I’ll continue to add to this as I accumulate more.

Updated: December 11, 2020

Curiosity Activating UX Activities

Abusability Testing: UX in the Age of Abusability. The role of Composition, Collaboration, and Craft in building ethical products.
By Dan Brown. Sep 18, 2018.

Abusability Testing: Article describing the Abusability Testing workshop organized by Anna Abovyan, Theora Kvitka and Allison Cosby of the Pittsburgh IxDA Chapter for World Interaction Design Day 2019.

“Black Mirror” Episodes: Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation. By Casey Fiesler. Oct 15, 2018.

Implicit Association Test (IAT): via Harvard University.

Tools for Supporting Ethical AI

Checklist to prompt intentional, uncomfortable conversations: Designing Ethical AI Experiences: Checklist and Agreement by Carol Smith (me), Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute.

Datasheets for Datasets

• Paper: “Datasheets for Datasets” on arxiv by Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Hal Daumé III, Kate Crawford
• Markdown for Datasheets for Datasets by JRMeyer (GitHub — includes LaTeX version)

Ethics checklist for data scientists by Deon.

Lists of Additional Resources

Awesome AI Guidelines on GitHub from EthicalML

Awful AI Curated list to track current scary usages of AI — hoping to raise awareness to its misuses in society by David Dao

List of ethics articles on Medium by Eirini Malliaraki

Machine Learning and User Experience: A Few Resources by Michelle Carney

Mapping of ethical principles — Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping consensus in ethical and rights-based approaches to principles for AI by Jessica Fjeld and Adam Nagy, Harvard University — Download the visualization!

Tech Ethics in The News — updated weekly from students in Casey Fiesler’s Information Ethics and Policy classes at CU Boulder.

Organizations and Newsletters

AI Ethics newsletter from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute

AI Now Institute

Algorithm Watch newsletter

Ethical OS

Lighthouse3 weekly Ethics newsletter

ML Engineer weekly newsletter from The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning

Radical AI Network

Books

11 books to read after watching Netflix’s The Social Dilemma from Fast Company

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Noble

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Hardcover by Virginia Eubanks

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

Carol Smith’s Contributions on AI Ethics and UX

My writings on the topic are below and you can also find my presentations on SlideShare.

“Designing Trustworthy AI for Human-Machine Teaming” — blog on the Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute Blog which contains links to:

• Checklist to prompt intentional, uncomfortable conversations (same as linked above): Designing Ethical AI Experiences: Checklist and Agreement Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute, Fact Sheet.
• “Designing Trustworthy AI: A Human-Machine Teaming Framework to Guide Development.” — Paper presented at AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Symposium FSS-19: Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector. Hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Creating a Curious, Ethical AI Workforce” — essay published in War on the Rocks.

“Intentionally Ethical AI Experiences” — Invited essay published in the Journal of Usability Studies by UXPA.

Stuart Maxwell (Twitter: @stumax) welcomed us to the conference with a challenging talk about the problems we face as information architects.

Anne Petersen (Twitter: @petersen) quoted him on Twitter:

“The field is deep and wide, and the problems are fascinating and wicked…” Stuart Maxwell #ias18

Digital + Physical: Designing Integrated Product Experiences

Bill Horan (Twitter: @billhoran) presented his thoughts on making integrated digital and physical experiences with a series of principles. My favorite was Don’t complicate simple. Bill talked about how light switches and similar items we use daily are often make much more complex by organizations “reinventing” the product. In many cases, they should have focused on the user’s mental model and used that to inform how the device works. Bill used the example of a broken escalator — it is still stairs — and still can be used to move between floors even when it is no longer moving.

Alternatively, by designing a device that can work in any situation, you can help the user create a mental model for how it works. For example, Bill showed ideas for a hearing device that was controlled via a phone application. Regardless of whether the user was listening to one person or an experience that surrounded them, the mental model that was created was one of raising and lowering the volume. In each situation it was the same, rather than creating a different type of control for each situation.

Information Arrangement: It’s the Metadata

Information Arrangement: It’s the Metadata was presented by Dalia Levine (Twitter: @daliawithnoh)

Duane Degler (Twitter: @ddegler) tweeted his takeaway from Dalia’s talk:

Supposedly simple decisions like language, country and region are in fact important political and social decision in your metadata. Be thoughtful about these decisions. @daliawithnoh #ias18

Personal Ontology Maps: A Way to Get to Good

Kat King’s (Twitter: KatalogofChaos) powerful talk on personal ontology mapping was extremely insightful.

