HmntyCntrd book club picks: let’s talk books, design, and what it means to be truly human-centered in UX.

Design books are great for learning practical and theoretical things about technology and design. But they are not the best at teaching us to be more human-centered in our work as UX professionals.

Why? Two reasons, mainly:

• Most of the widely recommended UX and design books are written by majority white/allocishet/abled/Western/middle or upper class authors. We can hardly become more human-centered if we center the experience and knowledge of a very homogenous group who holds the most power in tech when learning about fundamental practices and frameworks of design.
• Authors of design books don’t typically set out to question the way our world works, they just aim to teach us how to design within established systems. But the systems of the world are created to maintain inequality and concentrate power, and being human-centered requires being intentional about transforming and dismantling the status quo.

So, to address the above, we need to:

1. Center the knowledge and expertise of people whose voices are historically underrepresented in design and tech;
2. Learn more about the way the world works and how the harmful systems of the world (like white supremacy or global racial capitalism) are created, maintained, and reproduced.

Reading can be one of the ways to do both of these things.

HmntyCntrd book club: A different kind of UX book club

Centering underrepresented voices and learning more about the world outside of tech is what we set out to do with HmntyCntrd Book Club.

Some books are recommended by community members and some we vote on, but overall we try to be intentional about what books we pick up to ensure each one fits at least some of the following criteria:

• Non-fiction;
• Non-design / non-UX;
• Can help us be more human-centered in our work;
• Written by author(s) underrepresented in publishing (e.g. authors of color, LGBTQIA+, disabled, Global South, etc);
• Not published by the “Big 5” (Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster);
• Not on a list of best-selling books for any given year.

With those guidelines in mind, here are the 10 books we ended up reading and discussing over the course of the past year.

Book 1: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Free course| Interview with the author (video)

Big thanks to Moon Moua for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.

Why you can learn from this book:

Trauma is a protective mechanism used by the body to stop or protect itself from potential damage.

“…trauma is a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.”
 — Chapter 1. Your Body and Blood

White-body supremacy doesn’t just live in our conscious brains, it lives in our bodies and is being passed down over generations through the millennia of white-on-white violence resulting in racialized trauma. To begin to heal and unlearn the white-body supremacy, we need to address the trauma in our own bodies. Resma Menakem talks about how the pain of that healing process is inevitable, but we can choose the clean pain of growth over the dirty pain of avoidance, blame and denial. Read this book to learn more about how we can all start to heal from racialized trauma and the white-body supremacy.

Something to think about as UX professionals:

Trauma as a response to real or perceived danger is stored in our bodies, and the safety of trust is also physical: how do we then facilitate trust in remote research where we can’t physically connect with our participants, or when working with participants of a different race?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Locating racialized trauma in our cultural upbringings; racial liminal spaces; inheriting racialized trauma.

Book 2: Design for Cognitive Bias by David Dylan Thomas

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Podcast

Big thanks to Drew Bromfield for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.

What you can learn from this book:

About 95% of cognition happens below the threshold of conscious thought. A lot of this cognition happens through mental shortcuts meant to save us time & effort. However, some shortcuts lead to errors — cognitive biases. The book examines different kinds of biases and how we as designers and professionals might be susceptible to them.

“…the next time someone asks you why you did something, the most honest answer you can give is “How the hell should I know?” (Keep in mind this is also true when you ask your users why they do what they do.)”
 — Chapter 1. What is Bias?

Something to think about as UX professionals:

What are the biased practices that we employ in our everyday work? How do we uncover and mitigate user, stakeholder, and our own bias as designers and UX professionals?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

The “bandwagon effect” bias and the importance of considering the racialized/gendered/ableist component of dissent while providing a safe environment for criticism that respects people’s boundaries and effort; general lack of ethical accountability in design and tech; tech unions.

Book 3: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Author reading and discussion (video)

Big thanks to Mina Karusala for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.

What you can learn from this book:

The book explores the relationship between disability justice and care work, from members of the disability communities establishing mutual aid based care webs to how conference and event organizing needs to take into account different access needs. Drawing on their experience organizing in QTBIPOC disabled and chronically ill communities, the author explores important issues like pain, unequal emotional labor, and the sustainability of anti-ableist futures. It stresses the importance of shifting our understanding of care from an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility.

