What Can Asian Eyelids Teach Us About User Experience Design? A Culturally Reflexive Framework for UX/I Design

The proliferation of web applications in recent years has brought about conversations among technology designers about user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design’s role in propagating and reaffirming cultural bias, and in facilitating race-based discrimination. At times, such conversations have demonstrated how taking stock of racialized and cultural bias during the design process can challenge widely held design assumptions. For example, in 2015, Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, was reported to have facilitated racial profiling when users began posting to the application’s Crime and Safety section reports of “suspicious” persons on the basis of racialized appearance, as opposed to any actual suspicious behavior (Harshaw, 2015). To address this problem, Jamie Ayers (2016) explained, Nextdoor opted to break “a cardinal rule of contemporary user experience design: they added friction to the interface of the platform.” Nextdoor developers did so by adding steps and reminders to make incident reporting slightly more complicated so that over a more prolonged process, users would “stop and think.