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Inclusive Design at Big Design

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I am a presenter at the Big Design conference next month in Dallas where I will be doing a presentation on Inclusive Design beyond Accessibility. There just so happens to be another talk on Inclusive design at the same conference, so I am changing my tactics a bit from presenting research I’ve done on my own to reaching out to the masses to gather stories of people affected by exclusive design that the general public has no knowledge of, is not affected by, or completely ignores either out of ignorance or inconvenience.

Inclusive design presentation
Inclusive Design Presentation, Saturday, September 21st at 4pm at Gilley’s in Dallas, Texas

As an anthropologist and a designer, I feel this particular intersection of people and design is a perfect fit for anthropological work. I am interested in learning more about people’s experiences around exclusive design concerning cognitive, emotional, mental, physical, environmental, economic and financial, as well as gender and race (and any combination). The exclusion can be either physical or digital (or a combination). All exclusive design is important to me. I am also interested in learning about inclusive design that has greatly affected people or even design that came close or tried to be inclusive but missed the mark.

To that end, I am currently recruiting people to share their stories. If you would like to share your story, please contact me. At the moment, I am doing email interviews but I am open to communicating in what ever way is easiest for you. Please note that any information you share with me will be data I will potentially share in my presentation. You can choose to remain anonymous or attach your name and image, what ever is most comfortable for you. As a note, there is no compensation associated with this research. However, if I use your stories, I will attribute you in anyway you see fit and you will receive access to my presentation to share as you wish.

All of my research needs to be completed by September 14th. So please reach out to me as soon as possible. I look forward to hearing from you!

Following your Passions

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October was a month of wonderful opportunities. My first was the ability to go to Barcelona, Spain for a Design Thinking Facilitation course. This course was different than previous ones I have attended where design thinking methodologies are introduced. It was specifically about how to lead different exercises and what makes a good facilitator with actual practice doing it. The final day was for advanced people where we focused on different skills that make a good facilitator like talking, walking, standing, and even improv. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of DT. As an anthropologist, I see a lot of things “borrowed” from my discipline and repurposed for it. That said, I think there is a time and a place to use it and it should be considered a set of tools to use rather than the end all be all of getting companies and design on the same page.

Beyond the course itself, I was able to meet a lot of people from my company in person, which was really nice as I work from home. I was able to work in a little sightseeing as well. It was a beautiful city and I am very glad I had a chance to visit it. 

After I returned from Barcelona, I was a guest lecturer at UNT on Design Anthropology. There I talked about what I do, what I don’t, my career path that got me here, and how I use anthropological skills in business and design every day. 

The following week I presented on Team Building at DFW Beyond. I will write a post about this individually with a transcript of my talk for those who are interested! 

Though these three things may seem completely separate there is in fact a link between them. All three provided me with opportunities to learn how to help people through facilitation, share how I help people through anthropology, and share how people can be helped through intentional team building. Though I have many passions, my main passion is helping others and I find myself truly lucky that I’ve found a way to do so through design, research, and even gaming. More on the last in my next post! 

#luckywelivedhawaii

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Having lived in Hawaii for almost four years this article in the Washington Post on people leaving Hawaii hits home in multiple places.

This picture is one of the last I took, December of 2016, while we were living on the island of Oahu. It was a beautiful place to live and as the hashtag states, #luckywelivehawaii, we felt lucky indeed. But, that luck only went so far. Working in the technology industry as a remote worker for an off-island company (we had one office on the island that I never visited – it was mostly for transient workers going between the far east and the US) I was able to continue to work in my field. Had I not had my remote job, however, I would have never found work on the island.

I interviewed for a job before moving out there, hoping that I’d be a great fit coming from the mainland with all of my experience and expertise (which by the way you should never do – Hawaii has her own way of doing things and it should be appreciated). The problem was, though the cost of living was at least 3x what we were used to in Texas, they paid a 3rd of what I was making to do the same work. In all my time living on the island, I never saw another job available in my field. And yes, I did look.

What I found instead were other workers like me who worked for mainland offices, on mainland hours, from our tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. There weren’t many of us, but we did exist. Other technologists, I found in the tech startup community, mostly tried to develop opportunities that focused on capitalizing on the tourist market, because it was the only market.  Either that or they did like Hello Makana, a company that ships Hawaiian delicacies all over the world, and catered to the people who had left and wanted a reminder of home.

Still, others who were once the white-collar workers of the mainland fell so much in love with the island that they found a way to make it work by doing things like becoming bee-keepers, tour guides, or were a part of the service industry in jobs like bartending and masseuses.

What I will never forget is the disparity between the tourists, the rich who make money off the backs of the tourists, and then the natives who were either exploited for the tourists or forced to work menial jobs because that’s all there was available. In the worst cases, they were destitute or completely homeless. Of those who were able to afford homes, they did so because they had multiple extended family members or multiple families living under one roof. Those homes they could afford were dilapidated, old, and generally unkept due to the cost of doing so.

