I gave this talk for CHIFOO on 9/3/20, and originally shared this at ameliaabreu.com

Thank you all for coming tonight, and thank you especially to Fellene and Ed for inviting me to give this talk. This year has been incredibly challenging for me, as I’m sure it has been for you all, and it means so much to be able to share my work with you all. While I’ve really struggle to define the term “community” in thinking about community-centered approaches to our work, three things really resonate for me — that these are people who see you, who are invested in your success, and who you are accountable to. I feel all of these things about the CHIFOO community and the greater community of designers, researchers, technologists and thinkers here in Portland, and I am so grateful to be a part of it.

To begin, I’d like to acknowledge a few things, and situate myself and this work in the present moment and context.

First, I’d like to acknowledge that as we gather here tonight as part of the greater Portland design community, that we do so as part of a legacy of colonialism and illegal occupation. The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River …” (Portland Indian Leaders Roundtable, 2018)

While the practice of acknowledging the land has become increasingly commonplace in the last few years (something I enthusiastically support), I’d like to extend this beyond an acknowledgement gesture and use this as a place to begin our inquiry tonight.

Last month, I was fortunate to take a trip with my family to Lopez Island in Washington. I first visited the San Juan Islands nearly twenty years ago, and I still feel incredibly lucky to visit and to live in this part of the world around such breathtaking natural beauty. Over the past few months, along with my daughter, I’ve spent some time fishing and clamming as a way to try and spend time outside and away from screens, and to connect with each other and the world around us.

For the non-anglers out there (I personally had not held a fishing pole for over a decade before last year), I want to stress that fishing is a complex art that combines technical knowledge (I had to watch a lot of YouTube videos in order to re-learn how to tie knots) , data gathering, observation and lots of affective work. I’ve found it a deeply humanizing activity and not a particularly materially rewarding one, but nonetheless, found such grace in it, not to mention a new kind of connection to the environment.

Off the trail in a park last week, I saw an interpretive sign that floored me, it still does, detailing how the Coast Salish peoples had used the site I was standing on dating as far back as 1000 BCE. That they’d developed reef netting practices used to harvest salmon over the course of three thousand years.

It is so humbling to realize how limited your purview of history is, and also to be reminded, on a very basic level, that we all want the same things, and that many of those things are really not mine, or yours, to own. That we, as community and as individuals, have borrowed and stolen a lot of things that we never had any right to. So I want us all to consider tonight, how can we learn, and re-learn to live together and work together in ways that start to repay this huge debt?

Since the shift to work and school from home in the spring, I’ve found that taking bike rides and walks in the park has been incredibly valuable for my well being. I’m fortunate to live close to Mount Tabor, and have found hope and inspiration on the trails there, listening to bird songs and looking up at tall trees.

But the recent police murders of Ahumaud Arbery, a runner and just last week, Dijon Kizee, a cyclist, serve as a very stark reminder that these things — connection with nature, freedom to exist in public spaces, are very inequitably distributed in our society, and often controlled violently. Once again, what have we borrowed and stolen? What have we lost?

So next, I want to state unequivocally that Black Lives Matter, and to call attention to the folks we have lost in the past few years to police violence. In particular, I want to call out George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and from our local community, Kendra James, Quanice Hayes, Patrick Kimmons. This is only to scratch the surface.

Lastly, I also want to acknowledge the losses that we have all experienced as a result of COVID-19 crisis. In May, I lost a member of my family to COVID-19 and even now, it feels hard to believe. I know that many of us have lost loved ones, and had our lives upended. Many of us have lost work, many of us (myself included) have lost access to childcare and other supports that enable us to do our work.

Right now there are a lot of headlines about how bad this crisis is for mothers and other caregivers in their careers. And I know that my career has been impacted, and this will change the course of my work and life. (In mid-July, I left a job at a big tech company because working from home and having no outside childcare was making me feel like a burnt out husk of a person.) But I’m also hopeful that by adapting, by working with others around me, by building connections with neighbors and in embracing change and all it means, that we can help shape the futures we want to live, something I think we’ve been putting off for too long or waiting for others to do for us.

This is a time when it is impossible to carry on as usual, and any attempt to do so reveals how deeply racism, classism, sexism and other forms of oppression have been baked into the systems and institutions we navigate every day. Moreover, for me personally, along with a deep sense of loss, I feel a new urgency and sense of possibility for uprooting injustice and building abolitionist practices in my work and life.

You may have witnessed the Milwaukee Bucks’ strike, which brought sports at a global level to a halt and showed the power of solidarity at work. While there probably aren’t any professional athletes here tonight (although you never know in Portland!), I want to argue that we all hold this same power, and that we can stop and demand changes in our workplaces, our communities, and the world at large. I think we all have the power that the Bucks do, but what we need is the solidarity. For designers, technologists and researchers of all disciplines, this is the time to pause, to connect, and to build power for the futures we want to live.

For those of you who may ask, what does this have to do with design, with UX? Let me remind you that the methods we use today for participatory design and research are directly descended from the work of Scandinavian trade unions in the 20th century. Participatory design was developed to empower workers and improve safety and well-being. To divorce our methods from these origins doesn’t do service to anyone.

To be perfectly honest, when I proposed this talk, I envisioned a very geeky methods talk, in which I spoke with objectivity about traditional social science research methods, the legacy of community participation in design research, and some ways that practitioners can shift their methods in order to cultivate relationships within their own communities. And then, to spin this about how good design can change the world!

For anyone anticipating such, sorry, but you’re not going to get that tonight. Instead, I want to reflect on the ways that design and tech, along with the verticals we work across — healthcare, education, draw on resources from their communities and how we might envision a more collaborative way to work in the future.

So what do we do when we can no longer carry on as normal? Like, for real, what does it mean to stand up?

You all may have seen the news last week that OHSU, our local teaching and research hospital, announced that it cancelled its 25 million dollar COVID-19 study on the basis that it had failed to recruit a representative sample of folks to participate. As a result, the data it collected was not very useful! Why is this?

COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted folks of color, both here and Oregon and across the US. As you can see in these tables from the Oregon Health Authority, Hispanic/Latinx folks, who comprise 12 percent of the Oregon population, have accounted for 40 percent of COVID cases. It’s estimated that 90 percent of farm workers in Oregon are Latinx. Think about the relationship between these facts, and what it means for all of us. All of us, in some way or another, rely on the farm workers in our state.