Andrew Hinton (Twitter @inkblurt) tweeted:

The talk right now from @Katalogofchaos is one of the most important talks I’ve ever heard at this conference. A gently convicting charge to make ontological clarity for our own values — because otherwise we don’t understand the lenses we are using for everything else. #ias18

Kat challenges us by asking “What is Good?” and encourages us to select our battles. We should measure for ourselves if we are doing good work. Are we doing our best work? Jeff Eaton (Twitter: @Eaton) also attended the talk and captured this quote on Twitter.

“In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of.” — Miller’s Law #IAS18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%27s_law

Kat is a strong proponent of diverse, inclusive teams (as am I), and reminded us that research has shown that cognitive based, non-routine problems, are best solved by a team with diverse heuristics.

We need to embrace the discomfort that diverse teams bring. We must strive to encourage new ideas, and different points of view. Rather than coalescing around agreement, we should come together with our differences.

Kat asked us to “consider that someone else has access to experiences and understandings that I do not.” That diversity of experiences and understandings will help the team to develop great solutions.

Finally I loved this quote from Kat:

“IA is the way that you sort, and the people you support.”

Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich? and Other Taxonomy Questions

This was another wonderfully nerdy talk at the Summit. Bob Kasenchak (Twitter: @taxobob) spoke about categorizing information and of course referenced The Sandwich Alignment Chart shared by @MattoMic on Twitter last year (below).

Bob emphasized that we are encoding points of view in the decisions we make with regard to what is, and is not, included in categories (lists on forms, etc). This may sound familiar as Dalia Levine spoke on a similar topic, but they covered it in different ways.

Bob talked about the fluidity of naming categories and that they change over time. He used the example from an ancient Chinese Encyclopedia (via Foucault via Borges) where the categories of animals included:

• Tame
• Fabulous
• Innumerable
• Et cetera

Clearly, the way human’s cateogrize animals has changed and continues to as we learn more about the animal kingdom and evolution. Categories of things, such as the sandwich chart, are constantly changing as we change our understanding of the world, as new things are created and as we become aware of new ideas and information.

Fit & Finish: The Importance of Presentation Value to UX Deliverables

Adam Polansky (Twitter: @AdamtheIA) shared his lessons on #FitandFinish to ensure we are as effective as possible in sharing our work with our stakeholders.

He encouraged us to:

• work in public and share what we are doing.
• make room for other perspectives to avoid cognitive bias.
• consider: what’s the least we can do to get our message across?
• communicate understanding with artifacts.

No Static: IA for Dynamic Information Environments

I really enjoyed this talk by Duane Degler (Twitter: @ddegler) in which he brought conversations about security and privacy together with the creation of dynamic environments. He compared our search history to photographs of the past following us around — all the places we’d been.

Duane reminded us that it is “not a question of if sites get hacked, but when” and that taking precautions to protect individuals’ data is paramount.

He suggests a solution that enables people to own their personal portable digital profile. The profile would be shared in as much or as little an amount as the prefer, and when shared, the web sits would provide relevant pieces of data to them.

My favorite quote from Duane (context was lost in my notes):

“Translate intent into expression, and expression is more than language.”

On Designing a Safe Environment

Ramya Mahalingam (Twitter: @rams_mahalingam) presentated her engaging talk about safety. She presented a continuum of safety (see below) and talked about how psychological and contextual safety is. The concepts of accountability (I see you — even more confidence in well-lit situations for sighted people) and vulnerability (I’m alone — less confidence depending on context and individual).

Why do we all suck at collaboration?

Karen VanHouten (Twitter: @designinginward) brought all of her enthusiasm, anger and a nice bottle of Scotch (?) to the stage for her talk about collaboration.

My favorite quotes from her:

“Bias is equally distributed, power and privilege are not.”

“Give up the pursuit of perfection, enjoy the pursuit of progress!!”

“It’s courage that we need to build, not confidence. Try things, make mistakes. Redefine success.”

“Don’t be a wallflower, don’t be an asshole. Be a badass, and together we can change the world.”

Collaboration Code of Conduct

I hope many organizations adopt the Collaboration Code of Conduct that Karen has developed. It provides a framwork to deal with difficult indivduals and to treat everyone respectfully by giving them guidance that everyone sometimes needs. The Collaboration Code of Conduct requires asking difficult questions of the team and then making a code around the team’s responses.

How will we…

1. Treat each other?
2. Approach work?
3. Communicate?
4. Make decisions?
5. Define success of working relationships?
6. Enforce this code?

Prototyping Information Architecture

I also missed this talk by Andy Fitzgerald (Twitter: AndyByWire) but enjoyed the Twitter feed about it and I wanted to share this quote tweeted by IA Summit (Twitter: IAsummit).

