diverse range of perspectives, we are able to identify blind spots that we may never have considered, and in turn improve the experience for everyone.
Learn more about how inclusive design is influencing our work at SAP:
- Why Inclusive Research is the New Gold Standard
- Beyond Checklists: Growing Our Inclusive Experience Mindset
- Top 5 Trends in User Research & Insights
Ellie Kemery is a Principal Design Research Expert at SAP, where she is advancing a culture of ethical research and inclusive design practices across SAP.
Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprise on www.sap.com/design.
