Easy shortcuts to achieving diversity and inclusion in brand experience

Instead, if you want to deliver a brand experience that achieves DEI, then you must think of that effort as a never-ending journey, according to Bronwyn van der Merwe, APAC design lead at Accenture Interactive and general manager for Asia Pacific at the company’s design and innovation consultancy, Fjord.

"We as consumers are much more sensitive to organisations that are saying that they're doing something, but it's a very superficial or ineffectual way of addressing inclusion and diversity,” she says. “Inclusion and diversity is really a practice, as opposed to a destination. It's not somewhere you're ever going to get. It's a mindset—a way of working and a way of thinking that needs continual investment."

Inside out

Moreover, in Van der Merwe’s opinion, brand experience has to start from the inside. Only organisations that are actually diverse and inclusive—and which use design processes that harness diversity and inclusion to achieve equity—can achieve diversity, inclusion and equity in the brand experience they deliver to external stakeholders.

That means starting with hiring and supporting diverse teams. “It's really two sides of the same coin,” she says. “If you have a diverse and inclusive workplace, you're much more likely to design and deliver diverse and inclusive experiences for customers, because the two things are generally a reflection of each other.”

Bronwyn van der Merwe

Likewise, the importance of DEI has to be imbued from the top of the organisation, and must be embedded into the ways that organisation measures success, van der Merwe says. Accenture Interactive, for example, has developed a 360-degree value meter, which helps it to judge value beyond financial terms by looking at sustainability, inclusion, diversity, talent and other aspects of a decision.

"Right from our CEO down we have this mandate that we are looking at value in many different ways, and we are going to assess the work that we do with the clients and also the work that we do as individuals against a much more balanced scorecard,” she says. “That sort of clarity from the top down is really critical within organisations.” 

Another part of having your house in order is promoting honest internal dialogue. “If people aren't aware of their own privileges, their own biases, their own cultural context, and what they consider normal—if they aren't thinking about this when they're coming to design products and services—then then they're not going to build inclusive products and services,” she warns.

Principle and process

Beyond that, companies need to make sure DEI is not an afterthought, but that it's actually built into every component of every project and every product and service, van der Merwe says. Principles, processes, guidelines and a system of checks and balances are necessary to help employees understand what ‘good’ looks like and to make sure nothing that goes out the door falls short. It’s about making sure that time and budget are built in and that people with the right expertise are in place to judge whether any output is fit for purpose.

"We really need to embed it in the culture of an organisation,” she says. “We need to train people. We need to empower them. We need to give them the knowledge and the tools and information around this so that they can be the gatekeepers of responsible design, both internally in the employee experience, but also in any experiences that we're designing for end users.”

Seeking understanding

It may sound pat, but diverse and inclusive brand experience also requires a true understanding of who you're designing for. And van der Merwe believes this only comes from moving beyond quantitative data.

Investing in qualitative research, the kind that truly uncovers the needs, motivations, limitations and context of the end user, is required. 

And it can’t stop there. In fact, Accenture involves end users in the design process in the work it does for clients, and advocates that more brands make this part of their practice when devising new products and services on their own. 

"If we seek to really understand and include [customers] in the process, and then validate it with them, we're much more likely to create experiences that are much more inclusive and diverse,” van der Merwe says. 

Van der Merwe advises thinking in terms of mindsets rather than demographics; it's critical to understand why people do things, not just what they do.

“When we think about using mindsets and qualitative data, it allows us to get to the ‘why’, and it allows us to get to a much more nuanced understanding of human beings and their needs and behaviors in a way that historical quant data just doesn't give us,” she says. “So as designers, when we use that more qualitative data and these mindsets, we're much more able to design experiences with that inclusion and diversity lens, which take into consideration peoples’ whys and their situation. And we combine that with quant data. But the two things together really help us to design better experiences.”

Holistic thinking

One of Accenture’s mantras for DEI in experience design is ‘impact over intent’. “You need to think about the unintended consequences of anything that you do,” van der Merwe says. “Whether you are causing harm intentionally or unintentionally, it doesn't matter. It's unacceptable either way.” 

This goes not only for designing diverse and inclusive experiences but also for making sure those experiences don’t clash with intersecting goals such as sustainability. Accenture uses a life-centred approach, rather than just a human-centred approach, in evaluating proposals, van der Merwe says.

"If we focus too much just on human-centered, then we will necessarily sometimes have unintended consequences, for example on the planet,” she says. "However, we can design into products and services and experiences things that are beneficial for both human beings and for the planet, if we take the time and have the desire to do that. We can design it so that the default experience is better for the planet, or we can design it so that options are visible to the end user to choose something that is going to have a reduced environmental impact.” 

Avoiding paradox

One tricky aspect of DEI-conscious brand experience is what van der Merwe refers to as the inclusivity paradox. “The more that you try to delve deeper into niche groups with specific needs, the more that you may unintentionally risk excluding other groups,” she says. The perfect website for sight-impaired users, for example, is not ideal for many other users. “So as much as organisations would like to design experiences for all, sometimes it is not yet practical to do so. Therefore organisations do need to make decisions and tradeoffs.”

In the long run artificial intelligence and machine learning might make it easier to deliver personalised experiences, she adds. “But until we get to that sort of nirvana where we can do that, we would suggest that mixing qualitative insights and understanding different mindsets is the way to address this.”

The challenge in Apac

Brands worldwide are more aware then ever of the imperative of diverse and inclusive brand experience. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In Asia it may be particularly challenging for brands to achieve, given the region’s diversity across language, culture and socioeconomic level.

"There's always going to be headroom because we're in a constantly shifting world where attitudes and expectations around inclusion and diversity are changing rapidly, year by year, decade by decade, van der Merwe says. “So there's no end goal or marker where you can say, this organisation is inclusive and diverse, versus not. It's not binary. It's a journey that is constantly evolving.”

(This article first appeared on CampaignAsia.com)