UX, Part 3: Moving the edge case to the middle

TC Talk

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What if User Experience professionals, instead of designing for a “universal” user, put their most marginalized audiences first? In this episode, we share how you can invite audiences into classic UX processes including personas, localization, visual methods, and usability. We also discuss the challenges that come with participatory design, and how technical communicators must step into their advocacy role in order to support more socially just UX.

Sources and further reading

Acharya, K. R. (2019). Usability for social justice: Exploring the implementation of localization usability in Global North technology in the context of a Global South’s country. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 49(1), 6–32.
Acharya, K. R. (2022). Promoting Social Justice Through Usability in Technical Communication: An Integrative Literature Review. Technical Communication, 69(1), 6–26.
Agboka, G. (2012). Liberating intercultural technical communication from “large culture” ideologies: Constructing culture discursively. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 42(2), 159–181.
Agboka, G. (2013). Participatory localization: A social justice approach to navigating unenfranchised/disenfranchised cultural sites. Technical Communication Quarterly, 22(1), 28–49.
Bakke, A. (2019). Writing for Patients on the Participatory Web: Heuristics for Purpose-Driven Personas. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 62(4), 318–333. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2019.2946999
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
Buchanan, R. (2001). Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design. Design Issues, 17(3), 35–39.
Bregman, R. (2018). Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Reprint edition). Back Bay Books.
Carlson, E. B. (2021). Visual participatory action research methods: Presenting nuanced, co-created accounts of public problems. In R. Walton & G. Agboka (Eds.), Equipping technical communicators for social justice work: Theories, methodologies, and pedagogies (pp. 98–115).
The Future Has Arrived—It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet. William Gibson? Anonymous? Apocryphal? (2012, January 24). [Quotation Investigator]. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
Jones, N. N. (2016a). Narrative inquiry in human-centered design: Examining silence and voice to promote social justice in design scenarios. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 471–492.
Jones, N. N. (2016b). The technical communicator as advocate: Integrating a social justice approach in technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(3), 342–361.
Mirel, B. (2004). Interaction design for complex problem solving: Developing useful and usable software. Morgan Kaufmann.
Munroe, R. (n.d.). How it Works [Xkcd]. Retrieved May 10, 2022, from https://xkcd.com/385/
Opel, D. S., & Rhodes, J. (2018). Beyond Student as User: Rhetoric, Multimodality, and User-Centered Design. Computers and Composition, 49, 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.05.008
Ramler, M. E. (2021). Queer Usability. Technical Communication Quarterly, 30(4), 345–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1831614
Rose, E. J. (2016). Design as advocacy: Using a human-centered approach to investigate the needs of vulnerable populations. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 427–445.
Rose, E., & Cardinal, A. (2018). Participatory video methods in UX: Sharing power with users to gain insights into everyday life. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 6(2), 9–20.
Rose, E. J., & Cardinal, A. (2021). Purpose and Participation: Heuristics for Planning, Implementing, and Reflecting on Social Justice Work. In R. Walton & G. Agboka (Eds.), Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work (pp. 75–97).
Rose, E. J., Edenfield, A., Walton, R., Gonzales, L., McNair, A. S., Zhvotovska, T., Jones, N., de Mueller, G. I. G., & Moore, K. (2018). Social Justice in UX: Centering Marginalized Users. Proceedings of the 36th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3233756.3233931
Sano-Franchini, J. (2017). What can Asian eyelids teach us about user experience design? A culturally reflexive framework for UX/I design. Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, 10(1), 3.
Simmons, W. M., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2012). Productive usability: Fostering civic engagement and creating more useful online spaces for public deliberation. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(3), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2012.673953
Sims, M. (2022). Tools for Overcoming Oppression: Plain Language and Human-Centered Design for Social Justice. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 65(1), 11–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2022.3150236
Sun, H. (2006). The triumph of users: Achieving cultural usability goals with user localization. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4), 457–481.