Community organisations, those already working with the populations we’ve outlined here, had a lot of criticism of the methods and practices OHSU employed. For one, their approach was very top-down, and designed in a way that did not build on community connections. Furthermore, one big flaw in the study design is that participants were not originally offered compensation for their time and participation, thus skewing the population who did volunteer towards those who had ample resources.

This is a multi-layered community issue here — we have several communities overlapping here, and no real alignment of goals. We have the global medical research community, eager to use all of its resources. We have a local community here, made up of folks who live in the region. And then we have smaller, more fragmented, but equally important communities within — communities built around shared languages and cultures, neighbourhoods, heritage, shared interests.

One of the things I have not done thus far is provide a singular definition of community, what has been called “a nicely coercive word”. Community can and does mean a lot of things, and the most damaging thing we can do is to take a singular approach to this. The biggest strength of community-centered approaches is that they bring in a diversity of perspectives that strengthens the work, and build more resilient findings and results because of this.

While I’ve discussed biomedical research here, I think the applications can and do apply to us the disciplines we work in. We don’t have to look hard to see examples of the ways in which tech companies have mishandled or neglected the people, places, and communities they serve. We can find one very literal and material example here, on the Oregon Coast, where an environmental advocacy group has initiated a suit against Facebook for abandoning a drilling project and trashing the sea floor.

So how do we move forward?

There are two things that I want to propose here, and neither are complete solutions.

First, I want to draw our awareness towards the way we work and organise ourselves. In the contemporary economy, fewer and fewer of us work in traditional jobs in traditional institutions. Many of us are freelancers or small business operators. Many of us work as subcontractors on projects for companies that don’t actually employ us.

While I would like to fantasize about top-down solutions — what would it mean for tech companies to have community accountability boards? I truly do not see this as a way forward. There are no leaders coming to fix this problem, and it’s one that will impact us all in very de-centralized ways. The antidote, I think, to this huge gap between what our communities truly need and the lack of real solutions provided by corporations and nation states is deceptively simple — small individual actions.

I’m intrigued and inspired by the approaches in Julia Watson’s new book, Lo-Tek, which argues for a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. I believe that the most meaningful path forward is in building connections around what we share, the natural world being a gateway to all of this.

Perhaps the smallest, most impactful actions we can take are in critically examining our own work.

It’s important to note now, as ever, that design is not neutral, and design thinking is not always a source of good. Moreover, our current moment ( or more accurately, the last decade), has positioned design in a very culturally specific, and I would argue, gate-kept way. Lilly Irani’s work (2015), explores this in depth, and draws on her own experiences as a student at Stanford and a UX designer at Google.

Instead of asking why capitalist dynamics attempt to make even skilled labor as cheap as possible, the Stanford journal declares design as the valuable form of expertise…I heard this logic echoed in the hallways at Google as designers discussed the threat of outsourcing to India; they concluded that programming could be outsourced. Design, they concluded, was too “creative” to outsource. Only those living on the edge of the future a temporalization as old as colonial enlightenment and later modernization could combine emotion, cultural cosmopolitanism, and technology to make good designs.

We have spent so much time and rhetorical effort positioning design and design thinking as valuable and creative, and thus positioning the folks who do these jobs in a way that removes them from the actual problems they’ve set about solving.

In our current economy, we’re urged both at personal and institutional levels to devalue, a depersonalise the labor of others, to our supposed gain. We’ve been taught to ignore our bodies, our physical spaces, our histories and culture in order to elevate this work. And I’d argue that it’s made the real work of innovation and collaboration much harder.

What would it mean to approach our work with the belief that it was equally important to any other human work? To view the work of preparing food, keeping essential services running, or caring for children or elders with the same value as we assign to coding and conducting research? What would it mean to make visible, and valuable, the labor made invisible by design and technology? To use artist Jenny Holzer’s truism, what if we all worked under the notion that “Everyone’s Work is equally important”.

Those who have been at this game for awhile might have some objections to all of this — it is, I suppose, in our best interest in the short term to cast our work as uniquely valuable. Yet, this isn’t a bet I’m willing to make. In order to do the important work, we need to collaborate as equals with the folks who are most impacted by the decisions we make.

Time, of course, is another constraint here. Those who know me know that I’m as impatient as anyone. And yet, the past six months have changed all of our relationship to time.

It struck me that it took sports all over the world shutting down for 48 hours before they took Jacob Blake’s handcuffs off in the hospital in Kenosha.

Building real relationships and partnerships takes time. Changing our approaches takes time. And yet, at the same time, the decade or so I’ve spent in this business has shown a lot of short-term gain and long term stasis.

We need radical, imaginative, and adaptive approaches to do the work we need the most. The future is here. Let’s fight for it

When we talk about usability, or accessibility, one word that’s bound to come up is “empathy”. What is empathy, exactly, and how do you get it? Defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”, empathy is more complex than it sounds.

As Leslie Jamison writes, “Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia — em (into) and pathos (feeling) — a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?”

Can you step into someone else’s pathos momentarily and easily? Some folks think so, but I’m not so sure. Is there a better way to approach this?

Perhaps the most popular method of invoking empathy for accessibility issues is simulation, meaning to “try on” different constraints of disabled folks. This is practiced often in groups — working groups, or professional workshops. One common activity is to submerging one’s hands in icewater to simulate motor impairment. A local bureaucrat I know told me that he’d organized a group outing for his team in borrowed wheelchairs, where the otherwise able-bodied crew wheeled around the downtown area, with the intention of becoming more aware of ramps, curb cuts and accessibility infrastructure.

Previously, I’d thought these exercises were a good way to get people engaged. But the longer I do this work, the more reluctant I am to do things like these. They feel short-sighted and showy, and don’t engage the real people who navigate the world with differing abilities. There’s a term you hear in hip hop: stuntin’. These activities seem like stunts, that allow us to feel like we’ve broadened our perspective, making a big deal about it, and then go back to business as usual.

I’m not alone in being troubled by simulation-as-empathy building. In fact, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that this sort of exercise can undermine the intended outcome. One recent paper, Crip for a Day: The Unintended Negative Consequences of Disability Simulations, published by the American Psychological Association’s journal, Rehabilitation Psychology (March 2017), found that “disability simulations often result in feelings of fear, apprehension and pity toward those with disabilities.”

The research team found that “mimicking the effects of a disability for only a few minutes fails to account for the diverse coping mechanisms and innovative techniques persons with disabilities develop in long-term situations. Thus, momentarily experiencing the challenges a disability may create could cause participants to underestimate the true capabilities of persons with disabilities”.