Now, this is in no way meant to be representative of every possible Hawaiian experience on the island, just a snapshot of what my experience was there and one that falls in line with what the article reports. The natives will always have a soft spot in my heart. During our time there we did our best to avoid most of the tourist trappings and instead sought out experiences of the beauty and the nature of the island that helped the islands in one way or another. That will always be my recommendation to anyone who visits. Skip the tv dinner version and find a way to support the local culture and community any way you can.

Would I have stayed had I been able to find equal work for equal pay? It’s a possibility. What was more important were the opportunities afforded to my children, not only as children but also as adults. While we had to leave the island, part of it will always live within us. My children are better for having experienced their early childhood there. And, though they may never remember it, I have a lot of photographic evidence to help them relive as much as possible.

Relevant links:
To read more about the cultural perspective of native islanders here is an interesting piece I recently came across from a cultural anthropologist.
Here is a perspective from native Hawaiians on their culture versus the culture that is sold to tourists.
Here is yet another cultural look.

 

On Anthropology and User Experience Design

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I get a few inquiries each semester from students looking for information on how to get into user experience design, especially those with an anthropology background. I generally try to respond to each of these separately as they each have their own perspective and needs, however, this semester I am trying to get my dissertation defended on top of my every day job as a UXD (which is getting more complicated by the minute). So, rather than leave these unanswered, I am providing a public response here that includes the most common things I share. If you have comments or questions, please leave them! It will be easier for me to respond to those here than individual emails and you may help someone else who has a similar inquiry.

Response Below

Thank you for reaching out to me. Let me start out by saying that having a background in anthropology will lend itself greatly to UX design, however, it is only one part. My suggestion is to consider opportunities where you will be asked to learn to program or script (even just HTML/CSS) and have real users use what you create. This is not necessarily where your career path as a UXD will take you, but creating something, having users use it, and then having to “fix” it to make it better for them, will provide you with insight that no degree program will ever do.

After that, I suggest looking into classes in cognitive psychology and information architecture or information behavior. Adding those to your anthropology perspective will help you find out what users want and then understand what they really need – which may be two separate things. 😉

As for internships, consider looking into the agency world. What I mean by that is marketing/creative agencies that do campaigns for other companies. Not that you want to go into marketing, I prefer the high tech/application world myself, but it allows you to see how UX is applied to multiple groups of people and projects in a short amount of time. A lot of times you can find UXD or IA (information architecture) opportunities – both of which would be beneficial to you.

I also suggest looking into these authors: Steve Krug, Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Garrett, Luke Wroblewski, Lois Rosenfield, and Peter Morville (These are just off the top of my head, they will give you a good introduction to user experience design – but there are plenty more out there to learn from!)

And I suggest taking a look at the UX Slack channel that has UXers from all over the world lending their perspectives to the field (and it may lead to internship opportunities).

I hope that helps!

End Response

There is a lot that could be added to this, however, I feel it is a great place for people to start. I definitely recommend everyone going into user experience design have some sort of programming or scripting background where people have had to use what you create. My biggest failure as a developer led me to becoming a UXD and in my particular field I use skills I learned as a systems administrator/developer all the time. Not that I do those things anymore, but my past experiences and my understanding of those things definitely help inform me how to make those things easier for others to do. And really, that’s the best part of being an anthropologist and a UXD – being able to use your own experiences to inform your designs. That is, after all, what participant observation is all about!

To learn more about my professional experience, please visit my design and ethnography site.

p.s. This may be edited and updated as I have time. If you have questions/comments – please post them!

My take on ‘Guerrilla Research’ as an anthropologist and UXD professional

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I’ve been avidly following a discussion on the anthro-design list about guerrilla research and thought that perhaps my reply as both a traditional researcher and a guerrilla researcher may be useful to those who follow my blog. So, here it is!

Little about me:

Academically, I am finishing my masters degree in applied anthropology in 3 weeks where I focused on cyber anthropology – or studying culture online and using virtual research methods (as long as everything goes according to plan). Additionally, I am starting my PhD in 4 weeks in Human Computer Interaction.

As far as work experience I have 13 years in the computer industry and over 10 years in the fields of software development (JCPenney internal marketing applications that serviced over 5000 internal employees and over 1000 stores), graphic design (various jobs over the years from traditional print to web design), and user experience including positions as interaction designer (school information systems), information architect (at an interactive ad agency), and user interface engineer (designing HR software) / designer (designing mobile, desktop and web tools).

My Experience:

In all of my experience I have rarely ever been able to properly conduct user research. Even the one time I was given the go ahead to do so the recruitment methods which were performed by the product management team were so awful we only had a total of 6 people participate!

