By Janus Boye
Christina Scriven is a Toronto-based UX researcher. During the summer of 2023, she did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices.
Digital product equity is at the intersection of futures thinking, inclusive design and product accessibility.
In a recent members’ call, Toronto-based UX researcher Christina Scriven from our design leadership community looked at how the tech industry leaders are approaching the concept, and offered ideas about how you could bring product equity practices into your organisation.
Christina most recently worked as Customer Segments Manager at Scotiabank reporting into the Head of Accessibility and Digital Product Equity.
During the summer of 2023, Christina did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices to both consolidate key themes and to better inform customer experience leaders on industry approaches and in our call she shared her findings.
Let’s start with defining the practice.
What is digital product equity?
Christina explained that digital product equity is about building belonging through products by including marginalised voices and ensuring equal access to digital products without bias or limitations.
Based on her industry scan, she highlighted the definitions from these three tech giants:
Adobe: “Product equity is the state in which every person, regardless of human difference, can access and harness the full power of our digital products, without bias, harm, or limitation.”
Google: “Product inclusion and equity is the ongoing work of building belonging through our products, by centering the most marginalized voices at every phase of product creation.”
Salesforce: “One of the ways we build better, more usable products is through inclusive design. We aspire to drive innovation by including individuals with disabilities throughout the development process, highlighting voices that are often excluded in traditional design processes."
Christina also mentioned the concept of internet poverty. Internet poverty encompasses three critical pillars: affordability, quantity, and quality and by one definition a person is considered internet poor if he/she cannot afford a minimum quantity (1 GB) and quality (10 Mbps download speed) of internet services without spending more than 10 percent of his or her disposable income on these services. For context, 1GB of data is equivalent to 2 hours of SD video-streaming or 30 min of HD video-streaming over an entire month. Keep in mind, that in rural areas, internet services can still be quite slow, which also has a real impact.
On the point of definitions, Christina mentioned that product inclusion and product equity are often used synonymously. This can be illustrated by looking at how the corporate team names are chosen. Here’s just a few examples:
Adobe: Product Equity
Airbnb: Platform Equity
Alphabet: Equity & Inclusion Strategy
Apple: Inclusive Product Design
Google: Product Inclusion & Equity
Instagram: Equity Team
Meta: Product, Equity; Design, Equity
Microsoft: Inclusive Design
PayPal: Product Inclusion
Salesforce: Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Uber: Product Equity
Like the famous NNGroup UX maturity model, Christina mentioned one could make something similar for digital product equity. Efforts towards product inclusion and equity take time and the creation of a maturity model would assist in creating a roadmap towards greater product equity.
Understanding what it is, let’s move onto why doing the extra work is the right thing to do.
Why product equity and inclusion matters
Christina opened her explanation by weaving in this quote from Adobe:
“Building equitable products isn’t simply about altruism—albeit there are endless socioeconomic reasons as to why it’s important—it also drives innovation by solving unique people centric problems, deepens market penetration, and builds brand trust by focusing on previously ignored communities”
According to Christina, there’s three key reasons why product equity and inclusion matters, which she summarises as:
strategic growth opportunities by increasing market share
creating an enhanced sense of customer belonging
alignment with your corporate values
It’s important to point out that digital product equity goes beyond accessibility standards to consider the physical, emotional, and tactical needs of your customer. To quote from what Microsoft has to say about inclusive design:
“We design for all human experiences and needs. So, we strive to gather, listen to, and include as many perspectives as possible, with the goal of discovering how to bring out the best in each other, and everyone who uses what we create.”
A common approach to digital product equity
Going through her research, Christina identified three parts of a common approach taken by everyone she studied:
1) Adopting a multidimensional view of the user. Blending targeted universalism and intersectionality, key industry leaders have broadened the scope of their typical customer base. As an example, Google resources offered a thirteen dimension view of potential users. Expanding beyond typical demographic and segmentation strategies to attempt to add layers that are often unseen.
