The psychology behind your screen, feat. Dezzie García
The Automattic product designer on making the Internet user-friendly, the Hawaiian missile scare, and digital self-preservation
For Dezzie García, being a product designer means tackling a common online headache: web products that aren’t intuitive and don’t make sense to their users.
In the tech industry, product designers shape how we experience a whole host of everyday interactions, from how we see advertisements on Facebook to how we advertise ourselves as professionals and everyday people.
In some cases, product design can be life or death. García likes to use the 2018 Hawaiian missile scare as an example. Over a million Hawaiians received an alert on their phones warning them to seek shelter from an incoming ballistic missile — when there was none.
“There was a human error involved,” García explained. “The person who designed the computer program that sends out the alerts put two critically different functions on a screen that looked very similar. The person who had to use the software as part of their job accidentally hit the wrong button.”
A report from the FCC indicated that the employee at fault was also confused about whether the alert was real or a drill, but the software’s complicated user interface certainly didn’t help. While the error was resolved, it took 38 minutes for the all-clear to go out, which took a hefty emotional toll on the people who had thought they were saying goodbye to their families for the last time.
“It’s my job to make sure you don’t make that mistake of hitting the wrong button when you’re using a computer, so that, in a real world scenario, something like this doesn’t happen,” she added.
What got Dezzie García into tech?
“I’m a nerd, I’ve always been one,” García said, laughing. “I grew up with Star Trek, I grew up with Star Wars, so in general just anything related to space I remember being really interested in. I wanted to be an astronaut, and then once I got older…I learned what an actual astronomer does day-to-day, and I did not find that interesting.”
While astronomy may not have been García’s calling, it laid the foundation for her interest in a wide variety of STEM fields. She went on to study psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, but technology had always been on the periphery for García, and it took her a while to put her two passions together.
“I had this streak parallel to all of this official schoolwork — in technology, in learning how to make websites, in coding, as the kids call it now, and in general always just tinkering with the computer and the internet and all of that,” García explained. “The ways that I exposed myself to science and technology early on weren’t in the context of, ‘And this is what you can do for a career!’ — it was more, ‘Oh, this is really cool. I’m gonna just read a book about it,’ — and I still do that today.”
Now, she sees the technical aspects of her work and the psychology of what she does as equally vital to her success.
As a product designer for Automattic, García works primarily on user interfaces. This makes understanding how the average user thinks and engages with online content — the psychological aspect — essential to building the best buttons.
Most people are pretty familiar with the work of product designers like García — for instance, anyone with a Facebook account.
“While you’re using Facebook, any and all interactions that you have on there, someone like me — who’s a designer with a psych background — is gonna map out the ways that you build habits, the ways that you behave, the things that motivate you, the things that distract you, all of these sorts of things about what’s going on in your mind that captivate you,” García said. “I’m going to organize them and file them in a way that might get you to behave a certain way when you use Facebook, and whoever is on the business side of things is going to use some of those ways that I can map out and predict how you might behave to make money.”
After mapping out users’ behavior in this way, a product designer will often collaborate with an engineer to build what the designer believes to be the most user-friendly interface.
“My work is nothing without engineering and my work makes no money without a business strategy to it, so I have to really work in partnership with two very distinct roles with two very different technical or business backgrounds,” García added.
Protecting yourself in an intensely digital world
Product design can be incredibly rewarding when it opens doors for people and makes the business world more accessible, according to García. Automattic is the company behind WordPress, and García likes knowing that she’s helping the small business owners who use WordPress promote their hard work and their brand.
Before she worked at Automattic, García worked on IBM’s artificial intelligence project Watson. The familiarity she gained there with AI helped her realize how easily the Internet can be used unethically and maliciously. She cited Facebook, which came under fire in 2014 for running psychological tests on unwitting users, as an example of how popular platforms are often abused or are themselves abusive.
At the end of the day, these risks just make her own design work more rewarding.
“What’s also really rewarding is trying to craft or build products that are not misleading,” García said. “It’s this idea of having a way to understand the way that the Internet could be used to manipulate or just change people’s minds, and being the kind of person that can say ‘Hey, I know how people can use this for evil, let’s learn how to identify when that is happening so we can build ways to keep that from happening.’”
How can users keep themselves from being manipulated? According to García, the simplest, but perhaps least appealing, solution is for people to keep their heads out of their screens.
“If I were to list like one thing that people could do…keep screens away from young people, like very small children,” García urged. “Keep boundaries, and keep exposure to technology limited enough that it doesn’t become an addiction.”
It’s difficult, and often unreasonable for working people, to set time limits on technology use. But García encourages people to listening to their bodies to know when enough is enough.
“There are effects or signs you can pick up on when it might be a little too much…If you’re having trouble sleeping, that’s probably one sign of you being on your phone or on a computer too long,” she said. “When it becomes such a pervasive part of your day-to-day living, that’s when you can start making yourself more vulnerable to some of these more grey-area, vague psychological or mental effects.”
What is Dezzie García’s personal powerhouse?
“I would say that my personal powerhouse is the hot key,” she said (adding, “I’m serious!” when I couldn’t help but chuckle).
A “hot key” is a keyboard shortcut, like “control-C” to “copy” a file, or “control-V” to “paste” it in. García said that they’re life-savers for someone so prone to wear on her body from constant computer and mouse usage.
“It just reminds me of old school computers, but also I like how you can abstract things and actions down to a couple of taps,” she added. “Imagine that not being in place! Imagine if you had to mouse to every single menu and select — how slow would you be?”
You can follow Dezzie García and Powerhouse on Twitter: @thedezzie and @NewsPowerhouse. For more science-based reporting — delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning — subscribe to Powerhouse:eepurl.com/dA83pr
This article was corrected on 8/08/2018 with an email clarification from García about the nature of her role and additional background on the Hawaiian missile scare.