This means I’ve had to utilize any opportunities available to me to conduct ‘guerrilla research’.

Methods I’ve used include:

‘Participant Observation’ – I sat in on and participated in training classes where support people were being trained on current versions of software and were able to voice their concerns for themselves and their customers. I was able to take this information plus a heuristic review of the software’s current state and use that as my basis for what challenges needed to be tackled in the new interface and process design.

Subject Matter Expert (SME) interviews. Here is where I went deeper than the stakeholders or even those that called themselves SMEs and ferreted out those people who had to be SMEs not because it was their job title, but because their positions within the company required them to be. I found a great source to be the Sales department (and sales engineers) of all people. Why? These people are the ones on the front lines trying to sell the software. They are the ones that do the most competitive research and are asked the most questions by both potential customers who are shopping around (so I saw in this demo by this other company they did it this way – why do you do it different?) AND existing customers looking to upgrade (so why should I upgrade to the new version when the version I have does everything I need it to – or the current version is no longer meeting my needs and I’m not sure the new version will either – why should I stay with your company when I need this, this, this and this that you have yet to offer). Additionally, these people are GREAT to reconnect with after you’ve done your job and they are selling the software you’ve designed as they can give you both potential and current user feedback on it that they receive during demos!

Developers, developers, developers… They get such a bad rep because they are seen as the ones that just do the behind the scenes plumbing and aren’t as concerned as how it should operate on the front end. This, for one, isn’t necessarily true and in most cases is a simply out dated notion. Though many aren’t sure what to do on the front end, once you give them prototypes or wireframes and actually talk to them about your ideas they can help you expound on them 10 fold because they know how the system works, why it works the way it does, the current pitfalls, and ways to not only improve the front end based on all of this information but also ways to improve the backend which also has implications for user experience especially in terms of things like errors and page loads etc etc.

Online forums! Getting out there and seeing what people are actually saying about previous/current state is a huge help. Though it can be damaging to the ego once they start talking about YOUR contributions to the project, it is definitely a place to gather at least unabashed criticism and sometimes helpful suggestions to the product.

Stakeholders – really, I go to these people last. Especially in terms of product managers. They have too many people to answer to, to be in the right mindset of user experience most of the time. Though I’m not their adversary, I look at myself as the user advocate and the person that has the user’s voice when things come up where they might want to sacrifice usability and accessibility needs for niceities/unnecessary features/timelines.

More traditional methods done in a guerrilla way:

Site visits – can’t stress this enough. Though we only got a chance to visit two offices, just being able to see the tools they work with (monitor size, the size of their browser windows, how busy their office is etc etc) were very insightful.

Phone interviews – these were most helpful when the user already answered a set of predetermined questions up front and the phone call was used to expound on them.

Journals – having users take screen shots of problem areas and talk about them prior to our visits or phone calls was very helpful in that it got them thinking about where their problem areas were and it saved us time in that we could jump right into issues they were experiencing in the WAY they were experiencing them even if we couldn’t be there to see how they got to the issue, why they got there, or how they had to satisfice their way around it at the time (and all previous times).

Card Sorting – we had several different types of people across two offices take a stack of cards with navigation points on it and asked them to sort them in what they would most navigate to in terms of top level navigation and where they’d classify the rest of the cards beneath that top level. This was very insightful and helped our client see that yes 13 top level super cats was a bit ridiculous.

Shadowing internal users – when you have the opportunity to develop for in-house clients shadowing them is one of the least obstructive and most informative research methods I’ve been able to perform.

Examples of work:

If you’re at all interested you can find out more about my work via my resume, and my portfolio, which doesn’t include anything from my current job – but you can see an example of the work I’ve done for them here.

Let me know if this was useful!

And we have lift off!

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Survey Now Available:
I am hereby inviting all Fedora contributors to participate in my Fedora Research Survey by clicking on the banner below!

If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.

Survey Details:
All responses are anonymous, so please answer as honestly and thoroughly as you can! Only caveat is that you MUST be 18 years old or older to participate. It should only take 10 to 20 minutes to complete, unless you feel you have a lot to add to the open text areas, which from a researchers perspective, the more data the better!

Spread The Word!
Please repost this in your blogs or anywhere else you see fit!

Feel free to use the code below to incorporate the banner shown above:
<a href="http://cyberanthro.limequery.com/44899/lang-en" target="new"><img src="https://www.cyber-anthro.com/images/surveyresearchbanner.png"></a>

First Time Hearing Of This Research?
You can learn more about my research by viewing my introduction post to it here and the research FAQ I created here.

As always, if you have questions feel free to comment or contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com!

Go Fedora!
And of course a preemptive congrats to all your hard work on Fedora 13, only 8 days away!