So what do we do instead? Dr. Michele Nario-Redmond, lead author of the study, suggests that we build equitable human relationships with folks with differing abilities and disabilities. “For those who are curious about disability issues, take the time to visit with real people [with disabilities] and lots of them. Get to know their diverse interests and accessibility concerns and ask how you can be an ally for disability rights.”

Personas from the Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit.

This can start with you, and the people around you. I learned less from soaking my hands in ice water than from talking to my mom. She has chronic arthritis, and it’s through talking with her that I’ve learned more about the day-to-day adaptations one has to make in the context of an otherwise rich, full life. (I should also note that my mother is left-handed, so I’ve watched her point out barriers to accessibility for southpaws for decades.)

We can also think about accessibility in terms of diversity in experience: while I have friends and family members who use wheelchairs and other mobility devices, I became acutely aware of ramps, curb cuts, and the accessibility of infrastructure when I had my own daughter and used a stroller to take her around with me (and often, to put her to sleep!). Now, as a daily cyclist, I have another perspective on ramps and curb cuts.

There’s a powerful illustration here: The ramp outside of our local public library makes the building more easily accessible to those using wheelchairs, but also to the parent with the sleeping baby, the cyclist, or the delivery driver with a dolly full of packages.

We all have people in our lives whose bodies are remarkably different from ours. And it’s through living and critically engaging with diverse groups of people that we’re best able to cultivate empathy generally and constantly, not just selectively and discretely, and to design inclusive solutions that will work better for us all.

This post originally appeared on uxnightschool.com

Why I won’t “try on” disability to build empathy in the design process (and you should think twice… was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This quarter in UX Night School’s Intro Workshops, we’re introducing a journal exercise to go along with each week’s workshop. As I, Amelia, believe in walking the talk, I’m writing along with the workshop crew and sharing my responses. (Hopefully they’ll share theirs as well!)

Journal Prompt #1: Reflecting on your own past experiences, both professional and personal, what approaches do you bring to practicing human-centered design?

In this lesson, we’ve looked at perspectives from performing arts like theater and dance. But where are you coming from? Has your experience playing sports shaped your perspective? Studying history, sciences, or literature? Where have you learned to collaborate and make things?

Think about where you’re coming from, and how your perspective is unique.

I don’t talk about it much, but I spent my teenage years as a bona-fide theater geek (or theatre geek, as I would have made a point to spell it then). It started with a middle school drama and creative writing class, and became full-blown when I went to an arts magnet high school.

It’s funny to recall it now, but I feel oddly proud of my former self — by the time I was 18, I had hung lights, run sound, acted in plays, written plays (two of them even got produced!), built sets, sewed costumes, and stage managed a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I spent thousands of hours so immersed in theater, but at the end of high school, all I wanted to do was walk away. I burned out on theater, and to be real, the drama that surrounded it.

As an adult, my only involvement with theater has been as an audience member, and I have no regrets. Yet, as I look back, it’s very clear how all those years spent in the shop or at rehearsal shaped who I became and what I did next, and what I brought to my career in user experience and design research.

For one, my teenage passion for Playwriting helped me to understand dialogue and interaction, and how everyday interactions have a complex structure that very few of us ever think about.

When one writes a play, one first step in developing it is to have what’s called a “staged reading”, where actors sit on a stage and read the words out loud. Years later, I would experience a very similar feeling when I tested a product I’d designed — the theoretical, in-one’s-head concepts becoming real, and sometimes falling flat. A playwright can write what you might consider to be the perfect, brilliant bit of dialogue, only to hear it fall flat, the actors stumbling across it. Similarly, one can concept a feature only to get confusion from the end-users in the test.

Doing Theater also helped me to learn how theory and practice overlap and inform each other, and just how complex representing a problem can be. The concepts of mimesis (artistic imitation, representation or presentation) and digesis (literal narration) date back to Plato. And they’re particularly relevant in this regard — concepts that philosophers and theorists have wrestled with in the years since. Building technology is a form of mimesis, and as I learned in my youth, all acts of mimesis have a particular point of view.

Of course, if you ever take part in putting on a play, or in building a technology product, you’ll also quickly learn that production is always a collaborative effort. Just as actors draw our attention, tech figureheads are often who we see and credit with “the technology”.

Yet, an actor speaks their lines written by someone else, moves across the stage in direction from someone else, is visible because of lights set up and operated by someone else, wears makeup designed by someone else, appears in front of a stage designed by someone else and wears a costume designed by someone else — the list goes on. Similarly, when we hear about technology, and see these individual hero figures, I look back to my teenage theater days and say “yeah right”.

Theater also taught me that any effort that requires specialized knowledge is “technical”, and that hierarchies are almost always part of social life. Technical theater geeks (as I was) can and will nerd out about soundboards, lighting setups, set construction, stage makeup, or costume construction. It’s funny, because although “Technical Theater” geeks try to show themselves as more serious than performers, the Greek word techne originates in reference to the craft of performance. In my work these days, I take great joy in observing and identifying the hierarchical dimensions and secret languages of work and social life.

Theater taught me that everything has a structure. A play traditionally has five acts, and stories almost always adhere to narrative structure. We, as humans, recognize, are assisted, and resist these structures in our everyday lives.

All those hours in the theater taught me to recognize craft and complexity, to appreciate beauty, and to understand how our humanity is shaped by what we experience on an often-fleeting basis. It taught me to understand and consider multiple points of view, and to recognize different types of work and knowledge. But perhaps most important, it taught me to work at things that I felt compelling, and to take what I learned with me.

How my past life as a teen theater geek shaped my career in UX was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some steps to help you clean off your desk and get on with your work.

(Post from uxnightschool.com/notes)

Figure 1: Data from two days of workshopping, in a grocery bag.

Every design researcher, product manager, UX designer, and strategist faces this situation sooner or later. After we do our field research, gather our stakeholders, and engage everyone enough to get all of our brilliant ideas into sticky notes. We sketch, we write, we make models, and we make sense of it all. And then? The workshop is over. It’s time for happy hour! Great job, team.

It’s your job now to figure out the next steps.

And so now you’re stuck with the task of making this all make sense in a format that can be emailed, shared, uploaded to Basecamp, or converted to JIRA tickets. Suddenly, this all seems like a lot less fun. And what’s worse, you’ve got piles of sticky notes taking over your desktop, and photos of what seemed like such magic collaboration sitting in a folder. What comes next? What do you do with all of these freaking sticky notes?

We’ve faced this problem more than once, and we’ve learned by trial and error. Here are a few steps to turn those fleeting insights into actionable data, after you’re done with workshopping.

