Design Tribe: On Responsibility & Sustainability

A few weeks ago in New York City we kicked off our very first Design Tribe dinner. Being a recent San Francisco transplant, I hoped to connect a group of experienced designers and researchers in NYC, sparking rich UX & Product Design conversations in a smaller group setting (over dinner and drinks of course!).

Experienced designers have few formalized avenues for continued learning.

Why this format? Experienced designers have few formalized avenues for continued learning. We face increasingly complex challenges in our roles — both in continuing to adapt “hard” design skills to a changing technology landscape, as well as in growing our leadership skills for greater impact. Some of us are lucky to be surrounded by others we can learn from, but finding dedicated guidance and mentorship can be tough. By bringing together this group, we hope to create an informal tribe of mutual mentors. It challenges some of the more superficial conversations that are often carried out in large design events; the group can delve more deeply, and continue to build an atmosphere of mutual support.

It became clear we should be opening up our conversations, and expand our tribe of mutual mentors with the larger design community.

And so we did! For this first round, the discussion started on design titles, wove through design process, critique, design leadership, and finally dove into the ethics and responsibility of designers and the impact of our decisions. As we uncovered this last topic, it became clear we could also be sharing our conversations, and expand our tribe of mutual mentors with the larger design community. We hope to repeat this event in New York soon, but for now, here are some thoughts from our discussion. Let us know your thoughts, if you’ve tried out a format like this in the past, and if you’d like to participate in the future!

A big thank you to Dan Sullivan, Margaret Shear, Christina Chang, Paula Guntaur, Mark Enache, Danny Salvatori, and Nefaur Khandker for joining the first Design Tribe dinner!

Why should we focus on sustainability?

“Forgotten older sibling.” I find that often when I mention sustainability or long-term impact, it’s like I just pointed at some malnourished elephant sulking in the corner of the room that you can help for just five-cents-a-day. It’s like we’re talking about this budding utopia which, if we could all just recycle that one extra bottle, would finally be ours. Culturally speaking, we see it a million miles away.

The conversation around what impact is needs to evolve and start in the now.

Younger generations are investing shorter- and shorter-term, likely due to being shocked awake by the bursting financial bubbles of our parents’ generation. Yet, when it comes to our own well-being — particularly around work, the scene of most of our waking hours — we still continue to invest in a future that doesn’t exist rather than helping ourselves today. I’m not talking about selling everything you own to go become your own Magellan, suitcase and beloved fur-friend in tow (although, that does look appealing…). I’m talking about little, everyday investments.

Example: If you’re starting to get a cold at work, most people will wait until they’re pretty gross to call out or go home, probably at the risk of losing some form of bottom line (money, reputation, a deadline). Few people care about keeping others healthy. And why would we? People have bigger fish to fry than office altruism — like paying the bills, accomplishing their career goals, or even just keeping things simple in crazy, crazy times. But we — particularly Americans — have an almost supernatural talent for believing that other people’s problems don’t affect us. Did you know that in the long-run, going to work sick actually costs more for everyone than just staying home in the first place? And yes, that includes you, retroactively.

If you made a commitment to start working from home as soon as The Crud crept in, what would that mean for “Future You?” Might you relieve the focus-breaking distraction of everyone glaring at your miasmic sneeze-fest all day? Might you jump back to 100% after a couple days rather than crawling at fifty for the next two weeks? Maybe you get fewer coworkers sick, which means fewer people home sick and not delaying your next couple sprints. The impact this one small action has on overall productivity quickly becomes obvious.

Prioritizing investment into your own and others’ well-being is the building block of sustainable impact in the world.

The impact is serious, and that’s ultimately the promise of investing in today — that a better future is not just possible, you can make it happen now.

–by Mark Enache

How do you approach user privacy and safety?

Before moving to New York this year, I worked as a product designer at Remind, a messaging platform for schools. Many teachers use Remind as the primary way to communicate with students & parents. It’s a way for them to keep parents in the loop, extending learning beyond the classroom, fostering a greater sense of community, & establishing more personal relationships.

