Designing for Inclusion @Animoto
— empowering an organization to make the product development process accessible and inclusive
— type
10 months
Design Research
Workshop Facilitation
Tool Building
— role
Lead Product Designer & Researcher
— length
10 months
— context + problem to solve
As an acting member of the Animoto's DEI committee, I completed a DEI at the Workplace certification at the USF Muma College of Business in 2021. One day, during a 1:1 with my manager as we discussed goals & growth, I asked how else could I apply this training into my role as a designer creating experiences for all people? We make sure the product interfaces pass accessibility standards, but how else could we consider beyond numbers the nuanced intersectionalities different Animoto users faced when attempting to make a video?
These questions ignited a journey to investigate and discover what it meant to truly design for everyone beyond passing a contrast ratio. Based on my learnings, I facilitated multiple workshops with the design team to ponder how we could make our team's design process more inclusive. This resulted in the creation of a toolkit and curated resources to build experiences that made video creation magical for everyone.
How might we make Animoto’s product development more inclusive?
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As an Animoto employee, I want to have the educational resources and toolkit to make video creation magical for everyone.
Make video creation magical for everyone by evaluating solutions with thought-provoking questions tailored to yield inclusive experiences
— tool
The inclusive design checklist is one of the first tools in Animoto's design team toolkit to building more inclusive experiences. Born out of multiple ideation workshops and research sources, this checklist serves as a guide for designers as well as product teams to ideate, refine and build solutions that address holistically and responsibly all the ways a user could interact with the product.
This new section of the project checklist surfaces a set of questions sourced from research material to aid designers evaluate their concepts from a visual, ethical, media, organization, usability, and navigation standpoint.
Educational Presentation @ Company All Hands
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— learnings + outcomes
Upon stress testing this new resource with a set of ongoing projects, the updated checklist was made available as an official tool for the design team and shared to onboard new team members to the organization. This tool was paired with a curated set of articles and resources for the design team to continuously reference and nurture their knowledge on designing for inclusion.
In Q1 2022, I presented the insights from this initiative as well the new toolkit addition at the company all hands. This served as an educational effort to expand the impact of this initiative outside of the design team into the larger product organization and the various company verticals.
Given the nature of this project, further insights and next steps can only be revealed in a professional setting.
