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DIVYA

Mohan 


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This project was one way to consider lending our abilities to support Black Lives Matter’s movement for racial justice. For futher resources on how you can become a co-conspirator for racial justice, click here ︎︎︎




RAISE ︎ An Accountability App


Project Duration
October 2020 - December 2020



My Role
Research Lead

The Team
Ally Hopping
Lia Slaton
Janice Lyu
Jenny Xin
Kraig Fujii

Skills and Tools
Figma
Think Aloud
User Interviews
Expert Interviews
Mind Mapping
The Thing From the Future
New Metaphors
Crazy Eights



The Problem

 

How might we inspire and motivate allies to take a more proactive role in combatting racism in their daily lives?


  • We are dually fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide epidemic of lives lost at the hands of law enforcement and systemic racism: https://sayevery.name/
  • Black Lives Matter and #BLM posts and tags took off in early June, but there was criticism against “performative allyship” that occured on social media but didn’t translate to tangible action.
  • Many self-identified “allies” claimed they were interested in being more engaged “accomplices” rather than just allies, but didn’t know where to start.

our proposal

How might we simplify the process of finding impactful allyship tasks so that users could focus on doing them everyday? 




    1. Users receive a personalized list of tasks to complete weekly. Each task provides one tangible way to combat racism in their communities or educate themselves
    2. Users can add additional tasks, write reflections, and receive reports on how and how often they have showed up for people of color over time
    3. As donations are collected, petitions are signed, and laws are changed, users receive updates on how their sustained action contributes to social change

The Solution





How We Got Here


Understanding Context 


There was a rise in social action and awareness over the summer of 2020. As we collectively dealt with the public health crisis of COVID-19, communities of color dealt with disproportionatly high rates of COVID, a lack of access to equal care, and, in Black communities, an additional public health crisis - murder at the hands of law enforcement.

There was a flurry of resources passed on social media, protests, petitions, and an influx of donations organizations like the Minnesota Freedom Fund that quickly seemed to die down in coming months. As a team, we felt like we had been familiar with this cycle of action and inaction that kept progress stagnant and wondered how we could employ persuasive design techniques to motivate sustained allyship.


Identifying the Problem


We began with a survey of existing literature on why and how individuals are motivated to take a role in racial justice activism. Additionally, we spoke to four experts in diversity, equity, and inclusion. These experts were:


We are grateful for their time and the expertise they contributed to this project. Additionally, we interviewed six participants who identified as wanting to be more active accomplices or co-conspirators and had them complete a mind-mapping activity to gauge the connections and feelings that came up when discussing allyship.


On synthesis, we found several sources of hesitancy and discomfort that were barriers to active allyship. While the onus is on us to understand the importance of doing it anyway, as a design team we asked ourselves how we could minimize as many of these barriers as possible to create a net gain in allyship activities undertaken.

Pain Points


          1. There are multiple, conflicting sources of information online and I don’t know which to follow
          2. I don’t know when I’m overstepping my boundaries
          3. Allyship can fall off my radar when it’s not being shared as frequently on social media


Identifying the Solution


Because a central part of the growing motivation to be a more active ally was the prevalence of information on social media, we imagined our solution on an app - a familiar, intuitive, and centralized way to collect, vet, and synthesize the vast amount of anti-racism resources available, tailor it to the individual, and measure progress.

Based on the identified pain points, we needed our application to do a few things at once

1

CONVEY RELIABILITY

Provide updates on tangible community impacts of actions as they accrue over time.
Vet and source the information in one central place


2

BUILD USER TRUST

Use an onboarding assessment to assess an understanding of allyship and tailor tasks to preferences


3

SUSTAIN ENGAGEMENT OVER TIME

Send daily, weekly, and monthly progress reminders to incentivize and prompt regular use

Building our solution


Early Prototypes

We developed some basic screens for onboarding, giving recommendations, and quantifying efforts to increase motivation. We saw the basic flow as going from:

︎︎︎ Onboarding - where we assessed motivations 
︎︎︎ Tasks - where we presented three curated tasks to complete 
︎︎︎ Progress - where we measured progress over time and considered how to best incentivize completing the tasks

Considerations

  • Onboarding should be short and to the point. Long onboarding processes can be irritating and demotivating and prevent the user from getting to the actionable portion of the app
  • We considered several different ways of motivating regular usage of the app, an updates page, donations, a progress page, and badges. Of these -

1

The updates page

was unanimously the most motivating because it felt concrete and mobilizing

2

Donations

as a way to add an indvidual motivator and give users a way to have a say in the cause that would be supported by their activity on the app

3

The progress page

was favored for quantitative information. People liked knowing what their allyship “style” was and could see themselves using it to become a more well-rounded participant

4

Badges

were least popular and raised the most moral qualms. They felt performative and patronizing of the seriousness and urgency of combatting racism


Design Note: While our research opened our interest to creating accomplices and co-conspirators over “allies,” we maintained the language of “allyship” for familiarity and to create a more seamless transition into the actionable portion of this app.


Clarifying Our Intentions


We were nervous when it came to undertaking a task like this, or to insinuate that an app could even begin to make a dent in the centuries long issue of racism. To that end, we wanted to acknowledge what we could and couldn’t do early on:

We can’t turn someone into the perfect ally, or even accurately measure the impact of each activity undertaken

We CAN be a supportive and encouraging force to mobilize allies so that other people of color don’t have to

We CAN use the facilities and skillsets at our disposal to try and think more deeply about what we have to contribute in the ongoing fight for racial justice - in this case, the time and encouragement from faculty we receive as full time students to incorporate this into an academic project


our final prototype


ONBOARDING


ACTIONS


PROGRESS


What next


This prototype is intended to provide scaffolding for what could become an app or framework that supports an aggregated set of resources. The next steps to actualizing RAISE as an application would be to:

  • Compile and vet resources, making sure that sources are scientifically backed and emphasize the voices of those who have lived experiences with racism
  • Test and deploy a version of the application that can be used  in order to measure retention over time and fix any bugs