St.Amant, K. (2015). Culture and the contextualization of care: A prototype-based approach to developing health and medical visuals for international audiences. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 3(2), 38–47.
Wachter-Boettcher, S. (2017). Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. W. W. Norton & Company.
Wessels, T. (2013). The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (1st edition). University Press of New England.
Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World. Greystone Books.

Transcript

A	Welcome to TC talk. That’s tech comm talk.
B	I am not your host.
A	You kind of are? We co-host, but I am the hostier host.
B	I’m Benton.
A	I’m Abi. What are we doing here?
B	Ooh, getting real philosophical right off the bat aren’t we?
A	At least you didn’t say the backstroke. A toast to your empty glass.
B	Yeah.
A	We’re having champagne tonight because we’re celebrating your birthday. You know you’re committed when you will spend your birthday evening recording a podcast with me.
B	Yeah. The most heartwarming happening today was my daughters bringing me second breakfast in bed, brought me a parfait and a mandarin orange.
A	That’s so adorable.
B	And Phoebe even peeled the mandarin orange herself. And she served me the parfait in a Garfield mug, which is very high status in her book.
A	Before we get into the content of the podcast, I have a big favor to ask of you, dear listener.
B	Oh, not me, okay.
A	I’m not asking for money. I am not asking for ratings and reviews, but I am asking to hear from you. And here’s why. Two reasons actually. Number one, Benton and I are going to be presenting at the Applied Rhetoric Collaborative in June, which will be held in Provo, Utah. And we’ll be talking about TC talk
B	Indeed.
A	And I’m pretty proud of my title. I’m not very good with titles. So this one felt inspired: out of the ivory tower and into your earbuds.
B	That’s right.
A	The purpose of the applied rhetoric collaborative from what I understand is to talk about ways people have used rhetoric in practical ways in their life, whether it professionally or or not. Or it’s about bringing rhetoric to non-academic audiences. And in part, that’s what TC talk does. Which means I need to hear from you if you are not an academic or if you are an academic, but don’t specialize in technical communication. Even if you are just tech comm adjacent. I would love to hear it if you’ve learned something new about tech comm or rhetoric from this podcast. Because I want to talk about that in the presentation. It can be anonymous. I will welcome your comments on Twitter ar_bakke. Or you can email me at Abigail.bakke@mnsu.edu. Doesn’t need to be anything long or complicated. I just want to know how has it helped you connect with rhetoric if that’s not your primary area. But if rhetoric and tech comm is your primary area, I still want to hear from you and here’s why. Those of you who do podcasting in an academic fashion have probably bumped up against the challenge of tenure and promotion requirements that don’t necessarily know how to handle non-traditional formats for scholarship. This is not a peer reviewed manuscript. So I’m going to have to report on my work. And, you know, there’s not the traditional metrics to share with upper administration. I can share some quantitative metrics. But I think what will be most powerful is
B	Reviews,
A	actual comments from listeners. And if you’re a grad student as well, please, please reach out because it would warm my heart to know that what we’ve been working on has helped you in any way in your studies. Phew. Got through that. And it’s hard for me to ask for things, so
B	It’s kinda funny how that is never true of kids. It is easy for them to ask for things.
A	Yeah. And in fact, our oldest daughter is a girl scout. I am the worst Girl Scout parent because I’m like What? Talking to strangers? Meanwhile, she’s going up and down the street, chatting everyone up, making jokes. How did this person come from you and me, Benton?
B	Hm.
A	At one point she was like, I want to beat the Guinness World Record for number of Girl Scout cookies sold. And I’m like, Not on my watch.
B	Not happening. I think that a lot of kids, at least I personally went through a phase when the Guinness Book of World Records was this holy grail.
A	You know what’s interesting to think about?
B	What?
A	you probably have broken a world record. You just don’t know what it’s of.
B	The world will never know.
