This piece was first published on the SAP Community blog. Authors Julia Chistiakova, Christopher Johns, Amy Sanders, Megan Lewis, Jennifer Uhrig are members of the RTI International All of Us Innovator Team.
RTI International is an independent nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving the human condition. We are committed to applying principles of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging across every function of our organization and in our research process.
Our approach to developing digital solutions is equity-centered, culturally responsive, and evidence-based. Our co-creation process engages the people our solutions are being developed for throughout research, design, delivery, and evaluation, drawing on principles from human-centered design and developmental evaluation. Co-creation and user testing is central to our approach because centering the voices and lived experiences of community members who have historically been excluded from the research process is essential — innovation, creativity, and progress are best achieved when we include diversity of thought, perspectives, and experiences.
We use the SAP Scenes storyboarding tools to develop visual concept cards that represent the digital product ideas that emerge from our co-creation process. Then, we get feedback on the idea cards from community members during user testing. The visuals that Scenes allows us to create helps us rapidly align and iterate on our concepts.
One challenge our team faced was that the existing Scenes portfolio did not include characters that are culturally responsive to community members who collaborate with us, and for whom the digital products are being developed. To address this challenge, we collaborated with community members and multicultural communication experts at RTI to create a diversity and inclusion add-on to the SAP Scenes library. The diversity and inclusion add-on features characters who represent members of the Hispanic or Latino, African American, and LGBTQIA+ communities and their intersections.