Something to think about as UX professionals:

How can we center the leadership and wisdom of SDQTBIPOC (Sick, Disabled, Queer, Trans, Black and Indigenous People of Color) in design and a11y work?

“I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life — dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way.”
 — Cripping the Apocalypse. Some of my Wild Disability Justice Dreams

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Mutual aid and care webs; how non-disabled folks dominate the field of accessibility work; the political language surrounding disability.

Book 4: Identity Capitalists: How the Powerful Exploit Diversity and What It Means for the Rest of Us by Nancy Leong

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Podcast | Interview with the author (article)

Big thanks to Elysa Smigielski for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.

What you can learn from this book:

The book defines identity capitalism as people and institutions benefiting from the identity of those not in power. For example, white DEI leaders or design managers in power showcasing their affiliations with members of historically marginalized groups so they can be perceived as allies without doing anything of substance to change the realities of white supremacy.

“Identity capitalism is not about promoting tolerance, diversity, inclusion, or equality. It’s about self-interest and power.”
 — Introduction. Getting Used

Something to think about as UX professionals:

How does design and tech as an industry weaponize diversity and conversations about diversity to gain the social benefits associated with it without doing any of the difficult work required to make actual substantive progress?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

How the dominant culture benefits from policy; the ingroup — the group that controls power and resources vs. the outgroup — the group, often a numerical minority, without access to the ingroup’s power and resources and often the source of ingroup’s benefits; who is an identity entrepreneur.

Book 5: Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Interview with the author (article)

What you can learn from this book:

Borders are not an ontological category, but are created & maintained by the state to:

• consolidate racial-capitalist, border imperialist, colonial, and nationalist rule;
• create hierarchical social ordering based on racial exclusion;
• manage the flow of the capital;
• control the labor & divide the international working class via organization of difference (migrant/refugee status, race, gender, class etc).

Refugees and migrants who are the least responsible for poverty, wars, and climate crisis are disproportionately displaced by them and then face exclusion and criminalization in the countries that created the conditions for their displacement in the first place.

“Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.”
 — Conclusion

Something to think about as UX professionals:

What are the many ways in which tech companies are complicit in reproducing external and internal borders (creating the tools of surveillance, outsourcing, exploitation)?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Urban policy and gentrification as factors influencing the removal and fleeing of people; land grabbing and weaponizing citizenship; temporary labour migration as discussed in the book vs. the concept of ghost work in the book by Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri.

Book 6: Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Podcast | Interview with the author (article)

Big thanks to Lindsay Miller for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.

What you can learn from this book:

The book discusses the history of wild foods — from lobsters and sea turtles to game meat and bird’s nests. Foraged and wild-caught ingredients have become fads in the modern culinary world. But what do they represent in our lives? Are they a way for the postindustrial world to reconnect with nature or just another way for the privileged to fetishize poverty and survival? Gina Rae La Cerva looks into our fascination with wild foods and the implications of treating them as status symbols.

“We are comforted by the dullness that comes with domestication, but we crave the flavors of the wild. There is infinite anguish to live in such contradiction. But it is all we have. It is our most beautiful flaw. To be both mortal and godly, element and subject, body and mind.”
 — Chapter 10. Wild Grass

Something to think about as UX professionals:

The author, who is an anthropologist, used provocative research methods and storytelling in this book. How can we be more intentional in how we interpret research data and allow our stakeholders to consume it?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Research ethics of the author getting involved with one of the respondents; the complexity, history and terminology of “poaching” vs. “conservation”; commodification of restaurant culture and our emotional journey as food consumers.

Book 7: Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Talk by the author (video)

Big thanks to Marcela Musgrove for suggesting this book & to Elysa Smigielski for facilitating our discussion.

What you can learn from this book:

What is the role of technology in social change? Using his experience at Microsoft creating technology for “international development”, Kentaro Toyama introduces the law of amplification — technology serving only as an amplifier of pre-existing human capacities and intentions — and argues that even in our age of advanced technology, social progress depends on human change.

“…throwing gadgets at social problems isn’t effective.”
 — Chapter 2. The Law of Amplification

Something to think about as UX professionals:

What social issues (if any) we can and can’t solve with technological solutions?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

The problems of the One Laptop program implementation in India and Latin America; the role of participatory design in using technological solutions to address social issues.