People are heuristic, associative, approximate. Computers are exhaustive, enumerative, exact. IA is the connection between, matching one system to another. -@andybywire #IAS18

There was so much more!

I did not transcribe the entire conference, but there are many other people who have posted notes. Here are two more great tweets:

“But what is a screen but a promise of a space you cannot enter?” — Marius Watz via @joasqueeniebee

“Interrogating is a strong word, but I believe it’s what we need to do with our designs.” @brownorama

Ethics Roundtable (Pre-Conference)

Before the conference, I attended half of the IA and Ethics: Academics’ and Practitioners’ Roundtable which was organized by Andrea Resmini, Stacy Surla, Ren Pope, Sarah Rice, Bern Irizarry, and Keith Instone and attended by ~30 folks over 2 days.

Ethics is not mentioned in many IA/UX books, and the roundtable attendees were all passionate about raising awareness about our responsibilities to do better with regard to ethics. We identified ethics as one of the biggest problems we face in IA/UX, and yet I was still surprised when it was made clear that as a community we have a complete lack of awareness of the importance of ethics.

Inclusive Digital Spaces

Andrea Resmini’s (Twitter: @resmini) presentation got to the heart of the discussion with regard to ensuring awareness and consent for our users. This is core to an ethical experience. He led us to consider the need for open public digital spaces for conversations — spaces that are made to feel as wide as streets — so that they are inclusive and comfortable for all members of a community to take part in the conversation.

Accessibility — Who Uses Our Tools?

During the roundtable anne gibson (Twitter: Kirabug)presented a short talk on accessibility and how the choices we make with regard to accessibility, determine who will be able to use our tools.

“You all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted or expected, and to think big.” — Stephen Hawking, at Web Summit 2017

With Stephen Hawking’s passing still fresh at the conference, it was fitting to evoke him in a talk about accessibility.

Anne called us out, saying that when we do not design for people with disabilities we are ableists. When we design for accessibility we are doing our job. Anne stated that we should:

“Decide to give a damn” about people with disabilities of all types.

Anne also presented this topic later in the conference in her “What letter are you? An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues” session. I did not get to attend her talk, but the Twitter’s were very complementary and I found her slides and her 2014 blog post about the topic to be very informative. She has modeled an exemplary way to integrate people with disabilities into our everyday work.

An additional resource on this topic is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) “How People with Disabilities Use the Web.” When looking for a link I noticed that the WAI recently updated their web site — even easier to navigate, attractive and accessible!

Moral Maps and Models and VR

Dan Klyn (Twitter: DanKlyn) focused on virtual reality (VR) and ethics in this space. I have minimal experience with VR myself and Dan’s talk was very thoughtful. My takeaways:

• The focus point is inevitably occlusionary to other focal points (what are we occluding?).
• We should protect difference — too often we take out all that is special and unique to make it fit.
• Consider what models the VR decomposes to.
• Always consider consent and control — enable someone with a “get me out of here!” feeling to leave the experience easily.

IA in Age of AI: Embracing Abstraction and Change

Finally, I had the honor of presenting a follow-up to my 2017 talk on AI with more specific guidance with regard to desiging for these systems. The slides are on SlideShar/Carologic and what follows are some highlights of this talk.

Information Architects must push to…

• Keep people at the center of our work.
• Lead with our user’s goals.
• Ease of use, usability, findability, effectiveness, efficiency…
• Work to mature organizations approach
• Push back on “technology first” ideas.
• Lead on ethics — for our users, humanity.

Creating Ethical AI

• Less-biased content.
• Transparency of data sources and training.
• Intentional design: Build in safety.
• Build practices around PAPA (Privacy, Accuracy, Property, Accessibility)

Create a code of conduct/ethics

• What do you value?
• What lines won’t your AI cross?
• What is too far?
• What are you including?
• How will you track your progress?

Take Responsibility

• Keep humans in control.
• Hire people affected by bias
  (non-WEIRD, women, POC, LGBTQ, etc.).
• Conduct auditing (algorithmic, data, UI, etc.).

Reference: How to Keep Your AI from Turning into a Racist Monster by Megan Garcia

Learn about making ethical, transparent and fair AI

Teach others about AI

• Demystify AI by using plain language. Always.
• Teach people how to utilize and benefit from the system.
• Provide easy way to raise concerns (anonymously if appropriate).

Here are the highlights of the UX work I did and I also published my personal reflections on Africa.

