Wells Fargo Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Inclusive Design Program

Problem Statement

Like most companies, Wells Fargo hosted a series of conversations and guest speakers centering on George Floyd’s death and racial equality. The company gave employees a platform to share their own experiences and thoughts on race and social injustice.

While I found the conversations valuable, I wanted to do more. I researched unconscious bias and realized that my team needed to eliminate as much bias as possible in our designs. As the champion of users, my UX team owed it to our users to proactively embrace the spirit of inclusivity and effect change in our processes.

Corporate examples of cultural insensitivity and lack of awareness permeated social media and news stories. As a result, these companies suffered bad publicity and lost significant revenue.

Although A11y (accessibility) is more developed in the UX industry, Inclusive Design, which incorporates diversity, is still nascent. It is uncharted, with no clear industry best practices defined. Diversity is not just about race or ethnicity but includes many other facets, including personality, job function and geographic location.

Users

More than 260,000 Wells Fargo employees globally, including the UK, India and the Philippines.

Previous main personas: Professional non-frontline team members, other non-exempt team members and managers.

New personas: Frontline workers, non-exempt and international employees.

Role

I created the homepage portal group’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I)/Inclusive Design program and worked with partners to develop its components and champion it.

Scope and constraints

Although inclusivity became part of the UX team’s internal process, it was important to socialize it with my leadership, stakeholder leadership and the larger organization.

Designers also must embrace inclusive design and incorporate it into every step of their work process.

Challenges: With the exception of the SME in accessibility, the other designers needed training on A11y. They have undergone training in accessibility.

There was a lack of inclusive design resources in the industry. While there were diversity webinars and conversations with diversity executives in other industries, the focus was on diversity hiring. I couldn’t find one that was inclusive design-focused for users and customers. The only course that was offered was a Design for All: Inclusivity + Diversity + Creativity workshop through a design-based association in Seattle.

Process

I adapted the Stanford Design Thinking Process into my own Inclusive Design Journey:

Empathize:

Research the space, knowledge sharing with diversity peers in other industries and learn about diversity mistakes other companies made. I also attended the Design for All virtual workshop.

Define:

My Inclusive Design work would impact the users of Wells Fargo’s Intranet Teamworks. I defined the challenges and developed a value proposition for the program.

Ideate:

1) Capture comprehensive tool to help designers design with diversity on top of mind.
2) User feedback with a wide range of diversity, insight culture sensitivities and user perspectives.
3) A11y, accessibility compliant.

Prototype:

1) Develop the personas: I recruited my lead researcher to develop a more comprehensive set of employee personas. These personas would also capture subsets not previously included. For the first time, frontline and non-exempt workers as well as diversity aspects would be incorporated into the personas. The template is brand compliant and will be reviewed with the advisory group.

2) Designer checklist (A11y and diversity): I got buy-in from my manager (who was previously a designer) to help develop the designer checklist. The designers currently use it and consult it during each step of the process. My Inclusive Design Advisory Group gave feedback on the checklist during the iterative process. For an organizational event, one designer mindfully created a visual that included drawings of people in wheelchairs and diverse groups of people.

3) Recruit an 11-member diversity advisory group comprising Team Member Network chairs (Wells Fargo diversity councils), an accommodations SME and frontline employees (important but underrepresented voices) to offer their unique insight and feedback through design thinking sessions, design reviews and user interviews.

It provided a good opportunity for the UX team to develop relationships throughout the company. The members are opinionated and excited to have an outlet to give feedback.

Test:

Designers: They incorporated the Inclusive Design steps and checklist in their design processes, giving feedback and refining the checklist as necessary.

Advisory Group:
They routinely met to review designs, participate in design workshops, user interviews and are on standby for consultation.

Outcomes and lessons

Inclusive Design is evolving and we can take an active role in shaping it. Embracing diversity is not only a belief system or conversations; we can take an active role in incorporating it into our daily work and encouraging others to include DEI into their own processes.

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