Toward an Actionable Socioeconomic-Aware HCI
This work tackles socioeconomic inequities in technology experiences for HCI researchers and practitioners, offering actionable tools to mitigate biases.
The paper addresses socioeconomic inequities in user experiences by synthesizing research into six evidence-based SES facets and introduces SocioeconomicMag, a structured method for HCI practitioners to incorporate socioeconomic awareness into their work.
Although inequities for individuals in different socioeconomic situations are starting to capture widespread attention, less attention has been given to the socioeconomic inequities that saturate socioeconomic-diverse individuals' user experiences. To enable HCI practitioners to attend to such inequities and avoid unwittingly introducing them, in this paper we consider a wide body of research relevant to how an individual's socioeconomic status (SES) can affect their user experiences with technology. We synthesize this foundational research to produce a core set of 6 evidence-based SES "facets" (attribute types and value ranges) that directly relate to user experiences for individuals in different SES strata. We then harness these SES facets to produce actionable paths forward -- including a new structured method we call SocioeconomicMag -- by which HCI researchers and practitioners can bring new socioeconomic-aware practices into their everyday HCI work.