My 5 key takeaways from UX Scotland

I recently attended UX Scotland, which is a 3-day conference for designers, researchers and other user-centred professionals to come together to learn, share and connect with the community. It was my first in-person UX conference, and I left buzzing with ideas.

This blog post covers some of the ideas that really stuck with me. Not all of these ideas were new to me, but they’re the things I’ve been thinking the most about in the days following the conference.

Anyone can face barriers to inclusion

My former colleague Stéphanie Krus gave a talk about inclusion and going beyond accessibility and digital capability.

One part of her talk that I really enjoyed was when she talked about universal barriers. These are barriers that can arise when a task exceeds someone’s capacity.

You need to think about:

• ability — what a person can do in general, they have the skills to do it
• capability — what a person can do in a specific context (time and place)
• capacity — what a person can do, considering what is going on for them.

I might have the ability to complete an online form, but I might not have the capability to do it if my internet connection isn’t working. And I may not have the capacity to do it if I didn’t sleep well the previous night and am struggling to focus.

The 11 universal barriers are:

• awareness
• access
• comprehension
• emotional state
• enthusiasm
• evidence
• finance
• interface and interaction skills
• self-confidence
• time
• trust.

Stéphanie talked about her experience of applying for EU Settlement Scheme and some of the barriers she faced. I could relate to this example, since I’ve also gone through the UK immigration system and experienced many of the same barriers when completing visa applications.

For example, evidence was a barrier for me — it was difficult to find all the documents that I needed. My emotional state was a barrier as well, because I found the process stressful. But there were many barriers that I didn’t face. For example, finance wasn’t an issue because I had enough money to pay the application fees, and I had the computer skills I needed to complete the forms.

You can read more in her blog post on removing barriers to inclusion.

Designers need to be trauma-informed

I attended a workshop on trauma-informed service design run by Kat Every, where she talked about her experience of researching with citizens during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She shared 6 principles to make your practice trauma informed from SAMSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration):

• safety — prioritising the physical, psychological and emotional safety of service users and staff
• trustworthiness and transparency — being transparent about what you’re doing as an organisation and why
• peer support — building trust and support through shared experiences
• collaboration and mutuality — staff and service users work together to overcome challenges
• empowerment, voice and choice — staff and service users share power, and service users are supported in shared decision-making
• cultural, historical and gender issues — considering how things like gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, geography, race or ethnicity might impact the people involved.

We also discussed some of the barriers to being trauma-informed in our work, such as:

• time constraints
• lack of training and awareness of trauma-informed approaches
• lack of buy-in from senior stakeholders.

Kat told a story about a user research session she was observing where the participant got upset when they were asked to talk about their experiences during Covid. Afterwards, she reflected on whether they needed to ask that question at all, given that what they really needed to learn was whether users could navigate the prototype they had designed.

This story resonated with me because it made me think of a time when I asked someone about their experiences of hearing loss in a user research session. The participant got very emotional when they talked about feeling isolated at family gatherings. I was testing a prototype so didn’t really need to know about their experiences of hearing loss, and my question upset them. In the future, I’ll consider the potential a question has to add to someone’s trauma versus the benefit of what I might learn by asking it.

We need to design ethically

Kat Zhou gave a talk about the importance of designing ethically, which involves re-evaluating the design thinking model from:

• empathise
• define
• ideate
• prototype
• test

To:

• empathise
• define
• evaluate
• ideate
• forecast
• prototype
• test
• monitor.

Here’s how she explained the additional steps:

• evaluate — analysing the problem statement to see if it’s even ethically worthy of being addressed. For example, if your company wants to create a tool that could increase profits but might hurt thousands of people, that problem probably isn’t worth solving.
• forecast — review the ideas that you’ve generated and try to figure out any weak spots or potential ways that your product or service could be exploited by service users, the company or investors.
• monitor — continuously checking in with your live product or service to see if any ethical problems have occurred.

This talk made me reflect on how we recently learned that a tool we built at RNID may have been used in a way that we hadn’t intended and could potentially be harmful. We caught this issue after the tool was live, but could we have forecast it and done something to prevent it?

You can find out more on the Design Ethnically website.

How to measure the value of service design

I attended two sessions that discussed measuring the value of UX and service design — one with Lynsey Brownlow and another with Jason Bootle.

Sometimes you need to assign financial or business value to your design work to convince stakeholders that it’s worthwhile. This might involve measuring the value of your work in these areas:

• how it has helped users
• how it has increased internal efficiencies
• how it has increased profit.

Designers are usually good at focusing on user needs, but we don’t always think about how our work has helped the organisation save or make money. This is something I plan to focus on more for future projects.

Community is key

The keynote on the first day of UX Scotland was from Kara Kane, who talked about the power of communities of practice. I also attended a lean coffee session about communities of practice, facilitated by Kat Husbands and Neil Scott.

I was interested in these sessions because I am trying to build a third sector design community of practice. This community allows designers who work in or with charities to discuss what they’re working on and any challenges they’re facing. Read what I learned from the Third Sector Design Community of Practice.

It can be challenging to build and maintain a community. You need to keep people engaged, find a format that works, and ensure that people feel like they’re getting something out of the community.

Despite these challenges, there are lots of benefits to joining a community. Some of the ones that Kara mentioned were:

• learning
• supporting
• maintaining and growing the practice
• growing the profession
• attracting and retaining talent
• building relationships across organisations.

If you are looking to join or build a community, Kat and Neil shared some resources on the UX Glasgow website.

You can also sign up for the next Third Sector Design Community of Practice on 30 June, which will be about co-design.

Conferences like UX Scotland are also a great way to connect with your community. Despite being an introvert who is used to working alone in my home office, I enjoyed the opportunity to talk to and learn from other designers. Bring on UX Scotland 2024!