A	Now on to content, we’ve been chatting about user experience and usability for the past couple of episodes. This is Part 3 on ways to do socially just user experience. Although it is one part of several, I don’t mean to imply that it’s this separate aspect of UX because I think, like I’ve mentioned before, it is a thread that runs through UX, whether or not you intend it to. UX involves human beings.
B	Generally.
A	It involves potential for advocating for certain audiences or excluding certain audiences. Those are social justice questions.
B	I would say that there is in all UX cases a greater potential for excluding.
A	Certainly it’s easier to exclude than to include because there are infinite ways to include audiences. It’s not feasible to include them all. And you may not want to or need to anyway, but what you don’t want to do is put certain users on the sidelines because they’re just not as convenient to write for or design for. And another way to see the potential for social justice in UX is to look at examples where social justice was not supported in a certain design choice. And there’s tons of examples of this. But there’s one I want to share. This came from an article by Jennifer Sano-Franchini and she was describing the Nextdoor app. Are you familiar with that?
B	No.
A	It’s a social networking site that’s based around geography. So your neighbors all sign up for it. And they might post things like lost cat or garage sale. But they can also report suspicious behavior.
B	What could go wrong? They wouldn’t report suspiciously non-white people in their neighborhood, would they?
A	Yeah, they did.
B	Oh. People.
A	But this is interesting and kind of unexpected. Next door actually changed their platform to make it harder to report. So They didn’t eliminate it, but they added friction, you could say, enough friction to make people stop and think about what they’re doing. In one sense, that’s breaking a major rule of UX, which is make things easy and intuitive almost to the point that you don’t have to think about them, right? And here they’re making something harder. They’re forcing you to think about it. But I think that’s an example of bringing a social justice lens to UX work, is that it fills in the gaps where a strict focus on ease of use or even satisfaction are main goals, because someone might be very well satisfied that they’ve reported they’re suspicious looking neighbor for getting their mail at 9 pm. I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean that that’s creating a safe environment for those neighbors,
B	Right. It seems like making things easy and intuitive. Those are hammer descriptions. I know exactly what to do. I take this and I knock my neighbor on the head with it, right? No. So you make the hammer less easy and intuitive for head knocking.
A	Now, I’m wondering what an intuitively head knocking hammer would look like. I understand your point.
B	Yeah. That metaphor doesn’t exactly nail it if you know what I mean.
A	But that pun just did.
B	Thank you.
A	Sometimes you need to make things easy and intuitive. Like you should not make it exceptionally prohibitive to apply for social services, for instance, like we were talking about in the What Could Go wrong episode.
B	Yeah.
A	but other times, you need to take a broader view of what could the consequences be, not just on the users, but on other people in general. So those neighbors who were just getting their mail at 9 pm and
B	getting reported for it
A	and happened to not be white. They may not have opted into this Nextdoor app at all. They might not know it exists and yet they can be harmed.
B	It seems like good UX is making it easy and intuitive to do something good and making it harder and more confusing or difficult to do something bad.
A	I think that’s fair. What that means is that being a UX practitioner cannot be a neutral role. Just as being a technical communicator, you are not in a neutral role. This definition from Acharya’s lit review captures well this more expansive view of usability. He says. “It’s not limited to assessing the functional characteristics of a product. It also implies how the product can meaningfully change or improve users’ lives. Especially, but not exclusively in underserved and underrepresented communities.”
B	Change or improve users’ lives. That phrasing, just like jumped out at me as like, that is the point of technical communication.
A	Make people’s lives better?
B	Yes.
A	I love that.
B	That is the impetus of all technical communication, whether it’s
A	Done right.
B	yes,
A	a lot of it in reality does not do those things.
B	Okay, yeah. You know, communicating safety hazards. You are trying to improve someone’s life by making sure it isn’t ended prematurely.
A	Yes, I like that. Ideally UX will center the user or human, right? We talked about the language of human-centered design. Let me give you this definition of human-centered design from Buchanan. “Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity.”
B	I’ll take that.
