Women in UX: Kat Holmes

Kat Holmes is one of the most experienced and outspoken champions for inclusive design.

Kat Holmes has had a star-studded career as a UX designer. She has had influence on some of the biggest names in tech: she spent seven years at Microsoft developing radical new design practices before becoming Director of UX Design at Google. Today she is the Senior Vice President of Product Design and UX at Salesforce. In each of these positions, she has been a champion of the importance of user experience, namely user experience that is inclusive.

We all try to be inclusive designers. In UX, we’re encouraged to think about our users, to craft personas, and aim for seamless, friendly interfaces. Holmes has been campaigning for the tech industry to really think about the wide-reaching implications of exclusive design. While it’s likely that no one sets out to exclude people from their products — it’s a hard fact that the vast majority of websites are not ADA compliant. Many don’t meet basic accessibility requirements. (Friendly reminder to remember alt text, folks.) According to a study by UsableNet Inc., web accessibility lawsuits are on the rise, with 2020 alone seeing 3,550 cases filed against various sites for failing basic accessibility standards. In her powerful masterclasses and her insightful book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, Holmes points out that by forgoing accessibility for the few, we actually affect the many.

Mismatch: how inclusion shapes design

What is a mismatch? Holmes takes inspiration from the World Health Organization’s definition of disability, which was rewritten in 2001 to define a disability as a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live. As UX professionals, we can look at mismatches as pain points, as opportunities to think deeply about who we have in mind when designing interactive products.

At the University of Washington, Kat Holmes was the centerpiece of the Communication Leadership program’s Inclusive Design Masterclass. She asked us, the audience, to check out a picture she had taken in an airport bathroom. Above the usual piping associated with a public toilet was a sign that said “wave hand over the sensor to activate” along with an icon of a hand and a wifi-esque signal icon. There was no apparent lever or button to flush, just the small, black sensor and the explanatory sign.

“Who would experience a mismatch in interacting with this design?” Holmes asked.

Hands shot up around the room as we theorized that people who are blind, low vision, or otherwise unable to read English wouldn’t be able to read the sign. What if the user doesn’t have a free hand to wave or the balance and reach to do so? What if it’s a child in this bathroom, looking for the usual flush handle and instead finding themselves perplexed and frustrated?

Holmes says that this instance exemplifies the internet as it is now: designed with a rather narrow, specific population in mind. The modern-day (thankfully, rightfully) asks us to consider gender, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation when we’re designing, writing, and creating inclusive products — but as Holmes points out, “Disability is often mentioned last if at all in that list of human diversity, which I find incredibly strange because human ability is one of those kinds of human diversity that transcends every other kind of human diversity.”

Recognizing the flux of ability

Mismatch is rife with examples of how designing for accessibility can benefit many. Consider the previous example: in making that flush sensor accessible to those without the physical reach needed to operate the device, you would be helping out people with permanent disabilities, people with temporary injuries, and people in situations that are unable to spare a hand to wave.

Below is a chart featured in the book that exemplifies this. It shows that we cannot rely on peoples’ abilities to stay constant or “average.” Both as we age and experience the vicissitudes of life, our ability to see, hear, speak, and touch will vary. Some people will suffer permanent hearing loss, others will temporarily lose hearing from sickness or injury, and still others will find themselves in situations where listening to what Alexa has to say is nigh impossible.

Chart pulled from Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design

Holmes wants to bring disability to the top of that aforementioned list of human diversity, because wonderful things happen when disability is recognized. She points out that inclusive design has given us emails and keyboards with which to write them. The typewriter was invented by Italian Pellegrino Turri so that the blind Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano wouldn’t have to dictate her private letters aloud. Vint Cerf, who created the first email protocols, was hard of hearing and his wife was deaf.

Today Holmes continues to celebrate small, but meaningful breakthroughs in inclusive design. Pedro Carmo, a designer at Slack, made the platform just a bit more inclusive by pitching the inclusion of reaction emojis of all skin tones, rather than defaulting to the Simpsons’ yellow. “Combining skin tones to the same emoji disambiguates the concept that the ‘emoji’ is different because the skin tone color is different, instead it embraces solidarity and combines them.” he tweeted.

Credit: Pedro Carmo

“I love learning the origin stories behind inclusive designs.” Kat Holmes quote tweeted Carmo’s thread on the design, “Often it’s simply one or two people who are asking why not and setting out making it real. Even when it doesn’t make it all the way to market, it matters.”

Through her book, her social media presence, and her work, she asks us to ask ourselves: why not? Who is being left out? Who isn’t at the table during the all important ideation phase? Because she knows full well that there are serious consequences to assuming that your users are “average” or the nefarious “normal.”

Will male-focused testing on crash tests put women at higher risk? (Yes, it turns out, female drivers are 17% more likely to be killed in a crash.) Will designing bridges at heights that disallow buses to pass under exclude marginalized communities? (Yes, Robert Moses did so purposefully in order to bar Black and brown populations access to New York City’s parks and beaches.) Will making emojis that reflect only white, heteronormative couples make users feel forgotten, unseen, and excluded? (Yes, it wasn’t until 2019 that Apple created more skin tones and inclusive couples on the extensive emoji keyboard.)

Kat Holmes implores everyone in the user experience field to consider these consequences, and avoid practices that lead to exclusion. She has been well-informed by her user experience career, her engineering education, and her own experiences moving through the world as an Asian-American woman. I would recommend that readers check out a thirty minute video of her Inclusive Design Masterclass at the University of Washington (edited and captioned by yours truly.) I would also recommend considering these key takeaways from Holmes’ always aesthetically pleasing work:

Key Takeaways

Solve for one, extend to many

In solving a pain point for one person, you’ll likely benefit populations that previously went ignored. Pellegrino Turri wasn’t thinking about scores of people in the future who would use keyboards and keypads and typewriters when he was crafting a way for his friend the Countess to preserve some privacy in her correspondence. And yet here I am today, typing out this article. Likewise, solutions like the bendy straw just had one beneficiary in mind, but it cannot be argued how influential the seemingly simple design change has been. Ramps help out wheelchair users, elders with limited mobility, mothers with strollers… the list goes on. In your ideation phase on any project, think about who benefits, and who might be excluded otherwise.

There is no such thing as normal

In taking for granted what the “average” or “normal” human being is capable of, we exclude people who are permanently, temporarily, or situationally disabled. The legacy of Adolphe Quetelet, who can be credited with measuring and calculating what the “average” man was in the 19th century, is rife with eugenics, racist pseudoscience, and the deeply flawed Body Mass Index. The BMI continues to shove individuals into narrow definitions of health. When building personas, when considering who your users are, remember that there is no normal. To define what a “normal” student, mother, or father is is to disregard nuances that might just be crucial to the success and usefulness of your product.