Jonathan McFadden
The benefits of inclusive design practices are clear: better business results and more satisfied users of our digital products.
Our task now is to sharpen our focus on inclusion in our content-design craft. We also need to get better at convincing leadership to support this work.
Jonathan McFadden has been practicing inclusive design for years and gets better every year at persuading executives and managers to support this important work.
We talked about:
his work on the "Shop" app at Shopify
the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs the current round of tech layoffs
the improvement in representation of diverse employees at Shopify
the importance of gaining the attention of leadership to advance DEI initiatives, and how to do it
how he builds inclusive and diverse teams
the benefits of having a diverse design team, so that the full range of human experience is included in the design process
how reaching out to universities may be a good way to cope with the current scarcity around resourcing inclusion and diversity programs
how setting the stage for diversity and inclusion during lean times might magnify the work when times are good again
how to account for age and ageism along with other kinds of inclusion
his charge to content designers to remember that we're on the front lines of inclusion work and to keep the advocacy going
Jonathan's bio
Jonathan McFadden is a senior content designer at Shopify, where he partners with a team of designers to create better experiences for users on the Shop app. Outside of his daytime gig, he runs his own content writing business, Jon Writes, and teaches a weekly Bible study. He enjoys spending time with his lyrically-gifted wife, reading comic books, and bingeing reruns of his favorite cult classic, Xena: Warrior Princess.
Connect with Jonathan online
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JohnWrites
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1cwu6b7sX4
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 137. At this point, it's clear that when you include in your design process as many different kinds of folks as possible, you realize many business and social benefits. We're at a juncture now where the main challenges for designers doing inclusion work are in gaining the support of leadership and cultivating the practice skills that promote inclusion. Jonathan McFadden has years of experience doing this work, and in convincing executives and managers to support it.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 137 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to have with us Jonathan McFadden. Jon is a senior content designer at Shopify. And welcome to the show, Jon. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at Shopify these days.
Jonathan:
Hi, Larry. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Like Larry said, I'm a senior content designer at Shopify, and what that means is in the context of my day-to-day, I work on a product known as Shop. And Shop is an order tracking and shopping app that is powered by Shopify. And so I am responsible for the core shopping experience. I partner with product designers, with our engineers, with our product managers and our UX researcher to really help people shop on the app.
Jonathan:
And so some of those surfaces I work on include the home feed, our product display pages, the bag, which is basically a cart where you can continue to check out, and also responsible for activities such as activation; helping activate new users and help them acclimate to the actual app and onboard within the first 30 days or so of their app usage or app download. Yeah, that's what I do as part of my job.
Jonathan:
And what I do a little bit on this side also in tandem with work is I work with our craft lead, Mario Ferrer, to build the content design discipline at Shop. Even though we are part of the greater content design discipline at Shopify, Shop is considered a standalone product within the greater Shopify organization. And because of that, we're able to actually shape the content design discipline the way we think best. And we've been given a lot of runway and leeway by our UX director to really build and architect the discipline in the way we think it should look and how it should actually exist. And so I've been able to help with building and crafting and creating the discipline from the ground up, and that's been really exciting and rewarding work.
Larry:
It's hard to imagine a better team than you and Mario building that kind of practice, and to be doing shopping stuff at a place called Shopify; that's pretty awesome too. Just a quick aside, I'm actually going to be in Barcelona next week, and I'm going to have lunch with Mario, so I'm really looking forward to that.
Jonathan:
Oh. Yeah. Wonderful. Oh, you guys have to send me a picture or something. I'm going to have so much FOMO, but please still make-
Larry:
Well, you should fly over and join us.
Jonathan:
I should. You're right. Let me talk to Shopify about that.
Larry:
Yeah. Hey, one thing I want to get just at the top of the episode just to really get it out of the way, but I think it's something that people will expect people like us to talk about in this day and age, there's all these layoffs going on right now and there's a lot of uncertainty and concern in the tech world about that. One of the things that occurred to me about that is that one of the things that you're well known for and that we want to talk about more later in the show is you work in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and something occurred to me this morning as I was walking into work about, holy moly, I wonder, there's so often this last in, first out in hiring and programmatic decisions, and stuff. Do you have any concern that some of the progress we've seen might be diminished by this current environment?
Jonathan:
I am concerned about it, Larry. I don't have any empirical or statistical data to back this up, but anecdotally I feel like women and people of color have been disproportionately impacted in this wave of layoffs. And I have heard stories of people who work specifically on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives being some of the first to either see their budget slash, their teams reconfigured, restructured, or their employees completely let go from the company at some of the companies I worked at previously where I was able to really dig in to some of these DEI efforts.
Jonathan:
And so I am concerned that is not a priority for a lot of companies right now. I think the primary priority is really trying to recover shareholder trust and to bump up those stock prices. And unfortunately, in the face of profit, DEI tends to get put on the back burner. And so I am worried that companies that made these really audacious and bold commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion are no longer that concerned about it.
That's not every company, of course, but I think we are, at this point, almost three years removed from George Floyd's murder where we saw this groundswell of all of a sudden people were really concerned and interested about Black lives and diversity, equity and inclusion, and there was this frenzy of commitment and interest and investment from these companies; and there was a lot of accountability. And I feel like some of that fervor has faded. We just don't see companies making those kind of bold claims anymore.
Jonathan:
There are some who have been on this track before George Floyd, Ben and Jerry's being one of my favorite examples. Talk about a brand that's been like for Black lives for a very long time. But I think some of those organizations that may be, in my mind, were Johnny come latelys in 2020 and were just waking up to the fact that, "Oh, you know what? Being Black in America actually is different. There are two Americas, actually. What do you know?" I feel like they are probably the first to revert back to form because now they're really just trying to hold on and weather the economics and what we find ourselves in. I am very concerned about it.
Jonathan:
Without giving away too much, I guess, of the secret sauce, at Shopify, when I first joined and onboarded to the company, I was able to partner with the person who recruited me, actually. And we worked intently to ensure that the interviewing pipeline for content design, for the Shopify content design discipline in particular was more diversified, that we had more Black and brown candidates in that pipeline. And it worked. We saw more Black content designer specifically onboard in 2022. And while the numbers weren't that great to begin with, they did increase, and it was almost doubled. Again, not great numbers. It's the difference between three and six, but still it was an increase nonetheless. And so our efforts did yield some fruit, but now we're in a place even where it's like, okay, that's not at the top of the list right now. Again, without trying to give away too much, because I don't want Shopify to come after me, I think that that is maybe just one example that I can speak to of shifting priorities, for sure.
Larry:
Couple things about that. One is more just an observation, that in addition to the awareness that arose from the George Floyd murder and the ensuing action, there's also just a lot of evidence, scientific business evidence that diversity and inclusion make for better business results. There's that, to keep that in mind. And I know that you're not going to quit doing this work, so what can we do now doing more with less? What's our path forward, I guess, in that regard?
Jonathan:
I think it's really grabbing and bending the ears of leadership,
