Zsofi Lang’s Sketchnotes from my talk “Safe Tech Audit: IA as a Framework for Respectful Design” from The Information Architecture Conference 2022:
Safe Tech Audit Sketchnotes from IAC22
Me2B Alliance
Background
The Me2B Alliance is a standards development organization comprised of software engineers, policy analysts, UX experts, business and philanthropic leaders who are committed to giving individuals more say in how technology treats people. We are setting up a rigorous independent testing and certification program for websites, apps and connected devices. The Me2B Alliance is comprised of working groups for Me-s (the consumer), B-s (the business) as well as the Policy and Legal and Certification working groups. Together, we are setting the standard for Respectful Technology.
My Role
My role at the Me2B Alliance is twofold: I am leading up the Research and Validation practice to provide user experience and other research services to the various working groups, exploring questions around the consumer experience of their relationship with digital technology.
Secondly, I am developing the product integrity testing framework for digital technologies, in particular mobile apps and websites. This framework, coupled with data integrity and security testing, makes up the requirements for Me2BA certification.
User Research Methods
Ethnographic Research
I am engaging consumers in one on one conversations about their relationship with technologies they use in their day to day lives. Research questions range from and their understanding of privacy policies, terms of use agreements and other agreements they make implicitly by using a technology. for example, do users change how they interact with a website when they are familiar with the legal terms of the website? And would a score make a difference?
Preference Testing
I performed a series of tests of the certification mark to be used as a symbol of trust in connected digital technologies. This included interviews, focus groups, unmoderated 5-Second preference tests and surveys.
Product Integrity Testing
I developed a UX Integrity framework for the Me2B Safe and Respectful Technology Framework (now published as the Me2B Safe Specification). This framework was based on an applicaiton of IA heuristics to ensure that notices of data collection, use and sharing is Clear, Findable, Accessible, Credible and Communicative or understandable by a wide audience of human and machine readible or accessible devices.
Tools
Interviews and Focus Groups: Zoom, UserInterviews.com, Surveymonkey
Preference Tests and 5 Second tests: UserInterviews.com
Collaboration: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Microsoft365, Trello, Monday
Artifacts
Safe Tech Audit: IA as a Framework for Respectful Design (April 23, 2022)
Conference Presentation: Information Architecture Conference 2022
Spotlight Report #5: Me2B Alliance Validation Testing Report: Consumer Perception of Legal Policies in Digital Technology (January 18, 2022)
Spotlight Report #3: Me2B Alliance Validation Research: Consumer Sensitivity to Location Tracking by Websites and Mobile Apps (November 5, 2021)
Shedding Light on Dark Patterns: A Case Study on Digital Harms (April 28, 2021)
Conference Presentation: Information Architecture Conference 2021
Webinar: Me2B Research: Consumer Views on Respectful Technology
Future Plans
We are planning to conduct three focus groups per month of consumers and digital product designers/managers. The research will continue to evolve our understanding of how consumers experience their relationship and risks with respect to digital technologies.
Safe Tech Audit Sketchnotes – IAC22
Zsofi Lang’s Sketchnotes from my talk “Safe Tech Audit: IA as a Framework for Respectful Design” from The Information Architecture Conference 2022:
Disruptive Technologists: Vint Cerf, the Metaverse and Me
Watch me and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf discuss the future of the Metaverse at Disruptive Technologists NYC.
Keep On Trackin’
In the research I’ve been doing on respectful technology relationships at the Me2B Alliance, it’s a combination of “I’ve got nothing to hide” and “I’ve got no other option”. People are deeply entangled in their technology relationships. Even when presented with overwhelmingly bad scores on Terms of Service and Privacy Policies, they will continue to use products they depend on or that give them access to their family, community, and in the case of Amazon an abundance of choice, entertainment and low prices. Even when they abandon a digital product or service, they are unlikely to delete their accounts. And the adtech SDKs they’ve agreed to track them keep on tracking.
Downward Dot Voting
My friend Austin Govella wrote today on using a kind of whole-body dot voting to teach teams to “Vote With Your Feet“. We are in a Liminal Thinking group on Facebook where he initially threw his ideas around. I was excited that he chose to add my comment about using negative dots to vote down ideas, and use them in my undergraduate UX class as a discussion point about what we Won’t do or talk about on a project.
My students get to use dot voting on the first day of our UX/UI class at CUNY CityTech, where we talk about what we are worried about for the upcoming semester. Addressing concerns and potential problems is a good exercise in most occasions, but in these days of online classes, crushing economy and pandemic, talking about our worries is particularly important. It helps to alleviate anxiety and develop a growth mindset toward the months ahead.
In this first class, the students learn about a number of design practices using a shared, online whiteboard, including brainstorming, dot voting, cluster analysis, and Kanban as part of a pre-mortem exercise on what can go wrong with the class. (I learned this exercise while teaching with Jimmy Chandler at the New York Code and Design Academy and modified it for online classes).