(A low-tech lifesaver: if you’re taking portrait-style photos of your workshop participants, use a small chalkboard to label your photos while you take them, classic mugshot style.)

1. Document it all (before, during, and after).

If you can, before you workshop, document not only your prompts, but also how you plan to schematise your data. What does this mean? Have a plan for identifying what’s what after the fact.

For example, If you’re going to take pictures of your attendees, make sure you have some way to identify these photos later. (One time-tested solution — have attendees write their names on a small chalkboard or whiteboard, and have them hold it up, mugshot-style).

You’ll especially want to document the schemes you have in place for your stickies. Say that during your mapping exercise, you’ll use green stickies for opportunities and, pink stickies for barriers, WRITE THIS DOWN beforehand.

This all helps future you, but also helps folks get involved. It’s helpful for some folks with different learning and working styles to have instructions on paper. After your workshop is over, you’ll do yourself a favor as well, as you won’t have to scratch your head and think “What the heck were the pink stickies for again?”

(From Adaptive Path’s Guide to Service Design Blueprinting)

2. Set up your spreadsheet like your exercises

After the workshop is over, you’ll need to communicate what went on in the workshop, and you need to share it within your organization. The ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it way of doing this is via a spreadsheet. (You could also use the Post-it Plus app which, in all honesty, I’ve never tried.)

So, make a spreadsheet, (maybe even ahead of time!) and set it up the way you’ve set up your workshop exercises: same order, same color schema. If things diverge from the planned path during the workshop (which they often do), you can update it.

3. Do your data entry ASAP (and remember it’s an important step)

Ethnographers have a longstanding debate as to the value of transcribing interviews in the research process. It’s been a minute since I transcribed an interview (These days, I prefer to film them, and share clips in my reporting and analysis), yet I always find that I get real insights when I deep dive into data, even when it’s the supposedly less-important act of transcription and data entry.

So what does this mean for you? Don’t delay data entry- in fact, plan on it. If you’ve scheduled a Tuesday afternoon workshop, put time on your calendar Wednesday morning to organize and enter your data. Pay attention to the themes that emerge, and make a point to bring other people into this process. Which brings us to our next point…

4. Have a Buddy (Divide and Conquer)

As is the case with most other parts of the design research process, having a partner in this step will help you tremendously. At minimum, recruit a colleague to come help out for an hour or two, (and offer to buy lunch). In fact, this post was drafted after Britt and I worked together to conquer the bag of stickies you see above.

It is incredibly easy for me to put off all of this when I’m alone, and thus it’s super-helpful to work with someone else. In a team, you’ll build momentum working together, and it’ll hold you accountable to getting it done. What’s more, you’ll be able to share your primary insights with each other, and draw on the data at hand to validate or question your hypotheses as they develop.

As you work together, find ways to capture and summarise your insights. Use Group Notetaking techniques on a whiteboard to jot down your findings. And as soon as you’ve finished entering the data, share your spreadsheet with the project team, summarising your topline insights in the email you send out. See what questions come back.

5. Envision the next steps

Sometimes, very rarely, teams will know exactly where they want to go next after a workshop. But more often, workshops will generate as many questions as they will answers. So, after you’ve finished entering your data, fielding initial questions, and sharing your findings, figure out what your next steps are.

Maybe it’s creating a higher-fidelity version of the map you built in the workshop, to keep the team aligned. Maybe it’s wireframes or more sketches to illustrate possible solutions, or creating user stories for the dev team. And maybe it’s finding the holes: the areas where you know that you don’t know enough, and coming up with a plan to move forward with this new set of questions.

I got a note from a former colleague last week, a web developer I worked with a few summers back on a freelance job at a digital agency. We built a collegial relationship based on mutual interests in 90s hip hop, skateboarding, snack food and bad puns.

He wanted to know, was there a career guide, covering things like salary negotiation for “women in corporate America” (and yes, I love that he called it that)- for a colleague of his: underpaid, subject to “mild harassment” (dude) and generally being taken advantage of.

I was glad to hear from him- here’s one of the good ones, I thought. Sick of seeing the “sociopathic baby men” (to borrow the phrase from Heather Havrilesky) continue to insist that they are relevant, while watching brilliant folks around him get treated poorly.

Maybe a few years ago I would have told my friend: “Yo! Take your labor to someplace that isn’t run like a chain restaurant”.

But things have been different for me over the past year, as I have come to accept it, over and over again, that we are all often reporting up the line to people we know to be exploitative and terrible. That we often have friends and colleagues come to us, telling us that they are treated poorly, paid way below market rate for jobs they are objectively great at, being passed over for jobs or promotions at their job, being driven out of jobs.

But, what do we do?

“I wish there was a good rulebook on these things- if there was, I would be living a much cushier life!” I told him. Because the thing is, I am not about to tell some lady to Lean In (or take any action, except maybe not to litter or shout at others from her car) when I don’t even know her! And neither should he!

I told him:

My favorite book on negotiation is “Getting to Yes” from the Harvard Negotiation Project. It is from the late 70s-early 80s and very good at breaking down what it means to negotiate and how to go about it. You can find it for 99 cents on amazon, and I have thrust it into the hands of many a taken-advantage-of friend/colleague. However! As they say, you can lead a woman to water…

But maybe you don’t even do that. Maybe you just listen. Maybe you call things out when you see them. Maybe you 🐸☕️. And maybe you do try to speak out, but others say it’s best to ignore the matter and move on.

“Your righteous indignation is good,” I told my friend.
“The best thing you can do is be transparent (about both money and other shit) and encourage your white dude coworkers to do the same. obviously, be supportive and nonjudgmental with your coworker. You have a baby face, a seemingly decent command of JavaScript, and more structural power than you know.”

But it did strike me that it is totally logical to ask, “Where the fuck is the user manual?!” Especially when you’re in a setting that feels so unfamiliar, and seeing things that blow your mind, and you want to know what to do.

This is a long game. You work from your own experiences, and you take others’ experiences seriously. Maybe you tell others what you see, when you see something egregious. Maybe you just say “that is wack” when you witness something. Maybe you back her up when she speaks out. Maybe you recommend your coworker for a cool project or a job down the line. And maybe you do get the chance to take your labor to a place that is not run like a fast food franchise. Maybe you just stop allowing yourself to normalize all of this. Hopefully we all, eventually, find a way to make those in power irrelevant.

We do this by working differently. By working inclusively, by building equity into our design and development processes. We re-write the user manual.

