Why TD Lab created the
Equity Resource Hub
The spring of 2020 was a catalyst for conversations on inequality, increasing awareness of long-standing systemic racism against Black, Indigenous and other racialized individuals, as well as enduring discrimination against others including 2SLGBTQ+, PWD/IwDA (persons with disabilities / individuals with diverse abilities) communities, women, and religious minorities. Raw and honest conversations happened at dining room tables, in messaging apps, on social media, and during virtual work calls. It was during one of these open discussions at TD Lab that a suggestion was proposed in answer to the question:
“What can we do differently to be more inclusive in how we work?”
The idea involved transforming a standard practice: the use of personas. Personas are commonly used across industries to support design and development, among other purposes. Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Traditional personas can oversimplify a user's experience. If we wish to reflect different identities in a traditional persona, such as an accessibility need or certain lived experience that affects their worldviews, we're often pigeonholed into the small demographic section or outlining it all in the biography. Both lead to risk of oversimplification or stereotyping that particular identity. So, we created an inclusive persona template to use at TD, building into the persona sheet multiple areas where these identifiers can be noted and explored, without forcing these identifiers to be the only traits of the persona.
When we started to use inclusive personas, it was clear that inclusive personas were just one part of a larger transformation: the creation of an equity lens. The equity lens became a simple five step process that focuses on asking equity-centered questions and creating inclusive personas in TD Lab’s early-stage innovation research and concept development. The Hub was created to be a guidebook, a reference to help lead individuals and teams through the process, expanding their focus outside of their own lived experiences and building more inclusive personas. Our team's understanding of lived experiences outside of our own grew deeper, and the personas we used became more deliberately inclusive. The insights had an immediate and powerful impact on the innovation team's design and development choices – from branding to functionalities prioritized in the initial build to what types of services we sunset. While there is no replication of lived experience -- that ideally, innovation and transformation project teams should reflect the diversity of the customers to use the tools on the other side -- the hub's resources can help us stretch to better understand lived experiences of others where those aren't represented on our teams.
A year out from integrating this process, it has become a core element of TD Lab, the initial team using this process. Developers, designers, business analysts – each member of the team organically applies an equity lens to all stages of project work. Each time the Hub is used at TD, a team has learned something new and uncovered opportunities to improve a process or project to be more inclusive of the communities we serve.
This is why TD Lab is providing open access to the Hub. The ability to be more equitable and inclusive in how we think, what we create, and how we engage as a society is an opportunity we all can participate in.
So here is version 1.0. It is our hope that you will incorporate this equity lens into your organization and help us improve it. Build upon the resources here. Share it among your colleagues. Try it with your teams. Contribute content and learnings.
Let's create a new set of best practices – together.