Communicating with students outside of the classroom, however, can be a bit tricky. On one hand, many teachers want to have a communication channel that effectively cuts through the digital noise of their students’ lives. On the other hand, communicating with minors needs to be facilitated in a safe environment. Before using Remind, teachers often have questions like:

• Will my personal information be shared with my class?
• Can I control when I can be reached?
• How do I obtain parental consent to communicate with my students?
• Does Remind comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)?
• Does Remind help my school protect the privacy of student records (in compliance with FERPA)?

Questions like these drove Remind to be very intentional about how it handles PII (personally identifiable information) and to create protective Community Guidelines. It was well understood that our product decisions could affect the livelihood of our teachers, and this awareness created a culture very attuned to the long-term impact of even the smallest changes. To help support this further, we created a Trust & Safety team, stayed close to our teachers through ongoing Research, and brought these questions into the conversation whenever we created something new.

To give you some examples, when we built a way for students to search for and join classes, we made sure to give teachers control over whether their class was searchable or not. We only built profile photos after we had a flow in place for reporting inappropriate content. When we built Reactions, allowing students to more quickly respond to messages, we were careful to avoid emoji that could be abused and used for bullying. We achieved this by testing different sets of Reactions, gathering feedback and monitoring usage in groups of beta testers. We also intentionally created Reactions to be backend-driven, so we could quickly update them if we noticed an issue.

We didn’t always get it right. Sometimes we made mistakes and had to course-correct. But the fact that privacy & safety were so deeply woven into Remind’s culture made it easy to keep these issues top of mind. In other industries, however, the impact of these decisions can be an afterthought until something seemingly small, like a simple settings change, creates consequences with lasting impact on someone’s life.

“When you call something an edge case, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.” — Eric Meyer

So how can we improve this? What can designers do to stay focused on the long-term impact of these decisions? For starters, we can continue to educate ourselves on similar privacy and impact issues that have mired other companies. We can help strengthen our team cultures by continuing to bring up critical questions even in what may seem like small decisions. We can advocate for teams, frameworks and best practices — such as safety & community guidelines and User Research—that function as mechanisms to help our team collectively reign in the complexity of our work for more responsible impact.

Let’s be real with ourselves — product development is unavoidably human. Products don’t get created by a machine; each decision happens through many conversations with our PMs, developers, & cross-functional team members. By coming back to questions like “does this exploit or protect our customers?” we can slow down and remind ourselves that we are ultimately designing for people. Not edge-cases, not “users.”

— by Danny Salvatori

How do you support users in the short term to create long term, positive impact?

When people think of companies that create positive impact, the first answer is often non-profit companies. However, startups can and should challenge themselves to create positive impact, and not just build the next idea that squeezes out another minute of usage or another dollar. Thinking in a way that creates positive impact will help you plan toward future features and services to gain loyal, lifelong users.

What it means to create positive impact differs across specific industries and products, so here’s a general starter question:

What is the long term, holistic impact of what you’re building?

Startups tend to think 1–2 years ahead if they’re lucky, since they have to move fast to keep up with competition. That’s why it’s easy to lose sight of the long-term impact of your products.

For example, let’s say you’re building a retirement product for millennials. That means you’re asking users to think 40 years out! This is made especially difficult when you take into consideration that the average American income is about $56,000. If they live in an expensive city, that means living paycheck to paycheck. You, as the designer, are going directly against what the user naturally wants to do: survive the next week vs. thrive in the long term future. Plus, your product has to make up for the lack of personal finance education in America.

Thinking beyond long term impact, it’s worth identifying how user interaction with your product may have a holistic effect, a ripple impact on future generations and the wider society:

Having savings or an emergency fund is a good example of a simple thing that has great potential for wider impact. Beyond being able to pay rent if you lose a job, an emergency fund is a major step toward feeling stable. This shift frees up mental space for planning toward other areas of your life, like health, exercise, and diet. Additionally, these lessons in money management are often passed down, creating more wealth and opportunities for future generations.

So, given all these challenges, how do you gently move someone’s mindset toward saving for retirement?

Start small to build long term, healthy financial habits:

• Learn by doing — help users make that first investment
• Provide financial education in the product (tools, tips, videos, guides)
• Meet them where they are with language and analogies they can relate to

No matter what product you’re offering, try identifying the positive long term impact you can create for users — starting with 1 year, 5 years, and even multiple decades.

It’s a great motivator to truly understand that what you’re building as a company keeps affecting users long after they shut down your app or put down your product. And, if you find the impact isn’t positively serving users, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate and consider a new product approach.