Book 8: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (ed. by Alice Wong)

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Podcast

What you can learn from this book:

Through an intersectional & disability justice lens, the book discusses many different aspects of disability and inclusion, and how all of those things function on the intersection of other identities (race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on).

The essays in the book cover a range of topics that are grouped into 4 different sections:

• Being: Disability x Identity and different aspects of it, including institutional ableism and exclusion (especially medical ableism).
• Becoming: changing societal perception and representation of disability, taking a look at different narratives surrounding disability.
• Doing: how disability shapes and transforms other experiences: work, school, city living, communication.
• Connecting: connections inside the disability community and connecting other social justice movements to disability justice.

Something to think about as UX professionals:

How do we ensure the disabled community takes control of the narrative surrounding disability in design, especially a11y efforts? How do we center disabled and queer people of color in our work?

“The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos. The history of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs.”
 — To Survive Climate Catastrpohe, Look to Queer and Disabled Folks. Patty Berne, as told to and edited by Vanessa Raditz

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Bringing awareness of disability and highlighting the joy of the disabled community through art and media; social and medical interpretations of disability and defining what the cure is; community building and disabled ancestors.

Book 9: Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Podcast | Author event (video)| NYT review (article)

What you can learn from this book:

In this book, Ijeoma Oluo walks us through the history of America’s political, economic, and educational systems to expose the myth of meritocracy. For Oluo, the maintenance of these violent and unequal systems is rooted in white male “mediocrity.” What is the role of mediocrity in white manhood and how does it maintain racial power?

Because society uplifts and centers white men in all areas of social and political life, it also elevates incompetence. As a result, many white men have the expectation that they shouldn’t have to struggle like others, and the violation of this expectation leads to violence — both the violence they inflict on others (like mass shooters) and on themselves, with suicide rates being the highest amongst white men.

“By defining greatness as a white man’s birthright, we immediately divorce it from real, quantifiable greatness — greatness that benefits, greatness that creates.”
 — Introduction. Works According to Design

Something to think about as UX professionals:

How does maintaining the racial power of white male supremacy manifest in design? Take a look at both the language we use professionally (for example, violent metaphors like “war room” or “north star”) and all the ways the industry leaders resist being held accountable.

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

How our language reflects the ideas of white meritocracy; proximity to power & allies; white men in social justice movements and Bernie Bros.

Book 10: Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell

Purchase the book

Additional resources: Panel with the author (video) | Podcast

What you can learn from this book:

In this book, Purnell argues that policing cannot be reformed because it is not a broken institution; instead, policing is an institution that is effectively executing its original purpose.

“Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.”
 — Introduction. How I Became a Police Abolitionist

Through Purnell’s own personal journey of becoming an abolitionist, the book explores how the work of forging abolitionist futures is much broader than just elimination of any one particular system or institution (police, prison industrial complex, capital punishment, etc). Purnell establishes abolition as building responses to harm in society that are rooted in community and accountability, and as an opportunity to eliminate harm in the first place.

Something to think about as UX professionals:

What could be the role of technology in an abolitionist future? How can technology and design assist on scaling down the harms from the carceral system, policing and other violent institutions today?

What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:

Spaces that are coded as reformative and progressive but aren’t; how accountability without punishment could look like under abolition; imagining abolitionists futures (you can’t build what you can’t imagine).

Bonus: Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer’s) Head: Unraveling the Links Between Design and Policing by By Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis

For a bonus session, we also met to discuss an article by Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis that critically examines the connections between design and policing, from designers creating the tools of policing like various surveillance technologies to using and reproducing ideologies of policing in design.

First rule of book club: DO talk about book club

If some of the books on this list look interesting to you, I hope you pick them up. But I also hope that if you read any of these or other books that talk about social issues, you don’t just stop at reading. Share your learnings with others: your family, friends, and colleagues. Discuss them together. Question things you were taught based on the new things you learn. Think about how you can implement your learnings in your everyday work.

Let’s start with reading and learning, and continue by challenging the status quo together.

Neither this article nor the book club itself would be possible without Alba Villamil, the book club co-founder and our note-taker, and Vivianne Castillo, the founder of HmntyCntrd. Huge thanks to both of them for their stellar leadership and championing humanity in tech, always.