(A dispatch from the UX Night School Newsletter. Join us in PDX this fall or online.)

sabrina majeed on Twitter

lol this is why people hate the tech industry https://t.co/3yF0wtFoSl

Yesterday, my twitter timeline was consumed by a story from Fast Company about Bodega, a venture backed startup that put vending machine boxes in the lobbies of offices, apartment buildings, and other quasi-public spaces — thus eliminating the need (so they argued) for a real bodega, one staffed by humans and probably operated by immigrants. Bodegas are treasured institutions for many — they offer not just sundries and snacks, but also conversation, neighborhood news, and interactions.

In a rare moment of collectivity, my Twitter timeline filled up with not only disdain for this startup, disgust at the Silicon Valley mindset, but also an outpouring of love for real-life bodegas.

TOMÁS RÍOS on Twitter

My bodega guy calls me "brother," knows how I like my coffee, and has serious thoughts on the EPL. I would protect him with my life.

As someone who does not think that technology and humanity are inherently opposed, my thoughts turned quickly to how this concept could have been better executed. What do bodega owners know that engineers do not? How could these so-called innovators have brought the people they are accused of attempting to displace into the development of their product?

Speed and pressure in capitalism weigh us all down, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting something easy. I’ll admit, I’m as lazy as the next person, and will avail myself of conveniences where I can find them. As a grad student in Austin in the early-aughts, I lived next door to a mini-mart (semantically different than a Bodega but pretty much the same beast) that also had a taco truck. One month, I ate at that taco truck 23 times. (Freud called this “Repetition Compulsion”, I think of it as fond memory of my lost youth.)

What stood out most to me in the article was this bit, wherein the writer asked Bodega founder if he thought using the term Bodega, (and a cat in the logo), was offensive. His reply? “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’. It’s a simple name and I think it works.”

This made me crack the fuck up. First, any notion of “the Latin American community” as a singular thing that can be found and surveyed is kind of hilarious. I’m a Cuban-American who grew up in Tejas and has lived my adult life in the Pacific Northwest. As an overeducated guera, I feel endlessly guilty about (what could be seen as hard won gains by generations of my family) my own white privilege and assimilation. So naturally, I send my kid to a Spanish immersion school, where her teacher is a Boricua hippie and she hangs out with Mexicanos, Columbianos, Peruvianos, and other kids who like her are more American than anything else and can check a couple of boxes on the race and ethnicity forms. If there is a singular Latin-American community, I’m certainly not a part of it. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that Bodegas are run by folks from around the world. (We Latinx can only really take credit for the name.)

Yet! as a social scientist and a lifelong lover of television, the hearing the terms “survey said!” bring to mind a particular form of data gathering that may be more entertaining than externally valid. That of television classic “Family Feud”, and obviously, its DF-produced Mexican counterpart “Cien Mexicanos Dijeron” (literally: 100 Mexicans Said).

My fave incarnation of Cien Mexicanos is its current one with Mexican TV icon Adrian “El Vitor” Uribe as the host, and I have to say that I strongly dislike Family Feud’s current host, Steve “Act Like a Lady” Harvey, who should have been fired from this prestigious job for making hateful racist comments about Asian Americans. However! I will gladly watch any incarnation of this show and idly fantasize about which of my nearest and dearest I would recruit to appear on it with me.

And, as far as inadvisable bullshit strategies for determining whether your product is offensive go, surveying a tv audience is not the worst (the worst is the most common in tech circles — asking your friends and coworkers.) Someone get El Vitor and Andreeson-Horowitz on the phone! I have an exciting proposal!

So, what have we learned in the past 36 hours? First, that you cannot ask strangers, point blank, without context “Is this culturally offensive to you” and expect a reliable answer. Second, that “disrupting” an industry without actually understanding it on a cultural level — when you blatantly attempt to displace a beloved cultural institution with a vending machine- is not helping anyone, except for maybe you and your investors. And third, that convenience always comes with tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs get magnified with scale.

Let’s make technology together with the people who will be impacted by it. Don’t ask if it’s offensive, ask them what works for them, then watch and listen.

Right now, I’m sending out a lot of emails.

I started a school last year, having never started a school before. There are a few things I’m only now realizing what I signed up for. I am trying to figure out how to give students lessons that they can build on and also make things sustainable. And thus, I write lots of notes to students. To prospective students. To friends and people in my community. Like this one. And it’s hard in so many ways.

I should know this — both of my parents are teachers. They write firm, precise emails that let you know exactly what to expect. My daughter’s teachers write elegant, kind emails even when they’re doing their duty to recap little girl dramas of the most exhausting sort.

But my theory is that writing these emails is hard for a few reasons — one, that I am by nature anxious and cynical. I tend to approach all marketing — especially what I produce or have knowledge of, with caution and distaste. Second, I am not feeling so rah-rah-rah about the state of global capitalism or the tech industry lately.

Every day there’s another headline about how Silicon Valley’s Venture Capital firms are run by men who have repeatedly harassed or assaulted the women who have come to them seeking opportunities, along with the “good dudes” who have ignored everything all along. The parasitic startup culture they’ve spawned and the completely intolerable environments they’re created are on display, but no one knows if this changes anything. I hesitate to link to one single account, but this essay from Elizabeth Spiers is very good.

It’s inescapable, it seems, this sort of isolation and hopelessness. I dug out this bit of writing from 2015 yesterday, and was surprise-not surprised that much of it remains the same.

Loud, out of touch, offensive white men, both in the government and our industry, seem so entrenched in a reality that allows them to ignore suffering, and seem to be very eager to inflict more suffering on others if it means lower taxes for plutocrats, potential advancement for themselves, or increased return on investment.

I worry about preparing my students for jobs in this industry. It’s hard to send a series of emails telling people exactly what they’ll gain by taking the online course I’m teaching. It’s hard to overcome this myth that we can do this alone.

🔥📆

On the the 4th of July, a friend on social media posted a quote from James Baldwin’s“The Fire Next Time”. It made me go find my copy.

I was struck by what I found that seemed so relevant to what I had been teaching, the conversations I had been having with students over the past year. About how important and how hard it was to do this job responsibly.

How impossible it seems, sometimes, to represent someone else’s worldview. someone whom you may have little in common with.

How much potential there is for social change using the means of technology, as they say, if we want it.

Baldwin writes:

“We are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation with both the power, and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.”

I’ve struggled with another iteration of this. Working in the professional training space, I’ve found, gives you a particular view to how technology, and the opportunity in technology jobs, is of great interest to what seems like a demographically representative group of people.

“I want to be the professor I never had”, I said to myself when I entered my PhD program. With a few plot twists, this seems to have happened. One reason I suppose that I am able to do this is my own visibility as a Latina at mid-career. I’m somewhat relatable, or at least nonthreatening, it seems, and thus a diverse group of people have come my way.

