Intersectionality in UX Design and HCI Research and Curriculum Development: Bringing Race and Ethnicity into Focus

Reating personas in UX Design (UXD), the process used by designers to create purposeful products and significant experiences for users, becomes increasingly complicated when UX Designers creating inclusive personas must take greater responsibility for designing evolved and iterated products tailored to the circumstances and environments of their respective audiences; this can be achieved using an intersectional framework to capture the complexity of user identities to better inform the persona creation process. Intersectionality, defined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, involves Understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood in conventional ways of thinking [3]. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the interdisciplinary field that studies the dynamics of communications between humans, there is lack of attention to race and ethnicity in the current body of research. According to Schlesinger et al., previous “research on ethnicity and race lags behind research on gender and socio-economic class” [3] which indicates that researchers in the field of UX Design must rethink their approach to applying an intersectional lens to the study of the persona creation process to fill this gap in the literature. Through a literature review of the identity of the user in HCI, this study examines how the emerging literature sees, or fails to see, the user and the intersectionality of their identity when it comes to race and ethnicity. Schlesinger et al.’s research, whose goal is to understand how the user is represented in the literature using intersectionality as a framework, did not provide more insight than previous research; they explain that “Manuscripts about race and ethnicity accounted for a small number of publications in the corpus” [3]. It became clear that gender is instead overwhelmingly centered as the focal aspect of user identity in UX Design research [4]. To address these issues for the future generation of designers, this study asked how the emerging literature on race and ethnicity in UXD and HCI might be applied to educate the future generation of UX designers on the common design errors found in technology in relation to the race and ethnicity of the user. This work led to the development of a syllabus that will lead future designers to develop more inclusive personas by gaining greater insights of intersectional identity representation. Great care has been taken to examine the function of gender when it comes to the HCI curriculum [5] with race and ethnicity lagging. With the use of the literature, this study addresses this issue and provides a pathway for UXD faculty to implement a series of three modules which educates UX designers and the HCI community on the importance of intersectionality when representing the user.