Hi, I’m Anna, a product designer by day and a book nerd by night. I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion here on Medium. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

10 books to help you be more human-centered in your work was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One hot discussion on Twitter these days (especially in the design/tech parts of it) is Twitter itself. All the buzz is about Twitter’s new look. The update includes:

• New font — Chirp;
• Higher contrast (new high contrast/less blue colours, as well as high contrast buttons);
• Clearing up visual clutter (some grey backgrounds, dividers, etc).

As is usual with all things new, some love it, some hate it.

But those less happy with the new update have raised very valid and important concerns about who it prioritizes vs. who it excludes.

Accessibility for all… or is it?

An important aspect of the new update is that it’s presented as not just a visual facelift, but an accessibility improvement.

Is it, though? Let’s take a deeper look.

New font

The new font, Chirp, was introduced back in January, but has only been used as a part of the larger Twitter brand until now (in promotional materials, etc). This week it finally reached everyone’s screens in-product.

One great thing about Chirp is that it seems to be more readable for some folks with dyslexia , which is definitely an accessibility win.

However, not everyone with dyslexia finds the new font easy to read. This might be due to its unbalanced kerning across platforms that makes the letters seem ‘glued’, as well as the lack of ClearType support which makes the rendering of the font look even worse for Windows users (leading some to speculate that this new change might have only been tested on MacOS/iOS).

Apart from issues it creates for dyslexic users, those regularly suffering from migraines have shared that the font can make them physically unwell, triggering migraines, vertigo, or a feeling of seasickness when scrolling the TL.

Whether this problem is also caused by issues with kerning/lack of ClearType support or by the composition of the font itself remains unclear (and it’s not a question I’m qualified to answer, so I’ll leave a deeper investigation to typographers).

High contrast

Sufficient contrast is one of the requirements of the Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines, so one would presume that the more contrast between the foreground vs. the background, the better.

However, the contrast can be too high in some cases. People with dyslexia have shown to be able to read faster when color pairs have lower contrasts, plus high contrast is known to hurt people with photosensitivity & chronic pain (I can attest to that myself as someone who is suffering from a combination of photosensitivity and migraines).

There is a system-wide high contrast mode available for both Windows and MacOS, but it would be strange if it would be forced on all users by default, with no alternative, as it clearly doesn’t work for everyone. It is equally as strange for a large social media platform like Twitter to do it. Just like with an operating system, users can be expected to spend a large amount of time on the platform, so staring at something that triggers your photosensitivity or chronic pain is less than ideal.

Does all of the above mean that Twitter’s new update is bad? No. I think it’s awesome that they’re continuously working to improve the app’s accessibility and some issues were definitely addressed with this release.

But…

How does an accessibility update make the product less accessible for some users?

There are too many different access needs & ways they combine for different people to accommodate everyone with a very specific set of accessibility improvements designed to only address certain types of access, especially when those ‘improvements’ are forced across the board at a very large scale.

I think there’s a lesson we can learn from the gaming industry and their approach to accessibility when it comes to accommodating for different needs.

The Last of Us 2

The Last of Us 2, released by Naughty Dog in 2020, is the best example of accessibility in gaming to date.

With more than 60 (!) different accessibility settings, the player can navigate the game almost exclusively by sound, remap every button on their controller or keyboard, or play the entirety of the game one-handed.

While you can read an in-detail breakdown of all accessibility settings in the game, what The Last of Us 2 creators did extremely well was not succumbing to the idea of ‘accessibility modes’.

Initially, the team at Naughty Dog planned to have modes that covered specific areas. There would be one for hearing impaired users, for instance, and another for issues around motor control. The idea being that you switch on that mode and all of the related features will be enabled. “Instantly we got feedback that ‘this is not what we want,’” Gallant explains. “‘We want to be able to dig into the menus, fine-tune things, adjust things, really get into the nitty-gritty of what these options mean.’”

The designers had to give up their nice, tidy menus in favor of something a little messier. Diving into the accessibility menu in The Last of Us Part II is almost overwhelming, with so many toggles and siders to choose from.

- The Verge

Making all of the accessibility settings fully customizable and open to fine-tuning by the player allowed everyone to find the perfect combination of options for their individual access needs. It removed barriers for many who wouldn’t be able to experience the game at all otherwise, but also allowed others to just make their gameplay experience more comfortable.

If Naughty Dog made the game high contrast for all the players and called it a day, it would probably not be dubbed ‘the most accessible game ever.’

