Design Roundtable

Why are you interested in this session?

- human rights centered vs human centered design

- taking a difficult concept and making it approachable

- as we’re seeing human rights being degraded, how does this def function legally… how to keep ourselves safe. Trying to implement this on a large scale … and still have it work well enough considering user error

- usability conversations that takes into account power… e.g. Silicon Valley usability which destroys the man. So usability from what interest. Usable vs accountable usability. Digital justice is so much about how the dev of tech takes into account the needs and interests and accessibility of people without power

- to what end?

How to think about moving power in this way… these are Silicon Valley buzz words:

- Usability

- User experience

- Human centered design

- A/b testing

How do we think of these words?

Usability

- to what end?

- usability - ease of achieving a goal… but whose goal?

- low curses per min

- things that are considered more usable… are power structures

- comfort, low friction

- limited frustration, limited swearing

User experience

- workflows, interaction, more complete user interaction with the whole system

- first introduced in distinction to UI… UI is user interface, a snapshot of a thing; UX is the montage… journey… whole experience

- were they successful, confused, happy, did they get done with the goals

- incorporating feedback loops and understanding frustrations

- digital security training scene… peoples live frustrations when they are forced to use these tools under duress

User testing

- umbrella term for assessing a user experience

- quantify user experience

- best way to identify your assumptions

- helps you work against your cognitive bias… of how you think something should work.. .versus how it actually gets used

- can be applied remotely… not present, but internalize their frustrations

A/b testing

- specific formal method… show some users a, some b; define some criteria of success, decide which is more

- often done on company’s end… top-level view

Good groundwork/baseline to work from together…

Group’s biggest frustrations related to one of these terms

- new designers on boarding, helping them fig out what they should be working on

- multiple engagemenou ts as an org focused on planet efforts, make sure messaging is representative

- people have conflicting ideas about how to a/b test

- struggle of getting proper feedback from sources when you have built a tool that explicitly anonymizes them

- power dynamic of playou es that can afford to do user testing can’t gain as much from it vs projects where you can gain a lot but don’t have resources to do it

- ppl struggling with a thing, do you improve usability or train ppl to use it as is. in a weird way training gives you add’l usability insights, helps validate assumptions about why it’s difficult. Tradeoffs, decisions

- two very Dif contexts where you had instances of a tradeoff where it would be a lot of work to make the thing easier to use… agency if ppl understood the harder thing better

- sometimes ppl just really don’t click the button

- the way you can’t really trust what ppl say, observe what they do

- it doesn’t have to be very complicated… can be very simple… most value from watching anyone and watch how they use it, don’t say anything, take some notes, make some changes and try it again

- digital security trainings for Dif types of experts, e.g. journalists, use tools like tor and signal and how feedback so far has been that some are easier to use etc