Telling Human Stories Using Data
What does it mean to design for people?
As we dive into our project with the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), we are finding ourselves constantly reflecting on this question. Having the opportunity to work on a project with such sensitivity has pushed us to think deeply about the type of impact we can and want to have.
This project revolves around DPIC’s Death Penalty Census, which is a database documenting every death sentence that has been imposed in the U.S. since the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia. With over 9,800 cases containing information on year, name, race, gender, jurisdiction, retrials, sentence outcomes, case outcomes, and more, the census has the potential to be a powerful data-driven tool for a wide range of stakeholders.
We have a rich archive of data, but how can we communicate it in a way that is accessible, useful, and impactful for stakeholders?
From our understanding, there is currently a gap between data and people, making it difficult to engage with the information available. There is a need for new methods of interaction with the census that can empower people to explore, understand, and share knowledge. Something to note is that the ultimate goal is not to push a specific stance on the issue but rather to inform so that people can have sufficient information to arrive at their own thoughts, goals, and conclusions.
Embarking on a humanistic journey…
Throughout this 8 month journey, we will be using this space to document and reflect on our explorations, research findings, and design decisions. Follow along our journey with DPIC to find a humanistic approach to educating through data and encouraging critical thinking around the application of the death penalty in the U.S.
Meet the Team!
We are a group of passionate master’s students studying Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Feel free to read through to get a glimpse of our backgrounds and interests!
Lisa: A visual artist who makes art about memory and family archives! I previously worked in business development at a fintech startup doing lots of client-facing work. I like to create zines, read, and collect trinkets! Looking forward to working with DPIC to think critically about data, information-sharing, and storytelling :)
Zaynab: An aspiring Product Manager with a background in data science and HCI. I am passionate about using human centered design to attack social problems. In my free time I love to go on hikes, read, and sharpen my photography skills. I’m excited to be working on such an important project and can’t wait to see what we come up with through this collaboration.
Laura: UX researcher who loves learning about people! I have experience working as a UX researcher working with different government agencies and am experienced in doing qualitative user research. In my free time I like to play video games and volleyball. I’m excited to be working on such an important project!
Monica: A developer-turned-designer who previously worked as a UX designer at an e-commerce company where I created dashboards for web analytics and tracking orders. I’m excited to translate that data-centric experience while working on the Death Penalty Census! Outside of work, I like to play basketball, video games, and paint!
Project Planning
Planning a project is one of the most intimidating tasks to start. It always feels like you are expected to make big decisions without enough information to be able to predict what will happen. In reality, you can never predict what will happen fully which is why Agile thinking is so important.
We initially started our project planning by taking a waterfall approach. The project plan we came up with felt very daunting and didn’t seem realistic. We had limited research and synthesis to a month and a half, despite knowing this would not be the reality. In any design projects we had been a part of, research was always a continuous part of the process. We found that a waterfall approach limited us to harsh deadlines that won’t always reflect what is important to the project at the time.
After receiving some feedback from our Faculty Advisors we iterated on our project plan to incorporate more agile thinking. Instead of breaking down what we will do every sprint from now, we created a general project plan timeline that is flexible. We have different phases of the design process overlapping to portray a more realistic timeline for a design project. We plan to use this new project plan as a living document that we can evaluate and edit every sprint depending on our progress.
Preparing for our Kick-off Meeting
Setting the stage with Background Research
To ensure that the team has an in-depth shared understanding of the problem space before our Kick-off with DPIC, we each needed to do our share of background research.
DPIC was kind enough to put together a ‘Start Here!’ document that included references to their mission, goals, the Death Penalty Census, how data is collected, and a previously conducted UX audit of their website, which every member of the team explored.
We also decided to use a divide and conquer approach to split up other research areas, and then come back together as a group to share our findings. The research areas were:
- Users, groups, and personas impacted by the Death Penalty
- An overview of legal practices and the history of the Death Penalty
- Existing site audit — heuristic evaluation, previous UX audit analysis
- Competitive analysis to discover how other similar data-centric organizations present complex information
Through this exercise, we were able to put together a set of stakeholders that we believe are impacted by the project, understand the current practice of applying the death penalty in the US today, and explore how DPIC and similar organizations present their information. This crucial domain knowledge will help to enrich and contextualize our conversation with DPIC, setting up for a more successful kick-off!
Meeting Structure
The structure for the kickoff meeting was centered around the outcomes we wanted from this first sprint. After reading through articles about the importance of centering projects on outcomes, not outputs, and doing some individual background research on the death penalty and DPIC, we individually came up with a prioritized list of outcomes we wanted out of the meeting:
- Understanding the history, legacy, and current implementation of the death penalty
- Understanding the current state of DPIC’s Death Penalty Census
- Understanding where DPIC wants to take this project and why
Centering ourselves on these outcomes allowed us to structure our kick-off meeting with them in order to address these individually. The structure of the meeting is as follows:
- Introductions & death penalty legacy and history training
- Current state alignment using stakeholder mapping and mission orienting
- Future state planning using goals and success metrics
By making the meeting collaborative and focused on our outcomes, we will have a solid foundation of information and launching point for research!
Planning
To plan our kickoff meeting, we made sure to focus on activities that would allow us to form a strong foundation for our relationship with DPIC. One of the ways in which we accommodated this was by including activities that were active, and required all of us to be moving around the room and interacting with each other. Rather than sitting in a conference room and flipping through a slide deck, we wanted to keep the meeting engaging and collaborative. It’s not about them telling us what to do or us telling them what they need, but rather working together to discover the best approach.
In order to ensure that the activities were appropriate and communicated effectively, we went through several iterations, getting feedback from other capstone teams, testing the activities on ourselves, and getting suggestions from our faculty advisors. This process allowed us to find gaps in our understanding and tweak the activities to make sure that they would be helpful to us and productive to the project. Some of our activity highlights include:
- Design thinking activity around sorting
- Stakeholder mapping
- Empathy mapping
- Cover story writing
- I like, I wish, I wonder
Looking Ahead!
Our next steps are our kickoff meeting with DPIC, which is in DC at their office!! After we have the meeting, we plan on gathering as a team again, defining a draft project scope and plan and presenting that to DPIC for review. This will give us direction for research activities we hold in sprint 2.
This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