Customization is key at such a large scale

There is no one size fits all when it comes to accessibility. Instead of choosing who to prioritize and counting tradeoffs for certain choices like universal high contrast mode, the obvious solution would be to let the user choose.

Twitter already lets its users customize the look of the app to a degree, so adding more variables to the customization menu to accommodate for more accessibility needs feels like a natural progression.

High contrast mode & colour palette could be added to the variety of display modes (‘Default’, ‘Dim’, and ‘Lights out’) already available to Twitter users.

Chirp could be a part of a wider selection of fonts for the app. We already know that the old font (was that Helvetica?) worked well for those users who are prone to migraines — so letting everyone choose between the old vs. the new font would be a great option for a start.

Similar approach can be taken with any accessibility work at a large scale. There is no blanket ‘accessibility mode’ or ‘accessibility setting’ (save for basic compliance) that will fit everyone’s needs. Giving the user full control to set up what works best for them is always the better choice.

Hi, I’m Anna, a product designer by day and a book nerd by night. I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion here on Medium. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Twitter’s new font and Last of Us 2: an accessibility lesson to be learned was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The term ‘human-centered’ does not apply anymore.

Many of us on social media got to witness Robinhood abandoning its brand message AND its users to protect the hedge funds and the rich. This situation, while perhaps shocking to some, is not at all surprising to those of us who were watching the collapse of ethics in the tech industry closely.

The time has come to face that with the way we do things in tech, the term ‘human-centered’ does not apply.

The product that boasted “democratising investment” bailed on its users to make sure it doesn’t turn away potential investors before IPO. At that point, all the design practices considered to be ‘user-centered’ and ‘human-centered’ that the app itself implements ceased to matter.

No matter how intuitive and well-designed Robinhood’s interface and interactions are, how friendly the voice and tone of its content, how well researched the needs of its audience — it has failed all of its users.

That’s because all of the above:

• great interaction design,
• great UI design,
• great content strategy,
• great UX research & more,

— are not what makes truly human-centered design.

We see how all of these things can be implemented well and the product STILL fails its users and the society at large in a very fundamental way, because instead of protecting the interests of its users it chooses to protect the interests of the business.

That’s all our design truly is: business-centered. Not human-centered.

Business-centered vs. Human-centered

Let me further stress this: if our products don’t put the interests of humans (and I mean all humans) above the interests of business, our products are not human-centered. Simple as that.

The fact that the UI of your app is clean and pretty means nothing in terms of being truly human-centered. The fact that you have a very thorough and robust design system means nothing either. Neither does the ease with which the users can navigate your app. Don’t even get me started on ‘delight’.

If a product has the potential to turn around and harm both its user as an individual & the society at large in a very fundamental way, all of the ‘good’ design practices might not even be there.

Choosing profit over humans will always end up in business-centered design.

Human-centred design has to do what it claims to do: put humans first. That means putting the users of your product first, but also putting non-users who might be impacted by your product first, as well as the society that all those humans live in, and the planet they occupy.

This means several things for us, the designers.

I. We need to be radically inclusive and actively antiracist

Radical inclusion means making sure our products make space for people of all races, gender identities, sexual orientations, abilities, nationalities, levels of income. It means always educating ourselves about things that are outside of our personal experience, about systemic injustices and global issues.

On the other hand, radical inclusion means making sure people from underrepresented groups have decision-making power in our design process. That they are included not only as participants in user interviews and usability tests, but as members of design and management teams.

Prioritising inclusion also means that true human-centered design has to be actively anti-racist, and that in turn means that it has to be abolitionist, because all capitalism is racial capitalism, and racial capitalism is built on mass incarceration. I use ‘abolition’ in a broader sense here, as Ruth Gilmore Wilson describes it: abolition that aims to remove conditions that lead to structural injustice, that in turn lead to mass incarceration.

“Abolition seeks to undo the way of thinking and doing things that sees prison and punishment as solutions for all kinds of social, economic, political, behavioural and interpersonal problems. Abolition though is not simply decarceration (put everybody out on the street), it is reorganising how we live our lives together in the world.”
— Ruth Gilmore Wilson

Another important aspect of inclusion is, of course, accessibility. Too often conversations about accessibility on the business side are phrased in terms of legal compliance. But accessibility should be a goal in itself. If we’re building something, everyone should be able to use it, perceive it, understand it. Otherwise, we are engaging in politics of exclusion.

