Takeaways from the World Interaction Design Day Manila 2019
As part of Kalibrr Design’s annual tradition and mission to aid in advancing design and product thinking in the local design landscape, we held the 2019 edition of the World Interaction Design Day.
Designers from different backgrounds came together to the event and learned about the hard questions around the skills and domains around the design discourse. This year’s speakers Charz Mendoza of Mynt, Arts Serrano of One/Zero Design Collective, Andrea Levinge of White Widget, and Red Tani of Filipino Freethinkers and Engage Media shared fundamentals in putting Trust and Responsibility in the forefront of a designer’s process.
1. Embodying trust and responsibility as a designer
Charz Mendoza of Mynt, responsible for building the mobile wallet GCash, says being able to trust ourselves gives us a better sense of clarity and allows us to grow. This mindset enables us to create beautiful experiences for both the users and for ourselves.
Being grounded in trusting your own identity makes you function the way you want to function.
As a designer, we should be free from the egoistic mindset that we already know everything. Being conscious of the things we know and don’t know yet helps us function better.
We should also pay it forward to create a bigger circle of kindness. We owe transparency to the people around us: to our co-designers for us to be aligned and informed with each other’s values, beliefs and the talents and skills we’ve acquired and harnessed over time; and to our users who provide us data that we use to help them achieve what they want to do.
2. Understanding, nurturing and involving users
Despite being a designer of a different discipline amongst the speakers, Arts Serrano was able to share his process and thoughts in designing for a purpose where people can thrive and find comfort.
Some architects tend to impose identities to spaces. Designers need to involve their users.
With the thought of how cities could work better, he makes sure to understand the problems of the community or space first before doing design. Even though they aren’t urban planners, they took the effort of understanding the problems of each city — the streets and the commute, the spaces where people live, how big the spaces are, and how many people will it fit.
One of their projects, reintroducing Escolta’s First United Building — introduced how communication between artisans and creatives can be fostered by taking down the walls that divide spaces.
3. Trust and Privacy in Interaction Design
Andrea Levinge talked about the must-haves when designing experiences for data security and privacy. As designers, there are moments when we shouldn’t be moving fast and breaking things. It is our responsibility to be mindful of each step in the design process, more importantly, when asking users for data.
Breaches of trust are born in the design phase.
Her talk emphasized the need to respect each user’s rights by abiding by laws that protect consumers’ data. These are the Philippines’ Data Privacy Act, Europe’s GDPR, and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act.
Using clear language on the terms, conditions, agreements and everything related to the security of the users’ data or consent must always reflect in the products and systems we build. When we make it hard for the user to understand these, we promote dark UX patterns that undermine the pillars of privacy.
4. Taking Responsibility in What You Create
Red discussed empathy and the things that designers compromise when building products.
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer.
He used the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards as an example. Dvorak-type offers a much faster and more comfortable typing experience but QWERTY became the more used layout because of how it was marketed. Despite acquiring more revenue on the product, QWERTY wasn’t necessarily the best product that users need.
Red also encouraged everyone to always put humans into consideration when making design decisions through TechPledge.org.
Wrapping It Up
In Reciprocity Principle, we motivate users to provide us what we need. We ask for their information with ease and delight; their emails, birthdays, photos and more. Once they entrust us with it, they become our responsibility.
They become our responsibility because we are in a position to give them what they need using their data. We use it to recommend to them the cheapest restaurant nearby, songs that you might like, people with the same interest as yours, and more.
Designers seldom realize that pushing pixels, making prototypes and decreasing the number of clicks is the way to do the job. The most fundamental skill a designer should have is to give people the tools to improve their lives.
And whatever we provide to them reflects who we are.
World Interaction Design Day is an annual event where designers come together as a united global community to show how interaction design improves the human condition. It aims to have a positive, long-lasting impact by facilitating activities that support dialogue and outcomes. Presented by IxDA and Adobe.