Workshop at Nairobi Design Institute

Nairobi Design Institute is a new design school in Nairobi, Kenya whose goal is “educating the next generation of designers” for Africa. I led a half day workshop on user research and usability testing for the students and a few guests. The students were in the process of redesigning an airline web site and the timing worked out perfectly to conduct initial studies on the paper prototypes (cut from their printouts) and clickable prototypes they had created. None of the participants had been exposed to usability testing before so it was really exciting to introduce these new methods to them. Each team had a different approach to solving the problems they were faced with and all of them were making significant improvements to the experience.

User Research — Intercept Interviews

I relished the opportunity to meet Kenyan’s on the street and was thrilled to connect with an IBM team that was working with a Kenyan pharmacy. I was to conduct 10 intercept interviews at a pharmacy in Nairobi. I initially selected what turned out to be a very slow store and relocated to one in an extremely congested part of the city. It was rush hour on a Friday afternoon and there were thousands of people walking by the store. Despite this, there were only 8 customers in an hour. I interviewed four of them which I consider an incredible success rate.

The customers were very friendly and willing to speak with me about their experience. I hope to compare my experience with the team doing the same activity. I’m particularly curious if the responses change when someone local (and with more melatonin) intercepts customers. I suspect they would get a different response — though I’m not sure how it would differ — I’m interested to find out.

One of the more enlightening conversations was with a man who said he worked nearby and shared his concern with me that “many Kenyan’s don’t find out they are sick until too late.” In working with the American Cancer Society I’ve learned that late diagnosis (due to: lack of healthcare access; fear of cancer diagnosis which is equated to death; and concerns about the stigma of having cancer) is a primary reason for the rise of cancer mortalities in the region. I later observed him selling a vehicle and realized he was a car salesperson and worked from the lot in front of the store. It was reassuring that even a car salesman (I have only US stereotypes to compare him with — maybe some university education — not highly educated) are aware of (and frustrated by) the cultural barriers to improving healthcare in the region.

Usability Testing — Guerilla-esque

I refer to these as guerilla-esque studies because I ended up observing two participants at a time (not something I would ever recommend) to get as many studies completed as possible. These usability studies were conducted on a new Watson tool with the health care providers attending the African Cancer Coalition workshop.

I led a small team of developers and analysts who also acted as facilitators. I observed one participant using the application on my MacBook Pro and the other on my Lenovo PC at the same time. Luckily the interactions were basically the same across both. I’m sure I missed a great deal of their interactions, but I made it work. Each of my colleagues observed one participant and then I gathered notes after each session. We ran six sessions with ~5 participants in each session across two days and gathered significant and helpful feedback to improve the tool.

Lecture at Makerere University

I had the pleasure of meeting students of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and presenting a talk on user research and usability testing. This was a new topic to most of the audience and we discussed topics that are common around the world:

· potential bias in studies: studies with humans are always biased — we may or may not be able to identify all the biases — and our awareness makes a huge difference in one’s ability to understand the cultural nuances;

· logistics of participant recruitment: how to recruit, where to recruit and associated costs;

· and how to report findings: I always recommend providing findings and recommendations in as “light” and quickly shared format as possible (not a long, formal report) — the PhD students were not easy to convince of this.

Design Without Borders at Design Hub Uganda

My trip ended with a wonderful visit to Design Without Borders (DWB) workspace in Kampala. The Design Hub is a huge warehouse filled with design and architecture organizations and has a small exhibit space. I was inspired by the important work DWB is doing to bring design methods and design thinking to Africans. DWB focuses on projects where they can partner with local people and teach them design methods so that the individuals can effectively use them to further their own businesses.

Arrival in Nairobi, Kenya and Safari

When I landed in Kenya the officials noticed that I did not have my paperwork in order. I had procured an East African visa which included Kenya, but I needed to go through Uganda to get it. I had anticipated issues and attempted to confirm my visa status before I arrived. Now that I was facing immigration officials I was concerned I might be stuck or worse be put back on 24 hours of flights home. Fortunately, they allowed same-day visas and so I purchased the Kenyan visa. Annoying and expensive, but luckily not a big deal.

Using WhatsApp to communicate I had arranged to meet Abraham, the same driver I had used previously in Nairobi. As we planned the next days I mentioned the university cancellation and he encouraged a morning safari at the National Park near the city. I resisted at first thinking I’d be able to still make some arrangements to meet local UX people, but it quickly became apparent that Nairobi was still in lockdown and that people that I had been in contact with were not even in the city.

Early the next morning Abraham picked me up and we toured the national park viewing zebras, water buffalo, giraffes, ostriches, lions and more from his minivan with Nairobi visible in the background. It was a great way to recover from 24+ hours of travel.