Which leads me to the second principle of true human-centered design:

II. We have to get political

Amongst other things, human-centered design has to admit to being political, because all design is inherently political. We’ve seen it many times in the past, and we see it again with the Robinhood example above: tech products and the way they are designed have a very real impact on our economy, society, environment. “Tech is NOT neutral nor is it apolitical”, as is one of the guiding principles of #causeascene / #AntiracistEconomist by Kim Crayton.

We need to get as comfortable talking about politics in our design teams as we are talking about prototyping and roadmaps.

If we choose to ignore the political aspect of design, it means our design only serves the existing political system and those in power. It means all we are doing is designing for the privileged and protecting the interests of the business & the rich, while leaving the rest of society to deal with potential consequences of our choices. There’s nothing human-centered about that. It’s time we as an industry face that.

Speaking of potential consequences of our choices:

III. We should focus on harm reduction

We need to ensure harm reduction for our users. This means focusing not only on the ways our product might be used, but also on the ways it might be misused, disused, or abused.

On the other hand, harm reduction means putting conscious effort into avoiding negative externalities and the harmful impact our products might have on non-users and the society/the environment.

Anywhere from AirBNB ruining neighbourhoods for locals who are neither hosts nor visitors to Facebook aiding a genocide in Myanmar or influencing the 2016 US Presidential election results, tech companies have historically sucked the most at this aspect of true human-centered design.

For practical ways and ideas on how to to approach harm reduction & negative externalities and work against those issues in product design, I can’t recommend ‘Future Ethics’ by Cennydd Bowles enough.

“Externalities have been a sticky problem throughout the history of industry. A selfish, short-term focus has tempted many companies to harm their ecologies and futures. There’s evidence, for example, that Exxon knew of CO2’s potential climate threat in 1977, but kept it quiet, preferring that society pay the cost. Externalities also arise as a side effect of user-centred design. Focusing on fulfilling the goals and dreams of an individual user has caused tech companies to overlook impacts on non-users and wider society.”
— ‘Future Ethics’ by Cennydd Bowles

Harm reduction should be the first priority, not an after-thought in our design process.

Things you can do today

If we aim to achieve one thing today on our journey to true human-centered design, let it be acceptance. Let’s accept that what we’re doing is business-centered design, and not sugarcoat it.

We as tech professionals, and especially UX professionals, are helping our users only on a very shallow, surface level. Most of what our design achieves today is aiding users in terms of convenience and comfort, but not in terms of actively making their lives better in a real, fundamental way. And it’s time to own up to that and not romanticise our profession.

Another, more practical thing each one of you reading this article can do right now is to go and follow people who are speaking out about all the ways in which tech harms and abandons the very people it claims to serve, and all the ways in which it can and should do better:

• Tatiana Mac
• Kim Crayton
• Vivianne Castillo
• Cennydd Bowles
• Maxine Morris
• Marco Rogers
• Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• Laura Kalbag
• Lily Dart
• EJ Mason
• Safiya Umoja
• Erica Joy
• Zach Grosser

I’m sure there are many others whose name should be on this list; please help me expand it by adding your suggestions in the comments.

I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion. You can connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Robinhood app: What we’re doing isn’t human-centered — it’s business-centered design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This one is for all the content creators out there who can’t afford to pay a professional designer, as well as for non-designers on a team where designers are always too busy to help. If you can follow these simple steps, I guarantee your designs will look better.

This list was born out of years of observing my non-designer friends, family and colleagues struggle with designing things they need in their everyday life. Personal newsletters, CVs and portfolios, pictures for posts on Facebook or Instagram, video thumbnails for YouTube and so on.

All of these people came to me for help and advice on how to make things look better. I’m a firm believer in the whole “teach a person to fish” idea, so rather than designing things FOR them, I tried to give them valuable advice that could help with similar issues in the future.

As time went on, I realised I’ve been giving people all the same tips over and over again. I have worded them differently each time, but all of my advice I can distill down to these four principles.

I am aware that there are thousands of lists just like this one out there, but I find these lists to be too excessive. You can’t really consistently follow a list of 25 “simple” (nothing containing 25 parts can be truly “simple”) steps as a non-designer. And you don’t have to.

