Designing for People you didn't know existed
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Last week a few of us from SEEK went to UX Australia, a conference dedicated to all things user experience. I gave a 10-minute talk at UX Australia which was recorded and will eventually be available but in the mean time here’s the slides. Blog post about the topic available: http://www.kaylaheffernan.com/blog/2015/8/21/designing-for-people-you-didnt-know-existed https://medium.com/@kaylajheffernan/designing-for-people-you-didn-t-know-existed-9b2398377193
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Designing for People you didn't know existed
- 1. Designing for People you didn’t know existed Kayla J Heffernan | UX Designer
- 2. Kayla Heffernan UX Designer @ SEEK & PhD Candidate @kaylajheffernan
- 3. You are not the user
- 4. So how do you design for people you might not know exist?
- 5. Gender ! = Sex @kaylajheffernan
- 6. There are > 2 genders @kaylajheffernan
- 7. People have families different from yours @kaylajheffernan
- 8. People have relationships different from yours @kaylajheffernan
- 9. Women can be doctors @kaylajheffernan
- 10. People wear things you don’t @kaylajheffernan
- 11. I is a valid surname @kaylajheffernan
- 12. Joe is also a valid name @kaylajheffernan
- 13. Deaf people have a language @kaylajheffernan
- 14. People can have > 1 ‘impairment’ @kaylajheffernan
- 15. Okay, you probably knew most of these people exist
- 16. Discovering & remembering to design for people outside your umwelt*. * The world as it is experienced by a particular organism
- 17. Stop & think about inclusive design
- 18. Get out there and meet different people
- 21. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone!
- I’m Kayla - I’m a UX designer at SEEK. Since this is a 10 minute talk there are no questions but feel free to tweet at me.
- By now we all know we are not the user, it has been drilled in to us enough times. Not all users are going to fit in to the designers view of the world.
- So how do you design for people you might not know exist? By learning from examples where people who most certainly DO exist were not considered in the design.
- Lesson 1. Gender and sex are not the same thing. Gender is a social construct of cultural or learned significance while sex is a biological feature – the chromosomes you happen to have in your genome XX or XY. This app is asking for gender because it is important for establishing calories and nutrient goals. False, sex is important for establishing calories and nutrient goals. If I am genetically female but identify as male, I probably still have higher calcium needs that this app should tell me.
- Following on from that – there are more than 2 genders. People don’t fit into little boxes of male or female. Transexual and intersexual people exist and we’re too often not designing for them. You might not have known before today that there are more than 2 genders. As a younger designer I had a persona template that said “Gender: Skews female” and I was shot down but the developers and told that there are only 2 genders. Cut to last year, after meeting and becoming friends with a person transitioning, I fought to implement a non-specific gender in a system. Also, this. Hell no. At least male isn’t blue and female isn’t pink, but what is this iconography? Females wear skimpy undies? No.
- Not all families have a father and a mother. Both of these fields are mandatory and people may not be able to answer this. I might not know my father, I might have 2 mothers. I’ve seen versions that say male and female guardian, because same sex couples don’t exist? Same sex couples have so much trouble with forms that specify mother and father. Similarly I am my nieces god father because of course the catholic church forms are not gender neutral.
- Sorry for the quality of this image, Facebook used to not let you be in a relationship with someone who was your relation. Whatever you think of cousins dating cousins, there are many places in the world that this is legal. I know that this constraint has been removed because while trying to get a better quality screen shot I very awkwardly sent a relationship request to my uncle.
- So women can be doctors now, we have been able to since 1849, but apparently the only valid combination here is Dr & Mrs? Which to be fair could be two women, but I doubt this form which doesn’t include Ms or any female to female titles means that. I believe Messrs can refer to two males, which is fine but multiples miss or mrs ‘ es aren't.
- How often do you see an avatar with the option to wear a niqab? Or hijab? People wear them, regardless of whether the PM feels threatened by them or not .
- I have a friend with the surname I. Legally, on his birth certificate. He has to give a fake name on Facbeook, which breaks their real name policy but they implemented this. People with spaces or apostophes in their names also come across systems that wont accept their names
- And apparently so does Joe. I find it hard to believe that this form was designed by an organization that knew now joe’s, sue’s, tim’s, pat’s, tom’s… you get the point
- Deaf people have a language too, other than English. It’s called Auslan and there are so many times when you cannot enter it in to systems. And this is not language preference, obviously you cant set system languages to Auslan, this is showcasing what languages you can speak and it’s not an option.
- And what presentation on learning from bad examples would be complete without Melbourne’s infamous Myki. The new myki readers have you touch on on the only screen, which means you obscure the screen. The only feedback is this single light turning orange or green, which of course colour blind people can’t have, and a beep. So too bad if you are colour blind and deaf, or like so many commuters have your headphones in.
- Okay, you probably knew most of these people exist
- Perhaps I should have called my talk Discovering & remembering to design for people outside your umwelt*. Umwelt being one of those awesome German words that don’t translate in to English, this one meaning the world as it is experience by a particular organism. So how do we discover & remember to design for people outside your umwelt, your bubble, your ivory tower?
- Stop and think about inclusive design. Do I know these people exist and I just forgot about them? Did I forget about Dre (another three letter name that our form doesn’t think is acceptable)
- Get out there and meet different people. Learn about people you didn’t know existed! By meeting different people I didn’t only learn that transgender people existed but I developed empathy for their struggles in design and became an advocate for them. When you know a same sex couple, a Dr & Dr living together, a deaf person, you notice when your designs aren’t including them.
- Pay attention to the hashtags of tweet-avists, that’s twitter activists who are very vocal about products being exist, gender discriminatory, not support equal rights for the LGBTQ community and probably people I don’t even know about yet
- When all else fails – rule 34. Now I’m going to use the PG version, “if you can think of it, a sub-reddit already exists for it”. Google is your friend. I was once working on a system that would not accept non-alpha characters in a name field, so I googled it and sure enough there is a guy who has changed his name legally by depol to . Com. As in period com.
- Good afternoon everyone!