Later that day I had the pleasure of meeting Bettirose for coffee. We had met through Twitter due to our shared interest in encouraging women in technology. She is a local volunteer for AkiraChix, a not for profit organization that aims to inspire and develop a successful force of women in technology. Learn more about them in this NPR article.

Unbelievable Traffic in Nairobi

I had not yet been to downtown Nairobi, but felt that I had seen some of the crazy traffic that people complain about and that the city is famous for. Little did I truly understand what they meant.

Downtown Nairobi during Friday afternoon rush hour is really an incredible sight. There were thousands of people getting on stages (buses) to take them home. Most people in Nairobi travel by bus because distances are great and traffic is so bad. Even with primarily busses in the downtown area it was unbelievably crowded. Buses squeezed by each other barely by centimeters and we only moved a few inches at a time while people swarmed around coming and going. Imagine the largest event you’ve ever been to that most people drive to and what the parking lot is like when everyone is leaving (after a big sports event or concert). Now imagine that that parking lot and that level of chaos is a street, and the cars are so close together you cannot open a door. That’s Nairobi traffic.

Arrival in Kampala, Uganda

My immigration woes continued at Entebbe where they had run out of visa stickers. A group of us from the same flight were left waiting for 45 minutes in line with no explanations and no access to bathrooms or water. Finally, we got through the line and after some time I located my driver.

Immediately upon starting out on our drive to the hotel it was apparent how much had changed in the four months since my last visit. It takes at least one hour to drive to Kampala from the Entebbe airport on poorly maintained, extremely busy roads. The road had been crowded with small stores on both sides of the road and now one side was in ruins as they made way for the new highway being built.

It made me sad see this change, as I imagine many people’s livelihoods were likely lost, but the new road will hopefully be safer for everyone. The entrepreneurial spirit in this section of the world is inspiring. The unemployment rate is extremely high so many people sell goods or services from the front of their homes or on the roads and take on additional jobs like being a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers. The lack of air conditioning and small interior spaces makes the best place to do work outside. I loved observing people work as they planed wood for bed frames, repaired motorcycles, removed sugar from large cane sticks, and more.

We finally arrived at the lush resort where the oncology meetings would take place and I spent the afternoon exploring the property which included a horse barn and a marina. Being a Saturday I saw many wedding parties doing photo shoots and there were also families of highly entertaining monkeys on the property.

Rolex Festival and food

In Uganda, you do not wear a Rolex you eat one! Rolex’s (rolls with eggs) are a new and very popular food item in Uganda. They consist of chapati (yes, the bread from India) that is rolled up with egg, seasoning, vegetables and optionally a protein inside. We attended a local festival in the city with music and food vendors including the Rolex King among others. It was a lot of fun to meet more local folks and enjoy a relaxing afternoon.

In addition to enjoying Rolex’s during my trip there I also enjoyed a wonderful fish Masala every evening at the resort. The local Ugandan foods included lots of squash soups, sweet potatoes and bananas cooked in a variety of ways and often with Indian spices.

African Cancer Coalition Workshop to harmonize cancer treatment guidelines

Oncologists, palliative care specialists, and other care providers worked together during these sessions to define cancer treatment guidelines along with attendees from IBM Health Corps, American Cancer Society and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN). This work is an important step towards maturing the overall treatment of cancer in Africa using consistent, evidence based treatments and this group will be presenting their initial recommendations later this year.

Power Fluctuates

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you expect and when technology can fail it often does. I try to always be prepared as I’ve done talks in some very weird circumstances over the years. When I arrived at Makerere University I put together clues via comments being made around me that the electricity was out, and that no one was sure when it might return. I could tell they didn’t want me to know initially so I kept quiet. My host took me to her office and I worked on analyzing the studies I had run the day before and considered briefly what I would do if the power remained out. Obviously sharing my slides would only work with a very small group and she was expecting 10–20 students. I decided I would not bother trying to share the screen and would cut out anything in the talk that relied on visuals to explain. Luckily, I had fully powered up my battery the night before.

When we arrived at the room the power was still out — we delayed slightly and decided that we should just go on with the lecture. It went very well and we had a great discussion. The staff provided a snack for everyone which included a banana (they are very sweet and tasty in this region — and not like American bananas), a hard boiled egg and a little wheat cake. It was lovely and the perfect lunch.

Loud Rain Down in Africa

While at Design Without Borders in Kampala, Uganda I experienced the rain in Africa in a very auspicious way. Just as I sat down with my new friends at Design Without Borders it began to rain. Lightly at first and then what I can only imagine from the outside was a torrential downpour. I’ve experienced rain on a tin roof before, but this was an earsplitting experience. We ended up getting very close around the corner of a table and politely yelling at each other for 30 minutes or so while the rain poured down. Despite what could have been an unpleasant interaction I enjoyed it greatly and got a lot of value from our loud chat.