How do we build better systems from the ground up? Let’s remain skeptical when the same VCs and investors that have proven to be so toxic seem to be convinced that they know what’s best for us. Our first challenge is finding our way out of this mess.

I’ve struggled to not roll my eyes at well-intentioned cisgendered, heterosexual white men when they wax earnestly about their ideas for improving diverse representation in the tech industry. And maybe they honestly believe that they can help. Our government seems to be made up of this sort of people — those loud, out of touch, offensive white men who think they’re doing us a favor and solving our problems.

Our own experiences are our advantage. Baldwin writes that to be black in America gives one “great advantage” in having never believed the:

collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.

I’m not Black, I’m not a man. I’m not living in 1962, so I feel I have to contextualize Baldwin’s points and why I find them relevant. Certainly I know this feeling of never believing certain myths — about America, but also about the tech industry. Roland Barthes calls myths “a special type of speech”, indicating what other types can not.

For Baldwin, the lived experience is what shapes not only a narrative, but a way of seeing:

In your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying “You exaggerate.” They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one’s word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came.

There is something radical about trusting your own experience. I think it’s impossible to ever fully, objectively know anyone’s experience. As I said in my last email, Experience isn’t objective — rather, it’s the ephemeral, subjective, completely limited view we have of our own experience that invites us to find rigor and practice to confront it.

And though trusting your experience is a radical individual act, it’s one we cannot do alone. We all need co-conspirators. Accomplices, not allies. Trusting others’ equally, while working towards a greater goal, is even more so. And it’s more important now than ever.

And maybe that is the biggest myth, and one that I’m still trying to face. We cannot do this work alone.

I wrote last week about how I started UX Night School for the folks who came to me with great ideas and ambition and drive and desire to change the way we work. But maybe that’s a myth I’ve told myself.

Because the work of getting UX Night School off the ground has revealed one big thing: I’m doing this in no small part to build the space I needed to grow in my career. I’m building what I had needed earlier in my career, but it’s given me something I need now more than ever.

Presale registration is open for Intro to UX Design/Research, an online iteration of our Portland workshop series. The course officially starts July 10, and our focus is on online community.

Let’s connect what we learn and do, building strength from each other.

I hope you’ll join us.
xoxo, Amelia and the UX Night School crew

Hi, it’s July 5, 2017. I’ve been re-reading “The Fire Next Time” and the world has been learning about the weird, sexist, racist culture in venture capital funding and the terrible things that have happened in the startup culture it has made possible.

Earlier today, I was trying to write about James Baldwin’s writing on “experience” as a form of power. I was reminded that I wrote this in 2015, on the “good guys” / “Cool Guys” in UX and in design and tech more generally.

This system is broken and obsolete. Let’s build something better, so this isn’t all still true in 2 years.

xoxo, Amelia

Earlier this week, I went to a design research talk put on by a local UX group. It was generally great- the project was interesting, and the approach was thoughtful and practical. Then, towards the talk’s conclusion, the (male) speaker brought up a slide with this on it:

“The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned”

I shuddered in my seat as the audience giggled. I’d heard this before: it’s a UX cliché that’s been floating around for 20 years. And, if you’ve ever nursed a baby, or struggled to nurse one, you’ll know that this is rarely true. Bruce Ediger, to whom this has been attributed, refuted it in 2001, writing:

I also regret to inform, that while catchy, the saying isn’t true. My wife gave birth to an infant son in January of 2001. The boy, while smart, good-looking and possessed of a dazzling personality, had to learn to breast feed. Other friends of mine say the same thing about their kids.
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. — Bruce Ediger, 2001

But whatever. In what world is it okay to casually compare other people’s bodies to interfaces as a joke? (I’m all in favor of critically examining the embodied and gendered aspects of interfaces, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a crucial distinction there.)

I knew that night’s speaker a bit. He is a cool guy, active and visible in the local design community, and his business partner is a generally bad-ass woman I admire. I told him after how I found that quote to be pretty objectionable: I told him what a lactation consultant was and referenced how I’d had my own frustrations with nursing my daughter.

I’ve felt uneasy since. In our society, it’s a crime to slow a cool guy’s roll.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Cool Guys. To be a Cool Guy is to exist in an unimpeachable state: he is cool, so any problem you might have with him or his actions or his associations and express in any way therefore makes you uncool. Oh, he’s not sexist, he’s a really cool guy. He’s such a cool guy! He’s really into drinking whiskey. Oh, everyone here is really chill, lots of cool guys. Cool guys are often dads, but reproductive status has nothing to do with being a cool guy!

In the design and tech worlds I live in, cool guys have the ultimate privilege. Being a cool guy means that, above all else, you uphold things being chill and in line with cool values. You avoid all manner of conflict, unless it’s in the event of someone being uncool. You pursue a homogeneity in coolness with no expense spared, and that means being into the things your friends like and being friends with the people who like the same things as you. Workplace culture revolves around the cool guy ethos: is this guy cool to work with? Hire him. Maybe not so cool? Maybe not a guy? Whoaa, I don’t know! We’ve gotta think about our culture here!

The field I work in, User Experience (or to use the cool abbreviation, UX) is in many ways a triumph of cool guy ethos. Engineers and executives never want to hear how their work is imperfect, but they take the news better when it’s delivered by a cool guy. UX is dominated by cool guys, their discourse is full of cool guy markers. UX cool guys are really good at talking about how they can make things “awesome”, posing any of their contributions as unquestionably beneficial and in everyone’s interests. How they can bring “empathy” to the development process like it’s a discrete object, like it’s a six-pack they can bring to your party.

Recently, several prominent UX cool guys told the world that they didn’t see the need for codes of conduct at conferences, because, duh, it’s uncool. This cool guy (bless his heart), explained how user research allowed him to learn about sexism and harassment. Cool guys are treated well anywhere, so why would they want to bother with thinking about how other people aren’t.

Despite the fact that “cool” is a completely ambiguous term that doesn’t stand up to any sort of critical yardstick, being a “cool guy” is still an excuse for pretty much anything and a means to write one’s own ticket. I mean, it’s been this way forever (I would make a list of cool guys who have done terrible things with very few consequences, but I would rather make myself a snack.) America is happiest when we are one nation under a cool guy: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan- they might not have a lot in common politically, but they’re unquestionably cool guys. Richard Nixon, Jimmy “Put on a Sweater” Carter? George H.W. Bush? Not so cool, man!