Cataloging and Using Anthropological Metadata

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So, in my last post I talked about coding and no I don’t mean coding as in scripting or writing programming code (though it is just as tedious), I’m talking about coding qualitative data.

For those non-anthropologist among my readers, what this amounts to is tagging subsections out of large amounts of textual data with a taxonomy you develop along the way. This taxonomy is based on the themes that emerge as you sift through all of the data. This, if done meticulously (as of course it is), can take quite a bit of time and requires a bit of resifting of the data to capture and tag everything correctly.

Speaking as not only an anthropologist, but also an information architect, I actually really like this part! It’s to anthropology what sifting through the dirt at a dig is to an archaeologist. Each time something unique emerges from the sand/data there is a little *squee* that occurs. Each bit is just as precious as the last no matter how big or small. We collect each and every one of these unique themes and catalog them for reference later.

What happens after all the sifting has been completed is actually very interesting for dataphiles like me. You can then select any tag you used and see all of the text among all of your data sources that matches that tag. Or, you can line up all your tags as see which tags show up most often. Consider doing that to your blog, or Delicious Bookmarks.

My Delicious Bookmark Tags You can tell a lot about an avid Delicious user, or at least what interests them on the web, by looking at their tags as a whole and then at their most (and even least) used ones.

Tagging data and looking at the results of that process is very similar.

Basically, it is in a sense both organizing your qualitative data and quantifying it. As you can imagine, it’s very revealing!

How else do you quantify qualitative data? Well you make a survey of course! Why would you do that? Well it helps triangulate your data. In other words, it helps you generalize your qualitative findings against a broader sample in quantifiable terms.

In order to do this properly we take those themes that emerged through our coding or tagging process then use that data to form appropriate questions and answers to be asked of the same audience but on a larger scale. Thus, we use both qualitative and quantitative methods in the research process giving it both depth and validity.

Could you do one without the other? Well, of course you can and many anthropologists tend to prefer one over the other. I’ll not step into the qual vs quant debate here, except to say that it exists. What I will say is that the goal of the anthropologist is to approach research and the research questions from a holistic perspective. Using both methods, as I am doing here, helps to do this.

Why am I going into all of this detail? Well, if you’ve reached this point you are in for a special announcement! My survey has been approved by my committee and is now in the hands of the IRB for review. Once they approve it, I’ll be releasing it to all Fedora contributors to participate in.

It is about 28 questions (depending on how you answer) and will take most people less than 10 minutes to fill out. I say most, because I do give you places for long text descriptions if you so desire, so those people who have a lot to contribute may take a little longer. From my perspective, the more data the better!

I have lofty hopes of getting about 100 of you excited enough to participate. So, once I release it, I will need the help of all of the Fedora contributors that read this to pass it along and to tell those people you pass it along to, to pass it along as well!

An interesting side note to the survey is that it was created with the free and open source LimeSurvey! So, by taking it you’re not only helping Fedora, but you’re also supporting a pretty cool FLOSS project!

During the process of creating the survey I’ve become quite the LimeSurvey user. So, if anyone needs help with it, please feel free to ping me. When I’m done with this project I may even find a way to lend some of my user interface design and usability skills to the LimeSurvey project, if they want them. I have a few ideas that could make it a bit easier to use after having been a user myself.

I honestly cannot wait to get the survey out and start getting the data back. This part of the process is always so exciting!

Sunday Morning @ SXSW

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It’s a beautiful day in Austin Texas. I have always said that if I were to ever live anywhere else in Texas it would be in Austin. I simply love this city. Now, I’ll admit that I might be spoiled by my SXSW experiences here, but even visiting it outside of SXSW I still love it.

I’m backin the Blogger’s Lounge today, hangning out with all sorts of geek types and debating whether or not I really want to go to today’s keynote.

There is a guy who just came in and sat down at our table doing a sort of prototype demo for a product meant for the Apple iPad, that is some sort of backing that would make it a wall mount, refridgerator magnet, shoulder strap holder and more. He started talking to one guy about it becaues he had a mac, but another guy picked up on the convo and took over the conversation. It’s very interesting watching the interaction between the three. I love being an anthropologist. It really plays into my people watching tendencies. 😉

I’m currently typing on my Dell Mini 9 running Fedora 12 / Moblin and getting a few looks. I have Fedora stickers on the outside of it that I catch people reading ever so often. It’s kind of fun to see people notice. The guy who took over the iPad prototype convo over is stating how he recently switched from Mac to Linux. I just jumped in to ask what he was running and he said, Mint then commented his laptop was built to run Linux ‘Zareason’ (out of Berkley, will be looking this up later). He states that it’s clunkier, heavier, not as stylish, but it’s what he can afford right now. What’s funny is the room is sponsored by Windows and the new Windows Phone 7.

Mac’s and netbooks definitely have the run of the room. The blogger is an interesting user.

Heading to today’s keynote!

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