Will this help you create shiny beautiful designs? No. Will this help you create great, clear and comprehensible designs that everyone can easily understand and interact with? Absolutely. So, without further ado, I present to you:

4 Fundamental Design Principles Anyone Can Follow To Achieve Great Results

Contrast

Make sure there is enough contrast between all elements.

Why? Because things that are slightly different, but not different enough, create a kind of Uncanny Valley. They feel eerie and repulsive to a human eye, and/or are difficult to comprehend. Now we don’t want that in our designs, do we?

Elements of your design should be either exactly the same, or significantly different.

Issues with contrast mostly manifest themselves in 4 different ways:

1. Colour: use dark on light colours and vice versa.

Example: Never use combinations like grey on a slightly darker grey or light pink on light blue — they are extremely difficult to read/interact with.

2. Size: only put elements next to each other that are either exactly the same size, or a considerably different size.

Example: Don’t put 32pt and 36pt text lines next to each other. 18pt and 36pt, on the other hand, will work great together.

3. Weight: same as with Size, only put elements next to each other that are either exactly the same weight, or a considerably different weight.

Example: Don’t put “Bold” and “Black” weights of the same typeface next to each other — because they look too similar. “Light” and “Bold” weights, on the other hand, will work great together.

4. Style: don’t put one italic type next to another italic type, or one serif typeface next to another serif typeface. Combine things that are different.

Example: Don’t put “Times New Roman” and “Georgia” next to each other — they look too similar. Combine fonts that have considerably different styles.

Consistency

Make sure similar elements appear in similar ways.

Why? First of all, by keeping things consistent (and, therefore, simple), you allow people to focus their attention on important aspects of your design rather than being distracted by things changing all the time.

Second, consistency increases trust and makes things look actually designed, rather than just quickly thrown together.

Things to stick to once you have selected them:

• Typeface/font
• Colour palette/shade of colour
• Grid
• Alignment
• Style of decorative elements

And so on...

When you are working on many different pieces that appear next to each other (for example, video thumbnails for your YouTube channel, or covers for your Medium articles), choose one overall style for all of them and stick to it as well.

Occam’s Razor

aka Reduce Visual Noise

The fewer the number of elements you use in your design, the better.

Why? It’s hard for the human brain to process information and make decisions with an overload of input. Use as few decorative elements (typefaces, colours, shadows, frames, strokes, icons, patterns and so on) as possible.

Apply a design version of Occam’s Razor to everything:

If something can be achieved with just 2 elements, don’t use 3. If something can be achieved with 10 elements, don’t use 20. You get it.

If you don’t like old English scholastic philosophers and prefer things you can see on Netflix, sure: be the Marie Kondo of your own designs. Whatever doesn’t spark joy (or isn’t a useful part of a design), has to go.

William Hanson on Twitter

Either there's a @netflix glitch or @MarieKondo's methods have escalated.

Space

The way things are positioned sends a meta-level message about their meaning.

Why is this important? Because minding how you position things and how much space you add around them helps reduce the complexity of a design, and, therefore, makes it both more pleasing to look at AND easier to interact with.

To use space in your design to convey meaning mind these 3 things:

1. Proximity = Relatedness

Things that are closer to each other than to the other elements, are perceived as being related more to each other than to the other elements.

This one is the most important because I feel like it’s being ignored too often (even by some people claiming to be professional designers, not to name any names).

It can be applied in many different ways, for example:

• There should be more space between the lines than between each word in a line — and, similarly, more space between different paragraphs than between the lines inside a paragraph.

Tom Warren on Twitter

If we are gonna explore the world in 5G, I hope the character spacing gets better

• Elements of a design should have less space between each other than between those elements and the edges of the composition.

• Labels and supporting information should be positioned near the elements that they describe/relate to.

2. Negative Space

In combination with Occam’s Razor, give your designs as much negative space as you possibly can, to declutter them and make their meaning more obvious.

Putting too many elements into a limited amount of space is like trying to listen to three different songs at once. It’s hard to understand what is being said.

3. Importance and order

This one is extremely common sense but I feel like I still have to mention it here.

Things that matter most, you put first, and/or make them take up the most amount of space. Use sequences of things to convey order. Et cetera. You can definitely figure out the rest.