I would argue that Barack Obama is objectively our coolest president, but public perception disagrees with me. After all, we live in a completely racist society where the markers of cool for black men have a risky intersection with criminality. His reformed cool guy origin story has tempered his public persona: he tells us that in order to become and to be seen as a leader, he has had to present himself as a total square. He readily brings up his weed-smoking, leather jacket-wearing, Sonic Youth-listening past and but also tells us he got over it and decided to devote his life to public service. I adore this about him.

This guy.

The thing about cool guys, though, is that they’re rarely all that interesting or singular in their coolness. In ethnography, there’s a tradition of “collecting stories”. People are at their most interesting when they aren’t particularly chill: when they reveal the weird and obsessive parts of themselves.

Cool Guy dynamics stand in the way of this. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, it’s a blank space. When men act like Cool Guys they aren’t vulnerable or particularly self-aware, they don’t admit their shortcomings or mistakes. This is not a particularly advantageous approach to use when trying to understand people different from yourself.

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s op-ed from this week made a similar point: when we lazily rely on established social order for collaboration, those at the top of the social order get heard, no one disagrees with them, and thus no one actually collaborates or challenges anything. I think about facilitation and participatory design, and the issues this raises: you can’t just tell people to participate, you have to create a space in which they can do so safely.

Participatory design has long been popular in Silicon Valley, (Google Ventures has a design blog that relies heavily on participatory design techniques) but clearly, it hasn’t solved any of technology’s overarching problems with diversity in participation. Who gets to participate (and who doesn’t), is often just as much or more fraught than the dynamics of collaboration. How “participatory” is your design process when almost everyone who has input is doing so under the guise of performing as a Cool Guy?

(The sole visual from Fast Company’s article about Google Ventures’ design approach. Look at all these white guys participating!)

I understand though, what it’s like to try hard to maintain a gendered performance of cool. In 2014, we heard an awful lot about The Cool Girl. At this point, I cringe, because I am guilty as charged. I’m now entering my fourth decade what could be considered serious commitment to cool girl-ing and an impressive record of failure at it. I have tried give up this up, but my main hope at this point is aging out. I dream that by the time I’m 35, I’ll just be a middle aged lady who can just authentically like hot dogs, cars, music and sports and can stop trying to be cool about it.

After all, I have never succeeded in being a cool girl because I am decidedly uncool in my approach: studiously and fervently seeking out authoritative information on any and all cool topics. This, more than anything else, shaped my career trajectory: I started writing about music because on some level, it was a way to ascend this hierarchy (only later did I realize that critics of any sort are extremely uncool), and I fell in love with libraries and universities and computing and the promise of being able to organize and access knowledge structures — if something was cool, I reasoned, I could find out all about it.

In my teens and early 20s, revered and I hung out with a lot of boys and men with whom I really only sought knowledge and proximity: these relationships were not terrible, but perhaps not terribly honest. I got to listen to their records and absorb their acquired knowledge, they got to feel like authorities. The internet was a game changer for this: I once heard Tobi Vail say that as soon as she found out that you could find band discographies online, she realized she didn’t have to hang out with dudes she didn’t like. MP3 blogs in the early 00s changed things too: I no longer had to go to a dude’s house to hear the Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers. I abhor technological determinism, but I like to think that teen girls today have slightly better means for pursuing their interests. Though, from what we know about online communities, being a cool guy still reigns supreme.

Besides, a woman being committed to knowing and loving something is threatening. Last year, Deadspin reprinted Jennifer Briggs’ 1992 essay from the Dallas Observer: My Life In The Locker Room: A Female Sportswriter Remembers The Dicks. Of course, as someone who came of age in 90’s Dallas it all rang true, but this bit, especially:

The dirty little secret I’ve discovered is how little men know about sports, since this is what men are supposed to know more about than women. Most of the men I’ve dated certainly don’t know about the social fraying of America or why it might be at all amusing that a guy named Fujimori is in charge of Peru, so you’d certainly hope they knew some inane facts about NFL rushers. All most know how to do is bitch about the Cowboys and Mavericks and Rangers — about their (a) record, (b) salaries, © coach or manager — and praise the “kick-butt” barbecue they make before watching 18 hours of football on Sundays. That’s before they tell me I don’t have any business in the locker room.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(I’ve resolved not to talk to men I know professionally about sports because either a) they have such weird masculinity issues that determine whether sports are cool or not that they can’t handle casual conversation about it with a woman or b) they’ll subject me to dumb, “prove yourself” trivia of the sort Briggs details so well. NEVERMIND.)

At this point, kind of hate the words “guy” and “guys”. Too many times, I’ve been the one woman in the room and been addressed plurally as “guys”. I hate it when a man refers to another group of people as “those guys”, thus making the women he’s referencing invisible. I just don’t like the sound and connotations of it at this point. I’m refusing to be a Guy.

I will readily and enthusiastically use “dude” and “dudes” though, because as my friend Melanie Feinberg says, I reserve the right west coast cultural expression.

later dudes,
Amelia

(an open letter to everyone who’s come to me wanting to “Get Into UX”)

This is where I tell you that Intro to UX Design/Research — our the first online course from UX Night School! — is open for registration. We start July 10, and I’m so excited.

But first, I want to tell you all what I’ve learned from you. And how this has shaped what we’re doing at UX Night School.

You see, I’ve been in Portland for almost five years now, and I’ve reached a point where I’m somewhat visible in the community and approachable enough. People (kinda!) know what I do, and it seems like they trust me enough to send their friends, colleagues, kids, former bandmates, et cetera — my way when these folks say they want to “get into UX”.

And over the past five years I’ve had the pleasure of dozens of coffees, beers and walks (my fave- ask me to take a walk, and I’ll almost always say yes) with schoolteachers, programmers, economists, modern dancers, support engineers, recent college graduates. I’ve come to think of it as an invaluable form of user research. I’ve met some lovely folks, answered some questions with more questions, and learned a bit about what motivates us all to want to work on making technology work better for humans.

Here are three big themes I’ve noticed:

We’ve seen what’s not working, and we want to improve it — Almost all of us use technology in our jobs, and very few of us have much control over it. This was certainly the case for me when I decided to quit my job as a librarian to go back to grad school for Human-Computer Interaction. And it’s often the case for the support engineers, teachers, and other folks who come talk to me. They’ve been supporting systems and interfaces that are broken, building workarounds, and want to make things better.

