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Inclusive Design Playbook

An Analysis of Reddit's Inclusivity

Project Information

Role

Writer/Researcher

Project Type
Collaborators

Timothy Chen

(Writer/Researcher)

Term Project

(HCDE298 - Inclusive Design)

About the Project

This is the term project for my Inclusive Design class. After learning about exclusive designs and the axes of oppression that they reinforce, we were assigned to analyze the inclusivity of a project or service we use frequently. 

Our selections

  • We decided to analyze Reddit.

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  • We examined the accessibility for users with disabilities and non-English speakers.

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  • We examined the inclusion and experiences of  women and racially-oppressed groups on Reddit.

Project Components

  • We read papers about Reddit and did our own experiments using the website.​

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  • We compared it to Twitter and Facebook, specifically examining content moderation features across the three sites.

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  • We wrote design recommendations based on our findings.

Findings

Through our research, we found that Reddit provided very few features to support users with diverse needs. 

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It has few language options, and while disabled users described the accessibility features as generally sufficient for their use of Reddit, it still lacks in comparison to competitor social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

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We also found that women and people of color frequently experienced hostility and exclusion on the platform - other researchers we cited often attribute this to their laissez-faire content moderation model.

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* Elaboration on reporting users on Reddit

 

It is not easy to report users, when you click the ‘report’ button on a profile, Reddit takes you to a screen where it says to go somewhere else if you don’t like the content you’re seeing [15]. It’s not easy to figure out how to block the person, in fact, we could not figure out how to do it during our experimentation:

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Design Recommendations

Based on our findings, we proposed the following recommendations:

Design Process

  1. Be more inclusive: conduct testing with a wide variety of users which includes people of different ethnicities, genders, cultures, languages, able/disabled, etc.

  2. Hire moderators that visit different subreddits to make sure content is okay and monitor language/posts

  3. Generate/use software that can detect hate speech or keywords

  4. Iterate constantly on the software with different and diverse hate words

  5. Do more usability tests on current reward system and anonymous name features across the inclusive user pool

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Features

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  1. Ability to change the language on user generated content as well as the navigation bar, settings, etc.

  2. Include a policy that makes it clear to all users on actions that will be taken against racism, sexism, or any form of discrimination

  3. Generate alt text for images

  4. Having users request for a subreddit name so that subreddits aren’t labeled in a way that is exclusive

Read our paper!

For a much more thorough explanation of each component of the project and all our findings and analyses, read the full paper.

To view the full playbook, click here:

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