Navigating Equity & Reflexive Practices in Gigwork Design: A Journey Mapping Experience

A FAccT 2024 Dialogue/Translational Tutorial

Tutorial Summary

How do we create ethical and equitable experiences on global platforms? How might UX designers and developers incorporate reflexive practices--a continuous self-evaluation of one's assumptions and biases--to mitigate assumptions and workers' experience? This tutorial will explore ways to build equitable user experiences using gig work platforms as a target use case. With the rise of gig work platforms, the informal digital economy has altered how algorithmic systems manage occasional workers; its questionable assumptions have spread worldwide. Concerns over autonomy, gamification, and worker privacy and safety are amplified as these practices expand worldwide. We will practice reflexive techniques within this context by implementing an equity-focused journey-mapping experience. Journey mapping allows designers to map out the customer experience and identify potential pain points at each step that could hinder the user experience. Using a ride-sharing scenario, participants will be guided through a custom journey map highlighting equitable considerations that can facilitate responsible user experience innovation.

Content and Practical Work

  • The tutorial will be a journey-mapping exercise involving a fictionalized ride-sharing app.

  • The exercise will be enhanced with a set of reflexive questions designed to help identify inequitable factors in user experiences and opportunities to mitigate them.

  • Participants will form breakout groups to develop their own solutions to the exercise.

  • The breakout groups will rejoin for a plenary segment to present and discuss their proposals.

Learning Outcomes and Benefits

Digital platforms have enabled the gig economy to generate unprecedented millions of interactions between culturally and socio-economically diverse groups of people.

These interactions and their driving dynamics are often overlooked in app design, as more attention is devoted to the human-computer over the human-human interaction.

More importantly, because the users of these systems are so diverse on a global scale, primarily-Western developers and stakeholders may not anticipate potential harms their systems can inflict on users.

This tutorial will teach participants how to take a reflexive approach to user experience design and identify potential challenges to creating an equitable experience for their users.

Meet the Team

  • Alicia Boyd

    New York University

  • Danielle Cummings

    Department of Defense

  • Angie Zhang

    University of Texas - Austin