We want to work better together — Friends who manage teams will also come to me, often after a few drinks, and tell me how hard it is to hire a good UX designer. “They’re all talk!”, they say, and I shudder in recognition. Or they’ll complain about the designers on their teams, who “don’t know the tech” and “throw things over the wall”. Engineers will complain about building features that no one wants, and working on products without much direction. ( I call this “the echo chamber”). It’s hard to have the confidence to build collaborative process, especially when you’ve never done it before yourself.

We want better jobs — Sure, people come to me after they’ve spent years doing activism, making art, playing in bands, or taking time to care for their families, and are intrigued by the idea of a “tech job” that pays them a livable wage. (Who wouldn’t be?!) I also talk to a lot of folks who are great at their jobs, make perfectly respectable salaries, and yet want something else. They want to make more meaningful work. They want to connect with other people, to actually solve problems, instead of creating more.

I too want these things, and I wanted to find a way to offer folks in my community more than just ideas over coffee or commiseration over beers. So last July, I registered the domain name uxnightschool.com and started working on what would become the Intro Series workshops here in Portland. And immediately, I got the question — “Will you have an online class?”

The answer is, finally: Yes!

Presale registration is open for Intro to UX Design/Research, an online iteration of our Portland workshop series. The course officially starts July 10, and as is the beauty of online learning, you can complete it at your own pace. There’s also an intentional focus on community, so that we can sync up, connect what we learn and do, building strength from each other.

I’m not a technological determinist, but I do think that we can use the power of technology to make a better world for us all. Even if you’re “not a designer” or “not a tech person”, we need your passion, dedication, and collaboration in order to make technology better for all of us.

I hope you’ll join us. I’m incredibly lucky to be on this journey with you.

Thanks,
Amelia
(on behalf of the awesome UX Night School crew)

Notes on advocacy, design, and building better developer products.

I’ll say this up front — I’m not a developer, I’m a design researcher. But Developer Experience is totally a thing now, and I, for one, am stoked. I was fortunate to get invited to some awesome conferences during the month of May, and I’m just now slowly catching my breath, digesting all the intersections of UX, design, development, and what we’re now calling “developer experience”.

I’m excited about all of this because I’ve worked on developer solutions on and off for the past few years, and I personally love the collision of complexity, engineering, systems, and humans to be found within them. Like Anil Dash said, at some point someone realized that I could talk to engineers, and I realized that I enjoyed it.

I’m also a total geek about learning, and Developer Experiences are almost always learning experiences, and social ones — despite the popular characterization of development as a lonely solo process. We have a lot of new developers entering the scene, in part due to the fact that there are more ways to learn to code than ever. And, like Jenn Schiffer points out, every developer tool is a de facto learning tool — a potential we’re all too quick to write off.

But how do we work together, as designers, as developers, as developer advocates and managers? How can we build better, more robust, more open and accessible solutions for developers? As I said before, we can see building, documenting, and supporting usable tools for developers as an act of care. But, if we’re going to be successful, we’re going to need to think beyond tooling, to services. Like in healthcare, travel, consumer products, and government, we have much to gain by thoughtfully designing services to align products, tools, and human work.

UX? DevX?

“User experience” might be a term we first heard at the turn of the last century, but ergonomics, “man-machine interaction”, and the roots of usability and accessibility have much longer history. Some of the problems we face when building developer tools are unique, but many of them are not. So how do we adopt a more human-centered approach in Developer Experience?

To make this all the more complex, we all have far awareness of user experience and design, and its promises, than ever before. More of us are inclined to think that we build products that are “user-friendly” (or the word I hate to hear, “intuitive”. Intuitive to whom? I ask.). What’s more, I’ll hypothesize, is that many folks working on and with Developer tools are skeptical of the promises of “design thinking”. (I feel ya, I do.)

But still, in hearing folks like Alex Salazar, Cristiano Betta, and Jono Bacon speak on building great developer experiences, I heard some very familiar language. Salazar spoke to the value of understanding particular user segments, and in developing personas and journey maps. (Not mentioned was how one developed these, but obviously this is a subject I’m very opinionated about.) Developer Experience, it turns out, can get a lot of value from classic User Experience tactics.

One thing does stand out about Developer Experience, though. There’s no doubt, within this community, to the value of IRL human interaction. “Human interaction is the only thing that’s proven to work in selling to developers”, I heard someone say, “But they don’t trust sales. So we have advocates and evangelists.” With other products, UX gets set in opposition to an IRL, hands-on, long-game approach to growing products — “a usable product doesn’t need evangelists”, one might say. But I’d like to look past this thinking.

In the process of designing for developers, advocates and evangelists are amazing allies. After all, they spend their days and nights with end users, and as I’ve said, holding products together with duct tape and emotional labor. They build relationships with end-users, and gather rich data about them.

Is this a substitute for user research? Nope, but it’s a great asset to it. Design and research teams need to build close alliances with advocates and evangelists, building better feedback loops. Yet, it’s most often the case that these are distinct silos. Developer Advocacy has a demonstrated ROI, as does UX design and user research. How much more value could we add by working together?

Designing Developer Services

This brings me to my end point: to build great Developer Experiences, we need to look beyond these product/advocacy boundaries, and instead, combine our efforts for a Service Design approach. A more thoughtful, high-level design approach for developer experiences is possible, when we integrate products, support, services, and data from the interactions that surround them. Bringing advocacy, design, and development together allows us to integrate the wealth of data we have, and frame the user needs and workflows of developers in rich context.

What is Service Design, exactly, and what would that look like for Developer Experience? I’ll point here to cases of Service Design for healthcare and bikes.

But rather than give a complete illustration of something I’ve never seen in practice, I’ll offer the five principles of Service Design that Stickdorn and Schneider outline, and that I’ve adapted -

1. User Centered — centering design and development of services and products around the end-users and stakeholders, rather than technical specifications or business requirements. (Though those are important considerations as well)
2. Co-Creative- meaning that it’s not a single designer or developer in charge of developing a product or service, but that the design process draws on the insights and participation of those who will use it. Meaning, we bring developers and developer advocates into the room with us.
3. Sequencing- We visualize sequences and journeys, allowing us to better understand the impact of design decisions throughout the process of use
4. Evidencing- we draw on data and context to see elements of a service
5. Holistic- We take into account the entire experience of a service or product, each before, during, and after.

What does this look like for Developer Experience? I can tell you how it’s played out in projects I’ve worked on, but that’s a small representation. What’s more, I’d argue, is that we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to do this purposefully. Let’s work together to do better in building the next generation of developer experience.

***

This post originally appeared on the UX NIGHT SCHOOL blog. Keep in touch and sign up for our occasional Developer Experience newsletter.