To begin, students use virtual sticky notes to write down their concerns about the coming semester. Then the students attach green and red mini circles, three each, to vote on which issues they want to discuss and which ones they don’t. Then we use Kanban (To do, Doing, Done) to keep the discussion orderly.
When I used the technique earlier on, I allowed each student three dots to vote on ideas that they want to discuss. There are usually concerns expressed that are common students commuting to our downtown Brooklyn campus, like getting to class on time (what if the subway breaks down? what if my work goes overtime?), having too much homework (it is a lot of homework, tbh), or dealing with a teammate that doesn’t pull their share (this happens on the job, too, unfortunately). It was OK. But these concerns, being fairly common are covered in the syllabus in the items about time management, group behavior and attendance, so the discussion becomes somewhat procedural.
There are of course new and now-common issues this semester about logging into school instead of commuting, managing family and job expectations, particularly for those students whose families rely on their job income and dealing with the combined stress of school, real and potential loss of family members (at least two of my students had a COVID death in the family and many have been displaced or ill), and just living in the 2020 political and budgetary climate. These issues are very personal and went largely unspoken but manifested as concerns about deadlines, time management and doubts that they have the skills it takes to be successful.
By allowing the students to select some issues that are not particularly a concern was a new idea and I found it especially interesting to explore them with the class. So along with items that have a lot of upvotes, I also selected items that have some upvotes, but also a few downvotes (more than one downvote, so as not to put any one person on the spot).
“Not a Concern” is key phrasing. For the upvote dots, I told the students to “mark items they want to talk about.” For downvote dots, the instructions are “mark items that are Not a Concern.” Te fact that someone wrote the issue on a sticky note in the first place means it is a concern for some students. I inferred from the “Not a Concern” votes that maybe there are people who have discovered ways to deal with the problem.
And for a teacher, it highlights differences in each class (there are always differences) that point to certain pedagogical approaches. For instance in one section the most up-voted concern was “potential weakness in design skills.” In the other section, a similar issue got a lot of down-votes. I wanted to know what was going on so made sure to expand on that concern in the second week’s discussion and begin a discussion of skills development, the importance of practice, and imposter syndrome.
This then becomes an opportunity for a discussion of growth. I tell them to ask themselves, How can I, as a student in a rigorous BFA program, discover ways to develop perspective so I understand where the doubt is coming from? How can I build confidence? Through practice, time management and simply being honest about the particularly stressful challenges this world is throwing at us and asking for help.
So cheers to Austin for giving me a fun topic to explore here. While you are at it, you can find his book, Collaborative Product Design at https://www.agux.co/cpd.
The Occasional Mentor: On Minimal and Natural UI, Mid-Career Change and Hailing Taxis in NYC
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly(ish) column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May. This one has a fun one at the end.
Why are more and more companies moving towards making their UI white?
I trace the emergence of white background, minimalist design to the popularity of flat design and the explosion of sites offering crowd-generated content or media from disparate sources, like Medium and iTunes.
Flat design became popular for two reasons. The first, related to mobile frameworks like Material Design, is that people were becoming used to how buttons and links work and the raised, skeuomorphic styles were beginning to look old. Button colors that contrast starkly with the (usually) white background and colors with significant meaning (think red outlines for field errors) were enough to generate meaning. The second reason is the rise of mobile, which required sites to load faster in order to use less data. It’s become less of an issue as free WiFi becomes more and more available. This, along with a need for our mobile launch buttons to stand out, is why we are starting to see things like gradients and shadows making a return.
Minimalist design arose for utilitarian reasons. Having a busy, colorful layout too often competes with the images used by third party sources, so a clean, white (or black) layout makes sense on sites that aggregate a lot of content. There is also a recognition that certain background styles or fonts become dated very quickly. If you avoid using the style du jour, your products are less likely to seem old sooner.
How can I make the UX/UI design of a product feel more natural?
There were a lot of good answers to this question. I thought I’d add a couple resources that might be useful in understanding the fundamentals of natural, usable design.
First is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which discusses affordances like door handles and light switches and how people understand that a thing is something one can interact with.
Then read Indi Young’s Mental Models and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. These will get you good information about how to approach design in a way that is natural to the user.
I also like Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey, which pulls back to the whole experience of how a user finds and solves a problem and what their emotions and struggles are along the way. It goes well with the Empathy Map that some people described in previous answers.
Is it too late for me to take an UX design boot camp and get hired into an UX job? I have no design experience. I am 32 years old?
In an earlier post, I discussed the kinds of soft skills that are essential for an older, but new UX designer to highlight in a resume and portfolio and ways to bring up one’s design skills, in addition to boot camps, which I should say I have taught and recommend as a way to get the basics of UX along with some collaborative experience.
