UI Design   •   July 29th, 2020

In the spirit of constant self improvement, I’ve challenged myself to be more conscious of cultural and racial diversity. I struggled a bit to identify where/how to get started but soon realized that I could make the biggest impact through my work. In this article, I’ll walk you through a few tips on practicing cultural and racial diversity as a User Interface Designer.

Getting Started

I started my exploration by analyzing past and current projects and created a checklist to guide myself along; 

• Do your personas include people from different cultural and racial backgrounds?
• Do the photographs you choose represent people from different ethnicities?
• Are you including multicultural names in your interface designs? 
• Are you including users from different ethnic backgrounds in your user testing?
• Have you provided aid to non-native language speaking users?

The first thing that stood out to me is that the user names in my interface designs did not represent my entire audience. I thought that would be a good place to start so I created a list of influential leaders from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds, to use in my next design.

In addition, I also realized that many of my illustrations were lacking diversity too. I decided to create a few new characters and in doing so, I realized that having a skin tone chart would be handy (below) when selecting colors. Note, I referenced this skin tone article on Jezebel. Also note, this may be the first (and last) time that I reference Jezebel. Haha!

Next Steps

Now that you have an idea on how to practice racial and cultural diversity as a UX/UI Designer, it’s time to give it a shot. To get started, try analyzing your current work and see if there are some areas to improve. Then, consider making adjustments to your designs based on your findings. To learn more about culture, race, and ethnicity, checkout this article on the Cliffs Notes website. Finally, if you have some additional ideas, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below. Until next time, thanks for reading!

Have an idea I could help with? Let’s chat! While I’m currently on assignment, I’m excited to hear about the next big thing. Email me.