Take 5 minutes at the beginning of a design phase to consider how to make your project anti-oppressive
Here is a basic checklist of things to consider in your tech projects. Plan to run through this checklist a few times throughout your design and development processes. More details on each item are included below.
- Are your sign-up forms respectful of people outside the norms of names, gender, sexuality, relationships and ethnicity?
- What data are you collecting? Why are you collecting each piece of data? Is your intention conveyed to users? Does the project respect the privacy of users?
- If you collect comments that will be made public, do you have guidelines for discourse in place?
- Do icons, photos, etc. assume things about gender, race or ability of users?
- Have you staged any photos that inaccurately reflect the diversity of your visitorship or staff?
- Have you been sure not to make business decisions based solely on existing analytics? Do you have a clear plan on how to measure the business decisions you've made, through analytics or otherwise?
- What modes of communication do your teams use? Is that working for everyone?
- Is the project accessible to older people, younger people, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities?
- Is all the writing, including curatorial content, at an accessible reading level?
- Who’s not part of your design process? Why?
Are your sign-up forms respectful of people outside the norms of names, gender, sexuality, relationships and ethnicity?
Collect all user data in changeable, free-form text fields
Limited lists of values for fields like name, gender, ethnicity and more don't often work in real life. W3C has a good write-up making the case for why names don't fit the schema of first name-last name for many people. One alternative they suggest is to ask for the full name in one text field, then ask how your users would like to you to call them in another field:
Likewise with gender and ethnicity, these are identities that people choose for ourselves, and we can change the way we think about them over the course of our lives.
For more info, read this great Model View Culture piece.
What data are you collecting? Why are you collecting each piece of data? Is your intention conveyed to users? Does the project respect the privacy of users?
Be clear on why you're collecting each piece of data and what you’re doing with it
Privacy of users is particularly important for online visitors in another country looking at content that might be considered restricted in their country of origin - gay rights, political content, etc). Read more on why privacy is important by Cory Doctorow here.
Establish guidelines for discourse online
See the Contributor Covenant, The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse, and a good example of a Code of Conduct by Hypatia Software Organization.
Use non-gendered, raced, or abled user icons
Here are some good examples from Twitter, iPhone, Slack, Flickr and Wordpress:
Don't stage false diverse photographs
Inspiration porn of images of people with disabilities in museums also falls into this category.
Have you been sure not to make business decisions based solely on existing analytics? Do you have a clear plan on how to measure the business decisions you've made, through analytics or otherwise?
When using analytics: Decide, then act, then measure. Don't measure, then decide, then act.
Consider and critique modes of communication: face-to-face, e-mail
Is the project accessible to older people, younger people, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities?
Implement Universal Design and Learning
Check the readability grade level of your text
Use services like this one to see what grade level is of the text in your project. Is all above a high school reading level? Is that ok?