The list of tools that I mentioned should be updated, as I predicted. We see shiny, new tools every year, but a few seem to get mention in job posting more than others. We did use Sketch and InVision in our course. There are other tools you might consider working with including Figma, Adobe XD (which is now free), UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer, Proto.io and collaborative design tools like Mural, Miro (formerly Real Time Board), etc. you can find a lot of these if you search “Best UX Tools”.
Don’t try to learn them all and don’t worry about having an expert level at any of these, as you will likely be introduced to new ones on the job. If you have a positive attitude toward learning new tools, it helps a lot. Pick a few to create some mock designs, and then see if you can find a pro bono project to work on. You can also do a mock project for your current company, which would be ideal since you probably know a lot about your customers/users and would stand out in your portfolio. (Ask your boss first).
I know a lot of people who transitioned to UX at a later age from other careers, including similar roles in graphic design and communications, and as distant as restaurant management. Some were over 50 when they made the transition. 32 is still very young, so you won’t have to struggle against age-related bias nearly as much.
Do I have to whistle really loud to hail a taxi in NYC?
I love this question. Lol, no. Though it does call attention. I know a few doormen who have a pretty strong whistle.
If you can’t whistle, what you should do is cautiously step out a little off the curb, especially if you are on a block with parked cars, so the driver can see you. Corners are also good places to wait since you can direct a taxi heading the opposite way or on a perpendicular street to turn your way.
If you are too shy or too short to be seen, NYC Taxis also respond to Curb | The Taxi App.
The Occasional Mentor: Happy New Year! Resolutions and Bad UX
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below is a question I answered in December (slow month) and an idea for the new year.
Happy New Year!
Wait. Bad UX? I guess we can start the year with something a little more aspirational first and then get on with my answer from December.
On the DesignX NYC Slack, as on many of my social media spaces, everyone is talking about what they plan to change, do, realize for the New Year. It’s a good exercise and I thought I’d share my New Year’s resolutions here.
What I really want to do is get back on top of my writing a bit (lot) more. I do this Occasional Mentor column, but realized that I had a couple months of content backlog that I didn’t publish yet. I’d like to get more articles out on other things I’m doing, especially insights from our Behavioral Economics NYC guests. I’ll be experimenting with a few other formats as well.
I’m all caught up on republishing Brett’s Forbes articles to the Decision Fish blog. Brett posts at least once a month on financial wellness, philosophy, behavioral economics and of course decision making. I’m taking the opportunity this year to redesign that space to be more useful, with timely posts, curated content and links to our Behavioral Economics NYC videos. If I find time, no…When I find it, I’ll put in some work on a much-needed revamp of this site.
I also plan to start having more meaningful F2F conversations. Some of the Slacks I’m on have used the @donut plug-in for peer mentoring/networking. It can be hit and miss, but when I do meet interesting people it’s a win. I’ve already had five meetings this month with people I met at meetups and via @donut, including one client pitch!
In the spirit of Give/Get, I encourage you to think about how you can learn from your networks and what you have to offer, because I’m sure you have a lot to share in the coming year.
How you can help? – Follows always help. Follow
Also, don’t wait for @donut to match us. Reach out if you want to grab coffee or lunch some time.
Areas where I can help? – I can help walk anyone through the wonderful world of startups and can offer advice on pitch decks, founder programs and bootstrapping. I recently went through the Startup Leadership Program and was in a couple of incubator programs including NYU StartEd. We even placed well in MetLife Foundation’s Inclusion Plus. AMA.
And now, from Quora…
What are some examples of poor UX designs in good websites/apps
I’ll clarify a previous answer. There certainly is such a thing as bad user experience and it is possible for UX Design to be implemented poorly. That said, Bad UX Design or Dark UX or using UX methods or knowledge of human behavior to trick users into actions that are against their interest does exist; however, it wouldn’t properly be called UX Design, since the fundamentals of UX Design begin with the users’ interests.
Poorly implemented UX is really anything that’s is irritating or gets in the way of the user’s goal: badly implemented user flow, difficult onboarding, “corporate underwear” (where content or structure is delivered from the corporate POV rather than the user), or anything that generally frustrates the user.
My favorite example lately of poorly implemented UX is the old Search Bar at Jet.com. They have since fixed it, but for a very long time it was an extremely frustrating experience. On the home page, the search bar is displayed prominently at the top of the screen. It used to be that when you entered a search on the home page, a new search page would open with a new search bar, forcing you to enter the search again. This was true no matter which device I used. I can’t figure out why delivering results from the home page search box should be so difficult that the user should have to re-enter a search. I was really happy when they finally fixed it, which incidentally was around the time they started delivering some items in more environmentally friendly packaging. (I could go on about their packaging issues).