Google offers a thirteen dimension view of potential users. See their Guide to Product Inclusion and Equity
The question to ask here is: How might we stretch our understanding of our current users?
2) Enhancing capabilities through principles and frameworks. Industry leaders developed guidelines, frameworks and resources to amplify the practice and guided organizational strategy to enhance product inclusion efforts. Key inflection points along the product design lifecycle.
Google researchers identified and highlighted four as the most impactful: ideation, UX, user testing and marketing.
The question to ask here is: How might we infuse inclusion into our product lifecycle?
3) Connecting with diversity through community partnerships. Co-creation starts with who is involved in building and thinking about equity and inclusion. This can include diversity on product teams, leaning on ERGs for product testing or extending reach to community groups with deep experiential knowledge.
Leveraging community partnerships can happen at a variety of levels from inclusion of crossfunctional team members, to consulting internal groups, to wide research and testing, to co-creation workshops.
The question to ask here is: How might we use community resources to support more holistic views on our products?
Digital product equity differentiators and examples
While the approach to the topic might be overlapping, Christina’s presentation was packed with examples that illustrated how digital product equity helped set the industry leaders apart.
Here’s just a few:
Google and Airbnb highlighted the internal powerhouse of their diverse employees and how they leveraged their ERGs and empowered their internal employees to speak up.
Instagram, Apple, Airbnb and Salesforce highlighted that their product equity teams were also tackling responsible AI to reflect future-orientation and commitment to their mission.
More than half of the companies and all research centres reviewed connected inclusivity efforts with
innovation for the future, including Microsoft, Google, Alphabet, Adobe, Airbnb, Meta and Apple.
Implementing a product equity practice starts with getting familar with what is already in place and then getting curious about who might be included and excluded from your current business offerings. Steps can involve conducting a baseline understanding of the current processes, implementing workshops to better understand your customers, and also targeting areas along the product lifecycle to implement inclusion efforts.
At a leadership level, reviewing incentive structures that support customer research and the time involved in making inclusion a priority would cascade down to product teams and their deliverables. At a management level, could cross-functional workshops be included or adding metrics for inclusive research efforts? At the financial level, could line items and user research be added for community outreach?
Useful and helpful resources to improve your digital product equity work
Many of the firms that Christina survey also offers educational videos, toolkits and resources to support others in elevating product inclusion. Content in the form of guidebooks, frameworks, course access, and definitions to support product equity and inclusion.
Here’s a few highlighted by Christina:
Google’s Head of Product Equity Annie Jean-Babtiste's Blog
Several also showcase incredible stories of inclusion, including Project Lighthouse, which helps uncover and address disparities in how people of colour experience Airbnb. The initiative was developed with community partners, civil rights and privacy organizations.
Apple University created Technology for All of Us, an inclusivity course that uses case studies from inside and outside Apple to examine how to weigh the right considerations — including potential trade-offs —and ultimately make informed choices.
PayPal created Conscious Design Canvas to challenge you and your team’s biases and build more inclusive products.
Salesforce created an e-book entitled Build with Intention (PDF) that outlines a workshop on how to “Consequence Scan”
What’s next for building your digital product equity practice
In closing, Christina shared her advice for taking the practice to the next level. She defined product equity as an extension to inclusive design, which involves intentional measures to formalise and embed inclusion across business lines.
This is accomplished by uncovering areas of exclusion, developing shared principles, frameworks and organisational goals, and partnering with diverse partners to co-create solutions.
Keep in mind to:
Consider your user base. Ask: How can you strengthen your exclusion awareness and seek out edge cases?
Refine your practices. Ask: Where can you implement inclusion along the product lifecycle?
Practice co-creation: Ask: Which community groups could you involve providing feedback?
Learn more about digital product equity
The conversation about digital product equity naturally continues in our peer groups and conferences. You can meet Christina in person at our upcoming design leadership sessions in Toronto.
We’ve previously hosted a few other relevant members’ call including:
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or even lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.