EmpowerUs
A step towards handling Discriminatory Harassment at Workplace
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Team
Collaborated with 4 other HCI graduate students as part of this project
(2 Researchers and 3 Designers)
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What did I do?
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Literature Review
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User and Expert Interviews
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Brainstorming
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Low and High-fidelity prototypes
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Usability Testing
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Project Overview
Our exploration of the problem space centered around Discriminatory Harassment in the Workplace. Discrimination can create a hostile and toxic work environment that lowers morale and job satisfaction, leading to decreased productivity and increased absenteeism. Employees may feel embarrassed or ashamed and fear reporting discrimination, fearing further marginalization or trivialization of their experience. The immediate effects of discriminatory harassment in the workplace include victims fearing for their livelihood and superiors displaying gaslighting behavior when addressing harassment issues.
So, who the targeted users are?
Employees who might have faced discrimination in the past, and/or people who have not faced any discrimination but want to stay informed.
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Proposed Solution
Our solution aims to remove the stigma associated with discrimination in the workplace by fostering a supportive community, to promote a healthier work environment.
The solution we designed is a platform where users can share their stories and get to know others' experiences. The stories that are shared by the employees would be after conflict resolution. The user must follow the guidelines while sharing a story and these stories will be verified by a moderator to ensure authenticity.
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Try it yourself..
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Interviews
As part of our user research, our team conducted 8 interviews with employees who have faced discriminatory harassment in the workplace, out of which I conducted 3. The common themes that emerged include feelings of anger, frustration, and powerlessness. The employees reported feeling unsupported by their superiors, which further compounded their experience of discrimination. Some employees described a negative impact on their overall job satisfaction, motivation, and productivity. Additionally, almost all the participants mentioned that discrimination can be hard to identify and speak up.
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Secondary Research
"The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer."
(Source: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Harassment")
"We might need to focus on efforts such as education, community building, active citizen engagement, voting, or donations as more impactful alternatives."
(Source: Socially Just Design And Engendering Social Change - Dr Lynn Dombrowski)
61%
of employees in the United States have experienced or witnessed workplace discrimination [Wenzel Fenton]
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User Persona
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The Core Problem
Victims of workplace harassment are usually afraid to speak out and share their experiences, leading to a lack of support for the victims.
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Design Directions
As a team, we embraced a collaborative and iterative approach to ideation. Each team member independently generated 10 ideas. During a team session, we evaluated the pros and cons of each solution, considering feasibility and viability, and narrowed it down to four top concepts.
01. Informative Videos
Improving HR training videos with a focus on impact and bystander intervention, and regularly updating the content of the videos.
02. Restorative Justice Policy
Restorative justice policies promote accountability and prioritize rehabilitation and reconciliation between victim and perpetrator.
03. Implementing a Chatbot
Chatbots offer quick access to resources and support, such as company policies, and hotlines, reducing time to seek help.
04. A Storytelling Platform
Storytelling platforms foster empathy and understanding, promoting inclusivity and respect through personal stories.
Final Design direction
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Major Design Roadblocks
While ideating about a story-telling platform, we realized there could be a few challenges that can come up with such a solution.
To move forward with our design direction, we approached 3 experts from the field of HCI - Aqueasha Hammond (Assistant Professor, HCI at Indiana University), Hawra Rabaan (Ph.D. in HCI, Indiana University), and Thomas Starks (Ph.D. in Ergonomics at Indiana University), to gain insights and proceed further. The following are the key design problems and the advice we received from experts.
01. Anonymity
Users might not share stories if they can't post anonymously
Expert Advice: Users should be given freedom about the level of anonymity (Complete anonymity, partial or no anonymity)
02. Misallegations
Complete anonymity can lead to lies and misallegations
Expert Advice: Users must not be able to post personally identifiable information about the harasser. (Provide proper guidelines for posting stories and introducing a moderator)
03. Moderator Bias
Moderators' decision to take a story down or not can be biased
Expert Advice: Moderator information should be publicly available. Hiring a moderator who is from the community can enhance empathy
(Grassroots approach)
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Features of the Application
User
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Users can share their own stories on the platform either staying completely anonymous, or partially anonymous or without any anonymity.
