Resources

Putting people first

We owe it to the people who use our products and websites to truly design with them in mind. These books, articles, and videos will help you view design through a lens of empathy and kindness, and make decisions that allow your users to do their best.

• “10 Timeframes,” Paul Ford. Ford’s call to think about our users’ clocks, rather than our own, is as touching as it is helpful (http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/).
• Adaptive Path’s Guide to Experience Mapping. A free, downloadable guide to get you started mapping user journeys (https://web.archive.org/web/20160307024905/https://mappingexperiences.com/).
• Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra. Rather than spending all our time trying to create successful products, we should be thinking about how to make successful users. Sierra’s book shows us how (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036593.do).
• “How Bad UX Killed Jenny,” Jonathan Shariat. We often think more technology is the answer, but sometimes it can become overwhelming—and deadly (https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef915419879e).
• “How Designers Destroyed the World,” Mike Monteiro. In this video, Monteiro takes designers to task for the work they put into the world, and the impact it has on their users (https://vimeo.com/68470326).
• “Information Architecture Summit 2013 Closing Plenary,” Karen McGrane. This talk discusses mobile, content management, organizational change, and—perhaps most important of all—compassion (https://web.archive.org/web/20160328073936/http://library.iasummit.org/podcasts/closing-plenary-2/).
• Practical Empathy, Indi Young. By cultivating empathetic, people-centered listening skills, you can better understand what people think and feel, and apply that knowledge to your work (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/).
• “Your Website Has Two Faces,” Lyle Mullican. A robust website is one that is empathetic to users and allows them to enter data in a variety of forms, yet can translate that input to meet the system’s needs (http://alistapart.com/article/your-website-has-two-faces).

User research

The more we get to know the people who use (or might use) our digital products, the better we’ll become at identifying the scenarios and real-life situations that might create stress cases. These resources provide a basic foundation in user research.

• “Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask,” Kyle Soucy. A detailed guide to running a collaging session as part of your user research program (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/collaging-getting-answers-questions-you-dont-know-ask/).
• Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal. Interviewing people well takes time and practice. This book walks you through everything you need to know: setting the stage, asking questions that probe without leading, and keeping interviewees on track (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/).
• Just Enough Research*,* Erika Hall. You don’t need to be a full-time researcher to gain helpful insights for your project. Learn how to plan, perform, and analyze results for all kinds of studies (http://abookapart.com/products/just-enough-research).
• Mental Models, Indi Young. This is the classic text for learning and documenting why your users do what they do (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/).

Brains, bias, and decision-making

Our brains love to minimize work by relying on shortcuts—but that doesn’t always lead to the best decisions for your users. These texts can help you understand the ways our brains fail us, and teach you techniques for reducing bias in your work.

• “Outsmart Your Own Biases,” Jack B. Soll, Katherine L. Milkman, and John W. Payne. Most people rely on intuition to make business decisions—but that can result in automatic judgments and poor choices (https://hbr.org/2015/05/outsmart-your-own-biases).
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. The noted psychologist uses decades of research to explain the two systems that govern our brains, and how those systems often lead us to illogical conclusions (http://us.macmillan.com/thinkingfastandslow/DanielKahneman).

Inclusivity in design

We can’t always predict who will need to use our products, and what their background, context, or ability level will be. But we can put inclusive principles at the heart of our work. These resources will help you think inclusively from the start.

• “The Audience You Didn’t Know You Had,” Angela Colter. Up to half your audience may have low literacy skills, and at times, even high-literacy readers may be temporarily low-literacy. Colter shares strategies low-literacy people employ, and how you can accommodate these users (http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/the-audience-you-didn’t-know-you-had/).
• “Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm,” Carina C. Zona. In this keynote from PyCon Australia 2015, Zona discusses how programmers have an ethical responsibility to build empathy into the code they write (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NheE6udjfGI).
• “Democracy Is a Design Problem,” Dana Chisnell. In this video from Creative Mornings, Chisnell walks through examples of government services that work for diverse users—and those whose design misses its mark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFfCuCUfqyc).
• Government Digital Service Design Principles. “The people who most need our services are often the people who find them hardest to use.” The United Kingdom’s government design principles serve as a powerful platform for inclusivity of all kinds (https://www.gov.uk/design-principles).
• “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty,” Eric Meyer. A kernel of inspiration for this book: Eric’s initial reaction to Facebook’s Year in Review ad featuring his late daughter, Rebecca (http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/).
• “I Tried Tracking My Period and It Was Even Worse than I Could Have Imagined,” Maggie Delano. Delano shows us how products for women—in this case, period trackers—can alienate and exclude those who don’t fit a narrow profile (https://medium.com/@maggied/i-tried-tracking-my-period-and-it-was-even-worse-than-i-could-have-imagined-bb46f869f45).
• “My Name Is Only Real Enough to Work at Facebook, Not to Use on the Site,” Zoë Cat. A look at Facebook’s real name policy by someone who saw it from the inside, and was negatively affected by it after she left (https://medium.com/@zip/my-name-is-only-real-enough-to-work-at-facebook-not-to-use-on-the-site-c37daf3f4b03).
• “Personal Histories,” Sara Wachter-Boettcher. In this text, which was another inspiration for this book, Sara talks openly about the ways apparently neutral forms can have difficult and damaging effects on the people who must fill them out, and how a lack of context can make them even harder to complete (https://web.archive.org/web/20160304043320/https://www.sarawb.com/2015/01/13/personal-histories/).
• “A Talk About Nothing,” Lena Reinhard. Reinhard explores underlying systems that shape our experience of the web—and how we can use our privilege to make those systems more inclusive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3e3V66TH2Y).

Designing resilient interfaces

If we want our work to stand up to stress cases, then we need to design interfaces that are human, kind, and resilient to all kinds of fractures. These resources will get you thinking about what that means for your copy, form fields, and technical infrastructure.

• “Designing for Crisis,” Eric Meyer. Recorded at An Event Apart Austin in October 2015, Eric explores the idea that making interfaces that people in crisis can understand makes better interfaces for everyone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyZq6v3vZqo).
• “Don’t Poke the Bear: Creating Content for Sensitive Situations,” Kate Kiefer Lee. Kiefer Lee walks through common touchy subjects like financial disclosures and error messages and helps you create copy that’s helpful, clear, and kind (http://alistapart.com/article/dont-poke-the-bear-creating-content-for-sensitive-situations).
• “Everyone Has JavaScript, Right?,” Stuart Langridge. A helpful visualization of the many reasons JavaScript might fail (http://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html).
• Forms That Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability, Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. A detailed guide to determining what to ask (and what to skip), and how to help your users be successful completing web forms (https://web.archive.org/web/20160316062826/http://www.formsthatwork.com/).
• “Interface Writing,” Nicole Fenton. Fenton walks through the words that make up our interfaces, and shows you how to take cues from conversations to create human, helpful interactions (http://nicolefenton.com/interface-writing/).
• “Obergefell v. Hodges: The Database Engineering Perspective,” Ed MacPherson. A look at how database design can be a barrier to accommodating users’ realities, and ways to do better (http://qntm.org/support).
• “The Question Protocol: How to Make Sure Every Form Field Is Necessary,” Caroline Jarrett. A brief summation of the question protocol and how to apply it to your work (https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/06/the-question-protocol-how-to-make-sure-every-form-field-is-necessary.php#sthash.GGxLSg84.dpuf).