Let’s talk about politics.

• What UX concepts and methods do you rename to gain a shared understanding with non-UX folk?
• When have you pushed language too far and had negative repercussions from renaming a method or concept?
• When have you been successful in describing your work using UX jargon?
• When have clients/stakeholders been caught in misunderstandings about your work?

Persona Purists

The word persona, and the concept in general, are a major point of contention in the UX and design world and I won’t discuss this issue in depth here. Suffice it to say that persona purists (like me) believe that if, and only if, significant research has been conducted with actual end-users and patterns have been identified, then, and only then, can you create something you refer to as a persona. In Validating Product Ideas, Tomer Sharon colorfully states (see image below) that without research you do not have a persona.

In my organization we use the term ‘Archetype’ to indicate what Tomer refers to as bullshit. The Archetypes are utter bullshit, however, this is a more acceptable (and easier to translate) way to talk about the situation. I all-to-often frustrate stakeholders with my resistance to call anything a persona that does not have research backing it up. Typically that friction is healthy and leads to the discussion we need it to — get us to the users and we’ll build personas.

What is the difference between a persona, a proto-persona, and a profile? Which is the correct term to use? Which should I use to communicate to other UX professionals the amount and type of research I’ve conducted to create the document? The politics within the UX industry regarding terms such as this can be infuriating, but are also important discussions. If we cannot align on our terminology, how can we expect our stakeholders to understand what we’re delivering?
 — From “A Turn of Phrase: The Politics of UX Language” by Carol Smith

Usability [Not User] Testing

It drives me crazy (granted that’s a short trip) when ‘usability testing’ is called ‘user testing.’ User testing to me infers that we’re testing people to see if they can figure out our design work. Usability testing puts the emphasis on what is actually being tested (the interface and interactions) and reduces the focus on the participant’s performance.

Words matter. While we all slip up and say the wrong words all the time, the more carefully we chose how we use our words, the more likely we are to communicate what we intend to with accuracy and success.

Wikipedia defines universal design as a broad-spectrum idea meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to older people, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities.

What is your home’s visitability?

The conference opened with a discussion titled “Dirty Little Secrets Builders Don’t Want You to Know” regarding the challenges of convincing home owners to prioritize universal design in their home improvement project. The recommendation was to talk about enabling friends and family who are differently-abled to visit — increasing the home’s “visitability”. The fact that some homes cannot be retrofitted was also discussed. For example, my home’s front entrance requires climbing 22 steps (the back entrance is a mere 10 steps). My house lacks visitability! Adding a shower with universal design features on the 2nd floor would be nice, but it isn’t going to fix the primary access issue. Additionally, we discussed discrimination by design and how individual homes discriminate, but also entire neighborhoods when they lack sidewalks and other amenities that can connect people.

Prioritizing Broadband in Rural and Small Cities

While the majority of the conference attendees and presenters were speaking about physical spaces, I was challenged with bringing a digital point of view. The first opportunity I had to do this was in the plenary panel “Our Future “in” Rural and Small Cities” where we discussed our views on the opportunities, challenges and priorities of these communities. My focus was on extending internet access (broadband). The lack of reliable internet access for these communities is stifling their ability to access broader services, to be aware of creative solutions to their problems, and their ability to access training. Broadband also makes it possible for remote work and will provide the incentive needed for people to settle in these wonderful communities.

Internet of Caring Things and Taking on New Collars

In the future session I presented a quick talk on the Internet of Caring Things (a term coined by Susann Keohane, Sr. Technologist, IBM, and Nicola Palmarini, Technology Advocate, IBM Research — @skeohane1 and @IBMAccess). Similar to typical IOT, Caring Things leverage the use of cognitive technologies. In addition Caring Things personalized and connect individuals to relevant content and interests.

In the talk I introduced a set of qualities that the Internet of Caring Things should aspire to convey (initially inspired by this list):

• Commitment — Available, reliable, strong values and purpose
• Conscientious — Considers privacy issues, ethics and represents individual’s concerns
• Competent — knowledgeable about what we expect them to know
• Compassionate — Friendly, shows caring
• Confident — Empowering people, enabling freedom
• Context — Understands the current situation (e.g. when it is OK to interrupt)
• Content — Provides relevant information and is engaging
• Connected — Provides access to people (with similar interests, right professionals
• Cognitive — Uses knowledge to solve problems, is a helper, personalized, smart and usable

I urged the audience to take on new collar work (@ibmibv) and encouraged those around them to begin learning about cognitive computing to harness the power and to lead in the creation of the Internet of Caring Things.