The rest of the online UX at Jet.com is relatively good. I like the filtering and ratings information and the information about product safety. The cart functions pretty seamlessly and allows you to add or change items from a popout window. They could do a better job identifying second day only versus standard delivery, since there is an added cost. And their “buy more to reduce the price of everything” plays into some cognitive biases. You could call it a dark pattern, but it is not a new or unrecognizable one. Walmart has been using similar price drops for years.
The Occasional Mentor: On Data Science in UX, Content Strategy vs UX Writing and the Durability of Digital Humanities
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly(ish) column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in June.
How are the user experience design and data science professions connected with each other?
According to Wikipedia:
“Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from data in various forms, both structured and unstructured, similar to data mining.”
A data scientist is a person who is skilled in quantitative research and can formulate a study, analyze the results and create reports to inform other people about the topic of study. They may work with spreadsheets, statistical programs, graphical interfaces, and programming languages like Python, Java, JSON, R, SQL, MATLAB, SAS, C and F#, among others. They may also work with text analysis software, geographic information systems (GIS) and visualization tools like Tableau and Gephi.
UX designers use the results of quantitative research, created by data scientists and UX researchers. The reports help the designers understand user behavior, based on data collected from digital product user logs, web analytics, or quantitative user research tests. These data may describe typical user paths and places where users tend to drop off or bounce away from the app. It could include the results of A/B tests, card sorts, heatmaps, user flow diagrams and demographic and conversion data.
UX designers may also use the output of data studies in the content of the products they are designing for. These studies would be relevant to the subject of the product, not user generated data. For example, an infographic or other visualization that illustrates aspects of the product: weather maps, income disparity charts, election results.
What is the difference between a content strategist and a UX writer?
A content strategist creates a plan for all of the company’s reusable content assets. This can include graphics, text, labels, photographs, charts, PDFs, videos, audio files, documentation, directories, etc. The content strategist creates policies and manages the programs that house and govern content. This could include inventory, storage, workflow and governance of content (such as who has access to what type of content, who is responsible for updating or archiving content, who can delete or create new content).
A UX writer prepares written content for use in any number of media, including advertising, apps and websites, video/audio/animation, PR, etc. with a focus on maintaining a consistent user experience across all channels. This can include articles, product descriptions, documentation, headings, headlines, labels, microcopy, essentially anything that needs to be written in words.
Is the digital humanities an enduring movement or a trend?
I think it will endure. Academics need to create original research. Digital projects and analysis represents an exciting way to discover new things about subjects that otherwise seem to be studied to death. Applied to art, literature, history and other subjects in the humanities, digital projects open up a whole frontier of analytics and visualization where computational study used to be rare. This can take the form of text analysis, network diagramming, geographic information systems, 3D printing and even the creation of virtual worlds.
Where it can hit a road block is the fact that people who pursue humanities don’t often have the skills or competence required to utilize computational tools in their research. This isn’t their fault, it just happens to be rare in humanities curricula. That is why many universities are investing in developing IT and library staff who have these skills.
Ultimately, schools will include more and more digital studies electives in humanities programs. So like art and art history programs now may include chemistry and material science in units on art preservation, and English departments will have more an more computer scientists on hand to help with digital humanities projects.
The Occasional Mentor: On UX Certificates vs Conferences
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly-ish column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May.
Is it helpful to get a UX certificate or go to a UX conference as a starting point for a college undergraduate who wants to work on UX later but has no experience yet?
I am going on be the contrarian and say absolutely go to a conference or a meetup that is aligned with your UX interest. A certificate program will probably get you some basic skills, but so would reading books and working on pro bono projects on your own. (See one of my previous answers on certificates). For someone just starting out, it’s the interaction with other attendees as much as the talks and workshops that help build your knowledge of what and who you need to know to get a job in the field. And most conferences offer student discounts or lower-cost workshops so you don’t necessarily have to pay full price to get a benefit. Depending on where you live, Meetups can be plentiful and free or cheap. Online interest groups like Designers Guild on Facebook or UX Mastery on Slack are also good ways to find a community. UX Mastery even has a mentoring program.
Keep in mind that the most valuable UX design skills are soft skills like communication, presentation and ability to make insights. Design tools are always evolving so what you learn at a boot camp may not be marketable in a few years.
Some positive things about taking a certificate course. You meet your competition and potential future coworkers. A formal program may be confidence-building if you fear you don’t have basic understanding of what UX designers do and how they do it and aren’t comfortable picking up these skills on your own. But do some research. Not all certificates or boot camps have a good reputation. Meetups and other UX events are good places to ask about programs in your area.
Even better if your university offers design courses that you can take as part of your degree. Also, look for intro level cognitive psychology and ethnography courses (typically anthropology classes that cover interviewing skills). If your school has business or entrepreneur programs, ask if they offer any design or customer discovery workshops. Sometimes these programs are open to students schoolwide.