An Event Apart: “Compassionate Design”

Eric Meyer speaking at An Event Apart Orlando 2016 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World on October 5, 2016.

Designers are skilled at creating an ideal experience for idealized users. But what happens when our idealized experience collides with messy, human reality? Designs can frustrate, alienate, or even offend; form options can exclude; on-boarding processes can turn away; interactions can reject or even endanger. The more we build websites and digital products that touch every aspect of our lives, the more critical it becomes for us to start designing for imperfect, distressed, and vulnerable situations—designing interfaces that don’t attempt to make everything seamless, but instead embrace and accommodate the rough edges of the human experience. In this talk, Eric will explore a wide variety of failure modes, from the small to the life-changing, and show how reorienting your perspective and making simple additions to your process can help anticipate and avoid these failures, leading to more humane, and ultimately more compassionate, outcomes.

Notes

  • Facebook year in review
    • Who is this for? People who had a great year and want to share it — they didn’t think of any other test cases
    • We have all had this tunnel vision — we become so focused on an ideal outcome that we forget
  • Imagine a user
    • What gender are they? What race? What age? What do they want? How do they feel?
    • We tend to imagine users who are just like us
    • What if you’re wrong?
    • It’s easy to be wrong; it’s easy to think of someone just like you
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
    • System 1 vs. system 2 thinking
  • Plan for the worst
    • What do we do if something goes horribly wrong? What could we do to prevent that?
    • What’s the worst thing that can happen? And now, what’s worse than that?
    • We are not thinking through our decisions
    • By planning for the worst we can actually be our best
    • Tips:
      • Prioritize helpful, realistic estimates
      • Provide at-a-glance help
      • Use plain language
      • Write for the urgent case
    • When we use “edge case” we are marginalizing certain situations
    • Don’t think edge case, think stress case
  • Identify assumptions
    • Do a premortum — Harvard Business Review – “Performing a Project Premortem”
      • “A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure.”
    • Have someone be a designated dissenter
      • “At every step, they find the assumptions and subvert them… For the next project,
        however, someone else must become the Designated Dissenter.” — Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher
      • It’s critical that different people get to take the role from project to project
      • Everyone gets a chance to try this; it then becomes second nature
  • Communicate intent
    • Be clear about everything we do
  • Consider the context
    • Simple
    • Mail Chimp
      • “Before you write for MailChimp, it’s important to think about our readers. Though our voice doesn’t change much, our tone adapts to our users’ feelings.”
      • Voice and Tone
      • “We focus on clarity over cleverness and personality. We are not in an industry that is associated with crisis, but we don’t know what our readers and customers are going through. And our readers and customers are people. They could be in an emergency and they still have to use the internet.” — Kate Kiefer-Lee
      • “My Favorite Editing Tip: Read It Aloud” by Kate Kiefer Lee
  • Value users/people
    • Every interaction is personal
    • “People get incredibly frustrated if they feel like they have to lie. If you have a required set of questions, they have to give an answer, and it makes people feel uncomfortable when they don’t know and have to make something up. We don’t want people to have to tell us information they don’t have, and people will have different limits about what they are comfortable sharing” — Kate Brigham
    • Forms That Work
      • The Question Protocol
        • Who within your organization uses the answer?
        • What do they use the answers for?
        • Is an answer is required or optional?
        • If an answer is required, what happens if a user lies just to get through the form?
      • “A question protocol can help to create a discussion about the true business value of each question a web form asks. If you know exactly what decision your organization will make based on the data a web form collects, you can quantify the value of that decision and weigh it against the cost of collecting the data.”
  • Making the case
    • Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you receive
      • Be conservative in what you ask users
      • Be liberal in what you let users do on your site
      • Don’t make forms too picky
    • Only 3 viable business cases to do anything:
      • It will make money
      • It will save money
      • It will decrease risk
    • Slack
      • Every employee takes a turn on customer support channels
      • Empathy, compassion
      • “One way that empathy manifests itself is courtesy… It’s not just about having a veneer of politeness, but actually trying to anticipate someone else’s needs and meeting them in advance.” — Stewart Butterfield
    • gov.uk
    • Try recording a video of users using your product, and then show it to the stakeholders
  • “There’s actually a much deeper level of [empathy] that you would call compassion. What that means is that you have genuine emotional feeling for the struggles that someone is going through and you are spontaneously moved to help them because you feel them.” — Karen McGrane
  • Make a habit of being compassionate in what we do
  • Sometimes we are going to miss the mark—that’s being human

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