Design with empathy and agility to create equitable products

Often, innovation is less about creating new, shiny things and more about thorough analysis and reframing of the problem. This is especially critical when designing for underserved or low income communities. As product owners, designers and developers we are unconsciously programmed to focus on more affluent users in pursuit of revenue goals – designing for a low income household requires a different approach to innovation. 

In this session, GRID Alternatives and Blue State will discuss how we leveraged Design Thinking practices to create the “One Stop Shop”, a portal built on behalf of California Air Resources Board (CARB), which helps low-income Californians navigate a myriad of clean energy and transportation incentives with complex eligibility rules. 

Successful solutions required challenging our user’s assumptions and misconceptions about clean energy technology – and our own assumptions and misconceptions about the wants and needs of underserved audiences. Applying Design Thinking principles, we identified the right problems to solve by first conducting research to foster empathy with these communities, arriving at an understanding of the issues they face, and then ideating on impactful solutions. 

At key moments in the design process, we prototyped variations of the app, testing and validating our learnings with users along the way. An iterative development process (building in Drupal and React) and a flexible design system allowed us to remain nimble in the face of continuous user feedback. To show the result of this approach, we’ll share some real life impact stories from the Beta release of One Stop Shop in late 2019.

Through this session we hope to demonstrate how Design Thinking can be a powerful tool to help teams learn how to design products that prioritize accessibility, diversity and inclusion.