Welcome to the Era of Cognitive Computing

My keynote was focused on demystifying artificial intelligence (AI) and explaining the basics of machine learning. With only a handful of people in the room who had studied computer science, this was a new topic for the majority of the audience. I referenced the IBM video — Solutions for An Aging Population which focuses on a project in Bolzano, Italy, where IBM’s Smarter Cities team partnered with the city to help monitor a portion of their elder community to provide better service.

Again, I encouraged the audience to learn about these tools, and to not fear them. By partnering with others they can begin building tools to help their communities and create jobs that will keep people in the rural and small cities.

There were many more topics discussed and I encourage you to keep an eye on the Universal Design Today conference site as the proceedings are shared.

Yoga class in warmth.
Chinese lanterns swaying
in winter’s bitter wind.

Glory light calling:
Come away with me. Freedom.
Beauty. Calling me.

Overwhelmed. Consumed.
Visceral. Shifting. Alive.
Love remains intact.

The four primary actions that need to occur to enable teams to be successful in integrating UX are:

1. Everyone on the team understands the primary users
2. Problems are solved with the simplest solution
3. Collaboration is encouraged
4. Team is thinking ahead

I talked about these four actions at the Heart of Agile and I’ll discuss them further here.

Increased understanding of users

The entire team needs to understand who they are creating a product for, what the primary goals and needs are for those users and what problems they are trying to solve. When the entire team is aligned on these points, they are more likely to convene on a solution that is helpful to those users and be more successful overall. Being able to recognize who is not a primary user and who IS a primary user is key to success. It is impossible to design for everyone. When team members have differing ideas of who they are building a solution for, the result shows that incongruity via an ambivalent experience. No one is happy with the experience and it won’t do anything particularly well. Focusing on a specific type of user, with specific goals, needs and a problem space empowers the team to use the correct language and meet their needs appropriately. Secondary users will also benefit from a clear and unambiguous interface.

Solving problems with the simplest solution

Identifying what problem you are solving is often the hardest part and the point at which projects often begin to fail. Your users problem will not be solved with a specific technology or the placement of a button. Rather, by understanding the actual problem, you will be led to making the right technology and UI decisions and make a good user experience.

For example, your user’s problem may be that they need to make sure they are complying with all legal statutes related to their business. If this is determined to be in-scope for the product, you’ll need to decide how to solve this problem. Their problems are not:

• Logging in
• Clicking next
• Uploading docs
• Filling out a form

The interface may require they do all of this, and you need to make sure they can get through those steps in as simple a way as possible so that during and at the end of their experience they are confident that they have achieved their goal. If successful your user in this situation should be able to state that the system you built has helped them to be confident that they are in full compliance with legal statues. When recommending the product, they will not state that they were able to log in, or do one of the other necessary tasks to complete their goals — however, they will complain if they cannot do those things easily.

Encourage Collaborations

Working to approach these problems together will help build empathy for each other as well as shared understanding of the work. There are many ways collaboration can occur. One of the most effective ones are co-design activities with the entire squad/team (or at least representatives of the teams). This includes people with primary skills as developers, product owner/managers and designers working together on various activities. This can include early sketching to talk through a problem, conducting task analysis, and story mapping. It is important to have the entire team together in a room (or virtually) to talk through the user’s problem so that all of the relevant user’s experience, technical constraints and business needs can be considered and that information is available to the team. By exchanging information in real-time and working through a solution together, there is a shared understanding and huge time savings. These types of activities can reduce the time to build, but the benefit of working through all of the potential issues quickly usually saves time.

Usability testing is another activity that should be viewed as an opportunity to collaborate with the entire team. Everyone can actively observe the study and help to determine the major issues to address and how to reduce future issues. Team members can offer to greet participants (for in-person studies), help to operate software/recording equipment, take notes and then participate in post-study analysis by sharing their notes. Participating in these sessions will increase empathy for the users and team members will be able to better understand both the user’s struggles and what works. While usability testing takes time and the sessions are not all wonderfully helpful, this activities benefits outweigh the downside. Customer visits are the most time consuming activity, but also the best way to increase empathy of users. The team may see the users work space, how they use the existing solutions and can identify latent needs through their observations.

Think ahead to solve problems

A successful product will always have more work — thinking ahead about what that work is, how the product will mature, and what will be next for the product lifecycle, is important to avoid making bad design choices. When I say thinking ahead, that does not mean BDUB (Big Design Up Front). This is doing just enough thinking to potentially solve the problem in a way that doesn’t break the user experience. This type of work does not require wireframes, but rather is a visioning task completed with story maps and concept cars describing a high level interaction. These activities help to create a vision for the product and help to ensure that as it changes, it is being done in a way that is most helpful to the users.