The End

Congrats! If you have followed all these steps while making whatever it is you are making, it most likely looks very good by the industry standards.

For everything else, there is always a designer.

Hi, I’m Anna, a product designer by day and a book nerd by night. I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion here on Medium. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Fundamental design principles for non-designers was originally published in We’ve moved to freeCodeCamp.org/news on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ce n’est pas une book review. Just my personal takeaways.

I finished “How to Make Sense of Any Mess” by Abby Covert today (it took me about 4 hours total to read, including making extensive notes). Being honest, the book is so short and to the point that no review can present its ideas in a briefer or more brilliant way than Abby herself does. So I am not even going to try. I just wanted to follow up with some of my thoughts before they get completely dissolved into the mess (ha, ha) that is my memory and I forget where those ideas originated from.

The book is positioned as “information architecture for everyone” — and it is. But one does not have to be an information architect to make good use of this book. Anyone can benefit from it, because information is all around us, we deal with it daily, and we do organise it in some ways whether we are paying attention to it or not; even no organisation is a form of organisation.

“Everything around you was architected by another person. Whether or not they were aware of what they were doing. Whether or not they did a good job.”

So, to avoid information piling up and creating messes, it’s better to learn the ways we can make sense of it. And this was exactly the reason I picked up this book — to learn all those ways. Here are the ideas I got out of it & ways I am going to implement those ideas in my work:

1. Anything can be a mess, and a mess can be any thing.

But that is not a bad thing at all. It actually means that anything can be made sense of. Which is great.

How to implement: Identify the mess(es) in your process, acknowledge them, and make a decision to deal with them. Do not be afraid. Being in denial about the mess or refusing to face it only leads to the mess growing bigger, stronger & meaner. The earlier you begin, the easier it will be to sort through things. Because no matter how difficult it is (or seems to be), any mess can be made sense of. You will just need some time and (maybe) a little bit of help.

2. Choosing your language is a part of building your product.

As a company, personal brand, writer, artist, creator, or anyone with any audience/user base whatsoever, you have to pay attention to your vocabulary and your language. Choose the words that describe you. See what other words they make you walk away from. If you want to be “simple”, it means you cannot be “complex”; if you want to be “down to Earth”, you cannot be “elite”.

How to implement: If you already have your brand’s mission, values, philosophy or anything of the sort, this is a great place to start. Sit down and analyse those sacred texts, and/or invite the team along for a brainstorm session. Select the adjectives which describe your brand or which you want your users to describe it with. Make a list. Build the list of the opposites (things you should NOT be). Stick to those two lists and keep coming back to them to check if you are staying true to your preferred adjectives.

3. Great Information Architecture is invisible.

This has been said before, but it is worth saying again (for those in the back): when Information Architecture is implemented well, it becomes transparent. You only notice IA when it is done poorly.

How to implement: Build. Test. Fail. Fix. Implement. Fail again. Fail better. Maybe perfection is not attainable. But what you want is for your users to enjoy your product as seamlessly as possible, without having to spend any extra time trying to locate some specific part of it they really need but don’t know where to find.

4. If there is a space your users can go to, they will go there.

Even if you didn’t intend them to. Identify & locate those spaces. Build pathways through the mud.

How to implement: Build as many user flows as you can. Do moderated and/or recorded tests. See where users can end up unexpectedly. Where they might get lost, because there is no pathway built for them there. If there is a way for them to go to a place they are not supposed to go to, you can trust them to do so.

5. Not everyone is, or wants to be, or should be an Information Architect. But anyone can be a Sensemaker.

Maybe Information Architecture is just too much for you to bear. You have plenty of tasks on your hands as it is, and your current position is far from being related to all that jazz. That is totally fine. You can still fight the messes around you and make sense of them.

How to implement: This book is not at all centered on fighting messes while building digital products (such as websites or apps) — it is just a lense I present it through, because I myself am building those products. But remember p.1 — any thing can be a mess, and therefore any thing can be made sense of. Your apartment, your time management, your personal projects, your relationship with your client(s), your brand’s physical products. Whatever it is, if there is a mess, you can make sense of it. I recommend you consult this brilliant little book by Abby to find more ways of how to do so.

Hi, I’m Anna, a product designer by day and a book nerd by night. I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion here on Medium. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.

5 important things I learned from “How to make sense of any mess” by Abby Covert was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.