Color-Brave Parenting: Unveiling Needs with EmbraceRace
For the last decade, EmbraceRace has been creating resources, guidance, and a community for parents who want their kids to go beyond being colorblind and become “color brave” around race.
As the world has shifted and more and more folks join the cause, EmbraceRace found it’s time to reimagine its website in an approach that centers parents and educators on their learning journey. So what would a human-centered approach be?
Offering
Project-based Design Research and Strategy
Client
EmbraceRace
Approach
Reroot created a project team for this work over 5 months. We created and ran a 400+ response survey to gather qualitative and quantitative data, interviewed 18 parents and educators, and conducted a validation survey to ensure the findings remained true to our participants’ intentions.
Demographic diversity in recruiting was a critical component of this project. As such, we collaborated closely with EmbraceRace to identify which key journeys they want to support and which they view as outside their expertise. We then used our survey data as well as personal networks to make sure we considered diversity across: adults race, kids’ race, location, income, educational attainment, and engagement with EmbraceRace.
Key Questions
When the founders started EmbraceRace in 2016, the conversation around race in the US looked radically different than in 2023. As such, we wanted to reroot back to basics to understand:
What is drawing parents and educators to this work now?
What do they view as successes?
Where are they struggling?
What needs remain unfilled?
Early survey data was used to identify key characteristics about the EmbraceRace community, some of which they wanted to keep, and some of which, like educational attainment, signified a space to focus on regarding accessibility.
We used Mural to collaboratively create and determine which personas are key focuses for EmbraceRace. First, we identified some core personas, then tried applying them to real people. In the end, we asked each team member to select their four more important personas and their reasoning, in order to help the founders collaboratively decide on a direction.
Process
The core of our qualitative research happened in hour-long interviews with parents and educators. We used trauma-informed design practices to make the space one where participants felt safe to share and go deep. This included allowing participants to pick which researchers were present, setting clear quote options, and being clear with our intentions from the start.
During the synthesis of the interviews, we focused on the needs each participant mentioned and ultimately created 12 need statements to validate. Those need statements were built into a Typeform survey that allowed us to collect qualitative feedback as well as quantitative numbers on the alignment and importance of each need. Out of our 14 original participants, 8 chose to validate their findings, and we interviewed 4 new adults to validate as well.
Needs were tabulated and assessed to determine key patterns and categories
Outcome
We ultimately created key insights and a foundational framework focused on parents’ needs and interaction modality for EmbraceRace’s use. The framework allows them to continue supporting a wide range of needs without getting lost creating work that doesn’t resonate. We also developed core opportunity areas to allow for expansion.
The framework and needs will be used to develop actionable product suggestions and directions in the next phase of work.