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How Designers Bring Their Lived Experience to Work

A lot of hands touch each product, service, and policy that gets designed at Code for America. From client research to marketing, everything we create goes through a collaborative process full of feedback loops, iteration, and countless Zoom meetings. Recently we sat down with four people from across different projects to learn about how their experiences and identities as Black designers show up in their work: Jamie Renee Williams, a Staff UX Designer on the safety net team, Clara Asumadu, a Senior Service Designer working on local government projects, Jor Arcila, a Junior Designer on the tax benefits team, and Kelly Benton, a Senior Service Designer on the safety net team.
A big part of your job as designers is listening to people. What are your listening best practices?
Jamie: I think humility is a good guide. You have to be willing to listen—really listen—and believe people’s experiences. Then you practice discernment. Sometimes people will tell you what will fix their problem, but you as a designer have the expertise to incorporate that. The creative part of being a designer is figuring out what’s most important for accomplishing what needs to happen—it’s this mix of something tangible, whether it’s quantitative or qualitative, and something intuitive. You’re always trying to figure out when to lean into one over the other.
Jor: I think patience is the most important thing for me. Giving people time to review things allows them to process the information and relate it to their experience. When you give people time, you get the opportunity to hear more about things that you might not have realized if you rushed. This allows me to understand their process and integrate it into the design.
When you give people time, you get the opportunity to hear more about things that you might not have realized if you rushed. This allows me to understand their process and integrate it into the design.
How do you bring your communities into your work?
Jor: I was working on the tax benefits team when we were launching FileYourStateTaxes and it was really cool to be a part of it from the beginning. Seeing the barriers people face in the process of filing their taxes made me wonder how my family navigated this. So I called my dad to ask how we dealt with taxes. I asked, “Hey, did we pay to file our taxes?” And he said we did—which blew my mind because he shouldn’t have had to pay for anything, especially with the amount of money he was making at the time. It reinforced that working on this free tool would have a big impact on communities, especially BIPOC, lower income, and mixed status families. I included my dad in feedback sessions and asked if questions made sense to him and what the process was like for him. It felt really powerful to include him like that. It’s representative of human-centered approaches.
Kelly: I started at Code for America working with the California team on GetCalFresh, contributing to our design strategy and advancing the product’s accessibility and language equity standards. Basically, we were working to ensure that our product was reaching a multitude of audiences, especially those who are marginalized—so that includes Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Hispanic groups. When I was working on that, I spent a lot of time thinking about the people in my family who have applied for food stamps, including my grandmother. That’s how she would be able to afford groceries whenever we would stay with her during the summer to feed us. I spent time asking her about her past experiences and using that as a proxy for how to further improve the experience of people applying for food stamp benefits. One of the hardest things for people is keeping their information up to date—like if they get a new job or their address changes—so that there’s no disruption in their benefits. Seeing firsthand how crucial this benefit is to people’s livelihood put a problem like that in context for me so that I was able to reflect that in my work.
Clara: I often want to carry conversations I’m having here outside of work—like when the work I do is related to my identity as a Black woman, I want to go share what I’m learning with other Black women I know. Right now I’m working on a project in Albuquerque where we’re partnered with the city trying to increase the homeownership rates for Black residents. What I’m learning I’m bringing outside work, and telling people, “Here’s why this experience isn’t as terrifying as it seems.”
What do you do when you get hard feedback?
Jamie: There’s a really good example in our work in Maryland where we’re creating a pilot application for applying for SNAP, cash assistance, and parts of an energy assistance program. I live in this state where there’s a lot of immigrants and a lot of people are undocumented, and part of what we needed to do was figure out a way to be sensitive around questions related to citizenship. And my initial design approach was trying to put everything in the right way. But as soon as we showed it to some of our community partners and did user research, it became pretty clear that it was actually more condescending than helpful. And I think it took a lot of humility to acknowledge that we needed to start over. We’ll move stuff around. We’ll put these questions in a totally different place. And we’ll approach this in a whole different way. You have to let go of your ego.
What are some challenges you’ve faced as a Black designer in tech?
Kelly: I think for a lot of sad reasons, it’s not uncommon to be the only Black person on the team. And then you might be expected to represent the sentiments of all Black people, which can be overwhelming. There are so many layers to the Black experience, and those can get erased when you’re the only Black person in the room.
Jamie: One of the big reasons I came to Code for America was I was extremely exhausted from having to carry that exact emotional burden and do that kind of labor in a way that was making me physically sick. It’s so rare, sitting here together as four Black designers. And the kind of spaces we get now, where sometimes we just laugh or sit in silence because we just need that quiet, for our minds or our bodies. That brings me a lot of calm, internally.
There are so many layers to the Black experience, and those can get erased when you’re the only Black person in the room.
There’s so much diversity within Black people’s lived experiences. When you’re working, how do you fight that kind of reduction of communities to monoliths?
Clara: For me, I’m really young and I’ve already experienced so many spectrums of what it’s like to be Black. I was born in Ghana, I’m an immigrant, I’ve experienced different income classes. I expect that experiences are varied. So I approach people with curiosity, recognizing that everybody’s got something different going on, even if they’re also Black. When I’m out there talking to community members about our projects, I recognize I’m going to come into any situation with biases, like we all do, but I’m asking myself how I can operate from wanting to learn from people’s experiences rather than saying, “I get what you’re trying to say because I’m Black, too.”
Empathy and a trauma-informed approach is ingrained in our mission. Knowing that everything we do takes into consideration our audience’s actual livelihood as well as our own lived experiences makes the process a lot more intentional.
How do you take care of yourself in this work?
Clara: It means a lot to be here with people where you know this matters to all of us. There isn’t this need to prove why we want to do this work. We all just get it. That helps.
Kelly: Having a safe space with peers in your community is super important, because this work can weigh heavily on us as Black contributors and at the same time be triggering. When we have a chance to commune, that’s so valuable, whether it be formally or informally. A lot of organizations are numbers focused—you have to create a narrative that will support the bottomline. But here empathy and a trauma-informed approach is ingrained in our mission. Knowing that everything we do takes into consideration our audience’s actual livelihood as well as our own lived experiences makes the process a lot more intentional.