Every team is different and while everyone can benefit from these four actions, there are many more that may be needed to enable your UX team to perform to their utmost potential. Trying different things, figuring out what works and repeating it to gain efficiency is all part of working in Agile. By removing ambiguity with regard to the users, focusing on simple solutions, encouraging collaboration and thinking ahead, the team will be able to focus on creating great user experiences.

Clinic Visit

The first part of the trip was spent in Kampala, Uganda where I visited with oncologists, pharmacists and students in a learning hospital. My goal was to learn more about how these professionals treat cancer in Sub-Saharan African settings.

There are many reasons why access to cancer treatment can be limited in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the patients limited ability to pay. The situation changes from day-to-day as back ordered drugs arrive, machines are fixed, etc. In the morning there can be a huge amount of people waiting on benches or outside on the veranda. The patients know they will be seen, but they cannot make an appointment time, they can only pick a date, due to the unreliable transportation situation in Kampala.

Cancer is often diagnosed late in Sub-Saharan Africa and this challenge is one that these NGO’s will be working on. But in the meantime, they have had significant success with improvement of pain treatment. The availability of morphine meant that despite advanced stages of cancer, and cramped conditions, wards were calm and everyone seemed comfortable.

Safari!

We spent two days at Amboseli National Park is located in Loitoktok District, in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya. What a lovely break to visit with an incredible array of animals. I still cannot believe our luck in seeing so many animals. Elephants, zebras, gazelle, lions(!), monkeys and more. Mt. Kilimanjaro was an ever present, and impressive backdrop to our adventures. While we were only there for the weekend, I can safely say that is all you need (given great weather and incredible luck with animal sightings).

Design Thinking Workshop

Once we arrived in Nairobi, Kenya it was time for me to lead a design thinking workshop with oncologists. It was wonderful to work so closely with these physicians and to work to understand the problems they are facing on a daily basis in treating cancer. I look forward to using these experiences to support the IBM Health Corp teams to ensure that we are making great experiences for our partners.

If you would like to learn more about my experiences, I talked about my initial IBM Health Corps experience last week at the UXDC Conference in Washington, DC and I wrote a blog entry about that experience on the IBM Health Corps blog.

When I attended IA Summit a few weeks ago in Vancouver, BC, Canada, it was about as easy an experience as I’ve had anywhere:

Move files to thumb drive > Figure out bizarre security/credit card system of hotel > Insert thumb drive > Open files and hope they are similar to my intent on this device > determine how to print out what I want accurately > Push button and say The Printing Prayer. The result resembled what I had intended (though portions were illegible due to the printer lacking toner. Ugh.) and it only cost 5 CAD! Since the room I was in was unattended I could not get more ink and had to be happy with what I had.

The unattended Business Office, located as far as possible from the main desk is usually an indication that there will be issues. After I saw the problem with my prints I didn’t bother to tell the desk attendant that the printer was out of toner because I was in a hurry. I had completely forgotten about the fiasco by the time I checked out. I assume most hotel guests are likewise busy and also do not report their issues, so what could be a good experience is ignored by staff and we silently suffer while paying exorbitant fees for dead trees. [Paper should be expensive to discourage printing, but most hotels use the availability of these offices to price gouge the guests].

This week I’m spending time in Kampala, Uganda and again the first few minutes seemed to go well:

Desk attendant points out computer in main room and tells me the password, which I need repeated 80 times before I get it. > Go to hotel computer, set up my computer. > Transfer docs to thumb drive. > Put thumb drive into hotel computer. > Open my docs (didn’t bother to check on layout — found out later that Uganda uses A4). > Only option is color printing — try to change that but no options (of course). > Realize I only need one copy and then desk can copy remainders (save money — yay!). > I need handout pages of a PPT which I am able to swap to grey scale. Excellent — Anticipated Success! > I went to the desk to pick up my prints.

When I got to the desk the attendant informed me that nothing printed!

The desk attendant and I then participated in an elaborate ritual with her laboriously printing directly from my thumb drive and then copying the remainder. While doing this she’s also taking care of other guests and having to redo some of my copies as she got distracted. This all took at least 20 minutes more. I mostly got what I needed this time. They had a really nice stapler.

There are printing solutions that offer better experiences, but clearly this is not a high priority for hotels. A colleague of mine travels with her own printer to save time and money. When she first mentioned it I thought that seemed excessive, but it may be the only sane solution.

What works for you?