I think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful. When we speak of diversity today we often imply a sort of supposed-deserved reparations toward the “minorities.” Obviously there are so many incorrect aspects of these assumptions, but many people in power, perhaps all, have accumulated guilt that needs an outlet.
Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought, opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as a group to solve the problems we face by introducing alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things, measuring the number of “diverse” hires has ceased to be a meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.
> think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful.
I absolutely agree with this. To use myself as an example: as a Bangladeshi who grew up in the American south, I bring a super diverse viewpoint to a group of say white new englanders.
But why does that matter in a professional setting? I’d love to hear someone precisely articulate how they think I’d behave differently from a white new englander in the same position, and why that “diversity” would make the team “stronger.”
Because most people in technology have end users. Quite often those end users come from many different backgrounds. Having more people in the room who can think in terms of a larger subset of the user base will always produce a better product.
I work in the post secondary education sector. I am the only person on my team who doesn’t have a college degree. I often have to help them see our software through that lense so that we don’t make assumptions that all of our users are college educated or even know what their post-high school options are.
The fact that you’re casually comparing differences between users of different races to the different between people with different education levels is remarkable. You think that race is so meaningful?
I think your background and experience is meaningful. And, like it or not, people of different races frequently have differing backgrounds and experiences.
How's that not just a justification for discriminating against people based on race? Unless you're going to assert that those "meaningful" differences in "background or experiences" are necessarily positive, which is completely illogical.
When it comes to optimizing a sorting algorithm for some hardware, it probably doesn't matter. Now suppose you're making a user interface design choice. It would be good to have someone who knows how users from a different subculture would interpret it.
But things like that often have more to do with culture/geography than race. Someone from Mississippi will have a much different perspective than someone from Massachusetts, even if they're the same race. And a larger difference in perspective than two people who grew up across the street from each other, even if they're different races. But that doesn't show up in the group photo for the brochure.
Is there evidence that Americans of different ethnicities interpret user interface features differently?
If not, isn’t it concerning that in the year 2024 we casually assume that these sorts of differences exist? Isn’t that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this: https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8
Ethnicity is then being used as a proxy for culture, even though it's a bad one, because it's a visible one.
It's basically starting from the premise that cultural diversity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. Whereas traditional racism is more like starting from the premise that cultural homogeneity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. It's applying the same fallacy to the opposite premise, which is an error regardless of which premise is correct.
UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures.
Suppose you don't care anything for all of this political noise and you just want to make money. Do you want to use the same colors on your website in the countries where red implies danger as the ones where red implies prosperity and vitality? If it will be the same for everyone, might knowing how some large subset of the viewers will interpret it change what you choose?
> UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures.
Really? Can you provide actual examples?
JFYI, I speak Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Mandarin Chinese. I've used native-written apps in all these languages, and I have not seen any significant variations in the UI color selections.
I guess Mandarin Chinese is probably the best example because the red color is seen as more "festive", so it's more common in various app icons.
No it isn't. They said UIs are different in different cultures because "red implies prosperity and vitality" so prove it.
Show me some examples and evidence. Anyone can make claims based off of cliches, but when it comes time to back it up with real world examples everyone either goes silent or gets upset and makes the same claim more aggressively.
Chinese historical art has a use of red due to cinnabar being believed to be healthy and that persists in a few areas like red envelopes, but 'red means prosperity in some cultures' doesn't mean their computer interfaces are different. Their stop lights are the same too.
The actual claim was "UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures."
I don't know about that prosperity thing, but I can give you an example that happens a lot. Some groups use red to mean stopped and green to mean moving, while others use red to mean danger and moving, and green to mean safe and stopped. This isn't directly country-related but I believe there's significant variation based on location.
Oh, wait, while searching to double check that I found an example of exactly what you asked for. CJK stock market displays tend to use red for increases, while the West uses red for decreases.
I searched and I didn't see any examples of that. Oh, wait, I searched again and all I saw was the opposite. Oh, wait, I searched again and still found typical displays.
The post I replied to talked about websites and they didn't say different colors were used in some circumstances, they literally mean different things.
Why does everyone have the same colors in traffic lights (except for japan's blue lights which comes from language, not cultural significance)
> The post I replied to talked about websites and they didn't say different colors were used in some circumstances, they literally mean different things.
I'll quote it again.
"UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures."
And all the examples I gave have red meaning opposite things in user interfaces based on cultural assumptions.
Off/danger. Number up/number down. Occupied/available.
Websites were just one example of UI.
> It's funny that this person speaks multiple languages and actually used different apps but was downvoted anyway.
They said they haven't seen any. That doesn't override actual examples!
> arbitrary choices made a long time ago that became standards
That sounds like a description of culture.
> If it was cultural then newer designs like computer interfaces would be affected.
Does the big TV run by a computer not count as an interface?
Okay, do you have some pictures of chinese stock websites?
> Also you ignored traffic lights.
What about them? Yes Japan uses the same color scheme as the US for traffic lights. Because the idea spread that way. I don't see how that's relevant to either of my examples that talked about Japan?
...you're not suggesting that one situation where colors match invalidates situations where colors are different, right?
Older choices affect newer choices, and consistent choices become culture.
Once upon a time, stock chart makers made an arbitrary choice influenced by older choices that had become culture. Those older choices being a general association with fortune, and a specific association with loss of money. (With intermediate steps, I think, but I'm being brief.) And those associations were different for different groups. Now the chart colors are part of culture too.
A choice being arbitrary doesn't mean it was random. You can trace the influence here.
But even if it had been random, it's culture now. Money in red has implications, and the implications vary.
So now ui choices in different countries is because of deep cultural meaning, but they could be arbitrary, but that doesn't mean it's random and now the arbitrary choice is now the culture? Seems like circular logic to rationalize arbitrary choices made anonymously.
The canonical example is hand gestures and their use in UI elements such as mouse cursors.
More broadly speaking, exposure to different languages can often make you aware of issues that are not familiar to someone who only knows English, such as e.g.: existence of grammatical gender; pluralization that has to deal with more cases than just one/many (e.g. different forms for 2/3/...); the fact that placeholders in a format string may need to be reordered in different locales; drastically different length of text in different languages; the fact that notions such as upper/lowercase are not universal; sequences of letters that are treated as single characters in some languages; etc. Now of course all this applies to non-native speakers as well, but for more "exotic" languages out there it's usually their native speakers who provide such experience.
japanese ui is often more dense and information rich. there are left to right and right to left cultures. tonnes of difference between cultures and understand of the world.
Does hiring someone whose native script is “right-to-left” make a difference to the product though?
On the one hand, there are people who deeply understand the technical intricacies of Unicode BiDi yet can’t actually read Arabic or Hebrew
On the other hand, if the business doesn’t view Arabic markets (or Israel) as viable to pursue, it doesn’t matter how much you are aware of those languages, it is irrelevant to the product
And what about backend developer roles, where UI concerns like BiDi are largely a non-issue?
Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought, opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as a group to solve the problems we face by introducing alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things, measuring the number of “diverse” hires has ceased to be a meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.