Digital Equity is User-Centered Design
By Danyl Stephan Kok
Working on the Dear Digital Equity Project this quarter, I have had the wonderful opportunity of interviewing Matthew Peel, the Digital Equity Manager at Evergreen Goodwill, one of the franchises of Goodwill in the State of Washington based in Seattle. During my interview with him, Matt brought up a very intriguing formal process Goodwill performs regularly that he refers to as a community needs assessment. What that involves is surveying different groups, organizations, businesses, and even community colleges and universities, along with a whole bunch of other research from which Goodwill will determine what the community needs. After that has been determined, Goodwill will take a look at what they currently offer, and compare the two together. This will finally yield what needs to be changed, added, or omitted so that they can stay current, maintain being helpful, and offer things that people actually need.
It didn’t initially occur to me that this exact process has tremendous overlap with user-centered design. It has been emphasized a lot of times that when we design for a specific user, we must try to understand the users that are being designed for as much as possible. This is first done by having a specific user in mind. Then, several methods of collecting data about the user can be performed. Surveying a group of people absolutely counts as one of them. Another way is to do a lot of research to collect information that might involve observing, taking field notes, as well as interviewing.
There is an immediate overlap between user-centered design and the way Evergreen Goodwill executes their community needs assessment. By understanding more about the people that they are helping, Evergreen Goodwill is able to design much more beneficial programs, services, and resources that keep their users helped. In the same way, the more we designers are able to put in the effort to understand who we are designing for, the better we can tune our product to fit them best.
