Intersectional HCI on a Budget: An Analytical Approach Powered by Types

Intersectional HCI recognizes that humans' interconnected social identities shape their experiences with technology. However, intersectional HCI requires extensive resources, such as access to intersectional populations, which many HCI practitioners may lack. For these practitioners, we present an analytical approach to bring intersectional lenses to HCI practices. The approach uses types—not at the level of identities, but at the level of personal traits drawn from foundational research. We first formally prove that certain analytical methods for detecting inclusivity issues can be meaningfully composed to provide equitable consideration of typically overlooked populations; then present four design use-cases to illustrate what the approach brings to HCI practices; and then empirically investigated one of the four use-cases with 24 HCI participants. Results show that practitioners using the compositional approach detected even more intersectional inclusivity problems than those using a complementary intersectional approach.