
I went to IA Summit 2017 and all I got was this lousy blog post.
Ethics, accessibility, and facing up to a post-truth world.
I was supposed to write this about three months ago, but I forgot. Or more accurately, I spent a lot of time on Air Canada’s human-acting-like-a-robot chat system, and some time tweeting to Air Canada about their human-acting-like-a-robot chat system, trying to wrangle a lost coat from an overhead compartment to no avail.
So now I’ve had some time to let the topics of IA Summit 2017 lightly stew in my brain. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how to neatly summarize the whole thing. I’ve never even been to a conference before, so it was hard for me to parse the experience. But overall, Vancouver was beautiful, even in the rain, and the people at the conference were welcoming, thoughtful, and intelligent. I guess that’s par for the course when it comes to the UX community, but it really bears repeating. That whole empathy thing never gets old, eh?

But seriously, I was struck by the strong focus on ethics, responsibility, and stewardship at this conference. And maybe that’s what all conferences are like. We try to push forward our vision of an idealistic world through our words, hoping the rest of the industry hears us.
Even so, it was a good reminder for me, personally, to constantly reevaluate what I’m working on, what I’m creating, and asking if it’s helping or hurting. It may also just be my past life as an environmental policy student coming back to haunt me. We can never really escape our impact on the world, but we can try really hard to steer it in the right direction.
Another major theme that I noticed, maybe because it brought me some level of shame, was the topic of accessibility and expanding our design targets. Both Whitney Quesenbery, and FJ!! van Wingerde, among other speakers, spoke to this concept of designing for more people. Full disclosure: accessibility has played little to no part in the products that I have designed for thus far. Sure, I’ve heard about it and know that it’s good to care about; I just haven’t done anything about it. I have spent some time touting the concept that the specific is universal and if you try to please everyone you please no one and you need to focus on your target and all that jazz, and these ideas have some merit but are also obviously lacking context.
Whitney Quesenbery said something that really struck a chord with me, and it was something along the lines of, “Accessibility is just usability for more people.” It sounds like such a simple concept, but I had just never thought about it that way. Accessibility has always taken on such a cold, legal tone that I associated it more with compliance than plain old user experience.

And it really is just a more inclusive rendering of user experience. It seems there’s a ring missing between utility and usability called accessibility. The issue is that for many people, accessibility is a foregone conclusion, a thin layer easily traversed. I’m realizing now that everyone deserves to travel through this concentric experience, all the way up to brand experience. Accessibility is just the first step to get there, but it’s certainly not the last.
Finally, an overarching theme of the conference was the issue of current events—both how they affect us, and how we affect them. What can designers do in the new world order of filter bubbles, fake news, and travel bans?
Even after five minutes of listening to the opening notes of the summit, I was reminded that interfaces go so beyond the visual. Design tends to denote the visual, whether it intends to or not. But meaning and communication are really the things that are at the root of UX. Information architecture is all about structuring and communicating meaning, and in that sense, information architecture and UX are intertwined, if not one and the same.
As designers, we are stewards of information. As communicators, we affect how things are perceived. The conceptual models we create have consequences. Designers have a responsibility to make implicit knowledge explicit, and to recognize that we are in a unique position to do that.
Here’s to using those powers for good. Until next time, IA Summit!