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Users can also view others' stories and filter the topics based on tags.
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Chatbot answers user queries based on common questions, helping victims clarify confusion.
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Users are also presented with Myths and Facts and the respective resources.
Moderator
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Moderators make the decision whether a user story goes public or not. Moderators can read the stories posted by the users and can either approve or deny them based on guidelines
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Moderators can also add stories from the internet if they feel it would be helpful to the employees.
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A moderator would be someone from the community, i.e., someone who has experienced discrimination in the past or has had a close experience of discrimination. Ensuring this would create a sense of empathy and help in mitigating the moderator bias.
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Paper Prototypes
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High-fidelity Wireframes
The Home Screen of the application shows all the features of the application. The main CTA in the viewport of the landing page is 'Share Story' since that is one of the primary features of the application. The application also has a floating chatbot icon on the bottom right of the viewport.
The home page also provides navigation for other key features of the application like 'View Stories' and 'Myths and Facts'
On the Share Stories page, users will be presented with an input form where they can fill in the details about the situation, and the guidelines on how they should avoid using personally identifiable information about the harasser. Since the platform is only about people sharing their stories and empowering each other, we are making sure that users would not post any details targeting a single person. This is one step towards handling lies and misallegations.
Once the user publishes their story, they will be presented with a message saying their story is being reviewed by the moderators. The story will be published on the platform once moderators approve it. Users will also be shown recommended stories to read on similar topics on the same screen.
On the View Stories screen, users are presented with a list of stories along with the tags related to the topic. Users can choose to read the stories from the people within the organization, or the stories from the internet that are uploaded by the moderator.
This screen is accessible only for moderators after they log in. After reading the stories published by users, the moderators can choose to Approve or Deny the stories based on the guidelines. Moderators can also add a reason for their denial. Additionally, moderators can find stories from the internet and publish them on the platform.
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Usability Evaluations
After the high-fidelity screens were made, we approached multiple users to evaluate the application. We considered
4 experts in the field of HCI and 4 users to perform the evaluation. The evaluation was gauged based on three tasks.
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Sharing a story anonymously
Expert task success rate: 4/4
User task success rate: 3/4
Time on task: Users who finished the task successfully took less than 15 seconds on average
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Reading the stories posted by other employees.
Expert task success rate: 4/4
User task success rate: 4/4
Time on task: Users finished the task in less than 20 seconds on an average
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Act as a moderator and deny a story posted by a user
Expert task success rate: 3/4
User task success rate: 3/4
Time on task: Users who finished the task successfully took less than 30 seconds on average
The following issues arose during the usability evaluation
The guidelines to post a story are unintelligible and confusing to the user
Solution: Keeping the language simple and removing the example of adding initials or personally identifiable information.
Users were not sure about the different types of discrimination that are present while filling in the details of their story
Solution: Adding a dropdown field will eliminate the confusion about the types of discrimination. Users can select the type from a list of values.
The size of the input text box for the field ‘How did the incident affect you?’ is restrictive.
Solution: Increasing the size of the text box would enable the users to add more details.
Lack of clarity on defining partial anonymity.
Solution: A one-line description that informs the meaning of partial anonymity.
Login button is not evident on the home screen. The user struggled to log in as a moderator
Solution: Making 'Login' on the top right a primary button will improve its visibility
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Final Thoughts and Learnings
Aiming to solve a sensitive problem such as Discriminatory Harassment in the Workplace was challenging. We understood that while solving such social issues penalizing the harassers is not always a solution since most of the discriminatory incidents at the workplace often go unnoticed.
In this project, the user research consumed most of the project's time than developing prototypes, as we constantly approached multiple experts to evaluate our design directions.
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This project helped me learn the concept of Social Computing and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and how it can be useful while designing for social issues.
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I learned how to approach experts from time to time to critique our design direction.
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I also learned that solving the problem entirely from its roots is often impossible and a designer must understand the design limitations.