A	I want to also insert in here a comment from Jones, who writes that, yes, this focus on human dignity matches the field’s turn toward social justice. But quote, “although HCD, has the potential to be a site for more socially just design does not mean that HCD is inherently socially just. involving users is a great start. However, user involvement alone is not enough to ensure that design is more equitable. It is up to designers to deliberately make more just and equitable design an end goal.” which I think is an excellent reminder that if we’re going into it to check off a box of we’re involving users without actually going in with a goal to affirm the dignity of those humans. Then,
B	Then it’s really just a bureaucratic kangaroo court. In a sense.
A	What do you mean?
B	I mean, in a lot of cases, environmental protections and, getting an environmental statement approved by the state through some process, I’ll say it’s generally made in a way that is not made to stop bad things from happening. It’s just made to satisfy the requirement to check the box and get on with building the rubber dog shit factory. I went too far there. So human-centered design is definitely a step up from
A	System-centered design or designer centered design.
B	User-centered to human centered. What if we’re to take it a step further to? I’ll take a step back so that this, my next step makes more sense. So a lot of the ways that people view their surroundings, their environment is self-centered. We look outside and we see say a songbird sitting in a tree. And so we think about this bird makes me happy to see. You can think even a little bit more about the deeper ecological value that this bird has. It helps to spread the seeds of trees and plants from one place to another. And this bird is just an example of all of nature that we, humanity, views in terms of what can it do for us. So if we were to go a step further and to look at ecologically-centered design, or at least ecologically-centered rhetoric. We could say that this bird has value to the ecosystem, whether we’re here to experience it or not. And I realize that there aren’t all that many products or services that are designed for the ecosystem.
A	But there are products designed that harm the ecosystem.
B	Yes.
A	That don’t give any thought to it.
B	Absolutely.
A	Okay. So let me see if I can pick up what you’re putting down. We could move to even an environment centered design?
B	Environment or ecology. Ecology is more focused on the interplay of various forms of life in your environment.
A	Oh. That’s fair. That’s a great question because, huh. Yeah. That is I mean, that is another stakeholder for sure. I mean, it’s weird to call the environment a stakeholder, but
B	It’s because we’re not used to thinking about it that way.
A	But it is, it will be affected one way or another. And that’s yet another consideration for design.
B	I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been reading a lot about ecology in the excellent book, The Hidden Lives of Trees.
A	that could be another episode at some point. Environmental rhetoric, environmental design. Yeah.
B	And he, he gets into the way that trees, plants, the vegetative world sees, smells, hears, feels, elements of what is going on around us that we are wholly unused to thinking about as humans.
A	You mean to tell me trees have feelings.
B	They have preferences in terms of which trees matter more to them. Like a tree cares more about its mother, than it cares about its neighbor. Even if it’s the same species.
A	That’s wild. Let’s try to get back on track.
B	Yeah. Kind of fun with fungus but without the fungus involved, or being discussed.
A	Right, I thought
B	The fungus is what helps it talk. There, there’s your fun.
A	Ah.
B	Fungus is the information superhighway of the forest.
A	And that’s your fun with fungus for today folks,
B	The wood wide web.
A	Did you just come up with that?
B	I absolutely did not.
A	Oh. If you had I don’t know if I would have applauded you or rolled my eyes. That’s that’s honestly pretty good. Okay. I will add though, that, and this is something that I may not have been fully clear about in part 1, the UX-istential questions one. That human-centered design and user-centered design are distinct from participatory design, at least according to Rose and Cardinal. They explain that UCD or HCD is more representative in the sense that designers are getting information from them and then taking that information and bringing it to the design team. Kind of representing them. Make sense?
B	Okay.
A	Whereas participatory design is that active involvement of the user. Designing for users is one thing. Designing with them is the ideal we want to strive for. And not just any users, not just the easy users, the convenience sample, but going out of your way to center the most marginalized. There’s a passage from this book. Have you read this one? It’s Technically Wrong by Sarah Wachter Boettcher?
B	I don’t think I’ve read that one. And by that I mean, I have not read that one.