— by Christina Chang

How does the notion of sustainability drive your work?

I think about sustainability from a somewhat existential lens:

What do we want to continue to exist in our world? What do we believe is valuable for our world? How do we, as designers, ensure we’re putting our time and energy towards the things we truly believe to represent lasting value?

These questions were a big driver in my decision to leave a wonderful life of independent consulting to join Condé Nast as Design Director, and help drive the transformation of this cultural institute and the publishing industry at-large. Simply put, I decided to put my time towards making sure that publications like The New Yorker can continue to exist fifty years down the line despite all of the other external pressures working against them.

Older organizations and industries continue to fascinate me more than the newly emerging ones:

How do we help organizations which have created something of historical value translate this to the future, even amidst shifting constraints?

This was one of the reasons I moved to New York City in 2011 from San Francisco, where I became jaded seeing too many startups pursuing what often feels like a gold-mining expedition of sorts, in a quest to uncover new value. Meanwhile, the older industries, largely centered in New York — the ones which have powered our social and cultural infrastructure such as financial services, publishing, and advertising — are continuing to fight for a way forward.

These are all questions I like to bring into my team’s work daily, as we evaluate possible paths forward regardless of whether we’re discussing strategy or pixels.

How can we enable our editorial teams to do the things they do best, regardless of form factor? How can we provide our users with the thing they value most from us?

The way people discover and consume our content has shifted wildly in the past 15 years, with tectonic shifts in digital behaviors and the rise of social media. However, the fundamental thing that we give to people worldwide (over 164 million people to be more specific) — whether from Vanity Fair, WIRED, Bon Appétit, Pitchfork, or other brands — has not changed. People engage with the ideas and stories created by our brands because it gives them perspective, magazine-style content helps them relate to the world around us in new and different ways. This is the real challenge. Not how do we create a better website for a magazine. Not how do we help our advertisers sell more inventory. How do we ensure that this type of knowledge and perspective is available to people in the future regardless of what new fangled devices and and storytelling mechanisms we create? These are the questions that drive the design decisions we make daily.

Older organizations and industries continue to fascinate me more than the new ones: companies that have figured out how to deliver something of value to people. However, many of these organizations are still working through how to translate this value into our rapidly evolving technologically-driven landscape. So, from the broadest level, I would say that these types of questions are the ones that drive my team’s work. From a product development standpoint, how can we empower our editorial teams to do the thing that they do best?

— by Margaret Shear

How do you approach accessibility and inclusivity?

Agile development and intense prioritization often lead us to design for the “majority” of users, somewhere in the middle of a generalized bell curve. Accessibility then becomes this effort, at the end of our process, to make sure our fonts are legible and pass color contrast and perception testing. When we’re designing for millions of diverse users, this is an incredibly simplified version of inclusive design.

August de los Reyes, head of design at Pinterest, recently shared an idea that deeply resonates with me. He explains that the World Health Organization changed the definition of disability from the medical model to the social model. Reyes goes on to explain:

“Rather than thinking of disability as an outcome of some sort of medical phenomenon, it’s a mismatch between a persons ability and the environment that they live in — which is designed… Disability is a shortcoming of designed environments.”

This is a really powerful perspective. It highlights that when we make design decisions we have the capacity and responsibility to design for many — and not doing so creates a difference in ability that is exclusive. There’s an added benefit here too. Expanding the notion of who we’re designing for and considering differences in ability can benefit everyone. Reyes uses the example of wheelchair ramps, which can help not just those in wheelchairs and crutches but folks coming in to a building with bikes, packages or strollers.

There are a number of tools that are helpful in making sure we keep inclusive design a priority. A few helpful starters include: asking questions about intended demographics, creating design systems that integrate usability best practices, and running usability tests. Another strategy I’ve found really helpful is creating a set of personas, and including a couple that push on the bounds of our intended audience. As an (overly simplified) example, even if your team thinks most of your users will be parents in their mid-30s, include at least one persona that is a young, single student, as well as a retired grandparent. By diversifying the representation of users, we can keep coming back to a wide range of abilities, backgrounds and needs. This can help us improve our designs so that they‘re solving problems for many, and maybe even bringing new ideas that make them better for all.

— by Analía Ibargoyen