A	I’m going to read an extended passage because it’s such an excellent illustration. “Try to bring up all the people design teams are leaving out. And many in tech will reply, That’s just an edge case. We can’t cater to everyone. Edge case is a classic engineering term for scenarios that are considered extreme rather than typical. But when applied to people and their identities, rather than to a product’s features, the term edge case is problematic, because it assumes there’s such a thing as an average user in the first place. It turns out there isn’t, we’re all edge cases. And I don’t mean that metaphorically but scientifically. In his book, The End of Average, Rose tells the story of Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels, an Air Force researcher. The 1950s was tasked with figuring out whether fighter plane cockpits weren’t sized right for the pilots using them.” Hey call back to part one when we were talking about cockpits as an originatory site for usability research.
B	Yeah.
A	“Daniel studied more than 4 thousand pilots and calculated their averages for 10 physical dimensions like shoulders, chest, waist, hips. Then he took that profile of the quote, average pilot and compared each of his 4 thousand plus subjects to see how many of them were within the middle 30% of those averages for all 10 dimensions. The answer was 0,
B	Woah.
A	Not a single one fit the mold of average.
B	Huh. That’s wild.
A	Yeah. So what did the Air Force do? “Instead of designing for the middle? It demanded that airplane manufacturers design for the extremes instead, mandating planes that fit both those at the smallest and the largest sizes along each dimension. Pretty soon engineers found solutions to designing for these ranges, including adjustable seats, foot pedals and helmet straps, the kinds of inexpensive features we now take for granted.” She goes on to say that she prefers to call them stress cases rather than edge cases because it shows designers how strong their work is, right? Can it hold up under stress?
B	That’s genius.
A	Can it handle it?
B	It can handle anything you throw at it, designed to be strong and manly.
A	Okay.
B	Getting a little gender essentialist.
A	Yeah, asking the designer to rise to the challenge rather than attributing that to user error, say. This idea lines up with this idea of queer usability, which comes from Ramler, an article from Technical Communication Quarterly. She says that queer usability is not only about inclusion of queer audiences, but is an overall philosophy of centering the most marginalized users. And that includes anticipated future users.
B	Woah.
A	I’ll give you an example. Have you ever heard of the blogging site Tumblr?
B	Think so, yeah.
A	It was really popular for its ability for people to form groups and communities. And a sizable portion of its user base was queer individuals who found it really important for, like, especially young people who were learning about their sexuality, couldn’t find access to sex ed anywhere else. Living in our country I mean, that’s not a surprise. It wasn’t just for queer people. And it was discovered that there was some like child pornography being shared in some of these private groups. And so what Tumblr did is they said blanket ban on anything sexual in nature.
B	Oh.
A	What ended up happening was that these queer youth in particular lost what was a really important space. And so it ended up being dangerous in some cases because when people do not have access to accurate information or do not have access to support, that’s not healthy. So the point here is that, yes, the exchange of child pornography is obviously a problem, like that, is one of the stakeholders you need to consider is children, right? Yet, in issuing this blanket ban, there was a complete disregard for the other communities that could be harmed by it. And it’s, it’s not an either or here. It’s a matter of how do we find a nuanced solution that supports the things we want and doesn’t support the things we don’t want. And I think Tumblr eventually shut down because
B	I don’t know that it’s shut down but it might have just gone the way of MySpace. Did that shut down? Maybe it did.
A	I’m still friends with Pete, so. No, Tom!
B	Tom.
A	Myspace Tom.
B	Stupid Tom.
A	No, just kidding.
B	You know, at least he’s not a creepy billionaire right now.
A	That’s true.
B	He didn’t have a chance to turn into Mark Zuckerberg first because you know he would have been creepy.
A	I don’t know. Zuckerberg kinda maxes out the the creepiness.
B	I think that Mark Zuckerberg maxes out the creepiness in, don’t know,
A	Uncanny valley?
B	Yes.
A	Yeah, whereas Elon Musk just wants to be liked. He just wants to be popular.
B	He does.
A	He’s working out his issues in ways that are probably going to have disastrous global consequences. But, you know,
B	Yeah.
A	That’s 2022 for you.
B	Right, I mean, it’s just kind of the classic give one person a lot of power. And then they just start performing large-scale social experiments on humanity and we’ll never know what life would be like without them.
A	Yeah. Anyway, the point here is that platform designers should think in terms of who could be most likely to be harmed here, whether or not they are users of that platform. I don’t think Elon Musk is going to do that. If he’s at the helm of Twitter, I don’t think that’s going to be what he cares about in the least. In fact, I have a feeling he’s going to privilege the voices that are most likely to oppress others. So an example that Ramler gives of a platform that did focus on inclusion was dating site called thirst with a U. one of the design choices that was really inclusive was they didn’t have a drop-down for gender, male, female, other, because that is literally othering non-binary people. And so it had, I think like an open,
B	A text field.
A	Yeah. From a data surveillance standpoint, that’s not as efficient for the company if they want to, like run stats on their user base. But that’s not the point, right?
B	Hm. People before profits? This is a thing unheard of!
A	What is that from?
B	That wasn’t really my best John Ryhs Davies. An elf go underground where a dwarf dare not? Oh. I’d never hear the end of it.
A	Okay.
B	It’s in the,
A	I believe you.
B	The third movie when they’re going into the
A	Moria?
B	No, not Moria. Not at all.
A	Oh, no, no. The one with all the skulls.
B	To see the ghosties.
A	Yes. I remember. I think we’ve pretty well established that social justice is inherent to UX. What I want to talk about for the rest of the episode is who to center and how do we center those audiences? And then I’m going to raise some cautions and challenges.
B	Okay.
A	Users to center, traditionally marginalized groups. Women, which is unfortunately extremely relevant as of right now. With the Supreme Court decision, women who need reproductive health care need to be considered as an audience, even for things like say, Google, like how are they going to protect user’s search history Or location-based apps that could theoretically be used to track people. Queer communities like we talked about, people of color, people with disabilities, non-native speakers of English. Intercultural and international audiences and civic audiences. Methods for centering these populations. The big idea is participation, like we talked about before. Although that in and of itself is not enough if there’s not the correct mindset behind it. Not a guarantee, but in general, that’s the direction we want to move towards. This requires a rethinking of traditional roles. The researcher is not the sole authority or expert in the situation. It requires seeing users as having expertise in their own right and seeking to draw that out and honor that.
B	That’s an interesting thought.
A	A few specific methods here. Personas, talked about them in part two on UX practice and how they’re, they can be a great way to kind of humanize the design process. We know that at worst they’re based on assumptions and stereotypes. The more closely based on actual research they are, the better they tend to be. And when I say research, I don’t just mean like we studied the demographics of our user base. Like yes, that can give you some information, but it’s not giving you people’s reasoning for needing to do what they need to do.
B	Which is kind of the point of personas, right? Getting into the reasoning.
A	Right. If all you have is a list of this is Jimmy. He’s a Millennial. He’s in a low income bracket. And he grew up in Iowa. Like, I don’t know. That in and of itself. All that does is encourage you to stereotype because you’re making that leap from, oh what does it mean to be from Iowa? You’re filling in the blanks.
B	Exactly. Yeah. You know, you have a few data points that give you just enough to make inferences of your own.
A	So the more meaningful qualitative research you can get behind your personas, the better. We can take it a step further in our quest for more participation. User created personas. And this comes again from Rose and Cardinal. They talk about how they actually got their participants to craft their own personas. I think they had an image of like teenagers who were making collages even to represent their personas, which I thought was really cool to make it visual as well. And a good way to think about the quality of your personas if you don’t have the luxury of having your users create them, is to ask yourself what I want to be represented in these terms?
B	Hm.
A	Because I have seen examples of personas that are like the overachiever or the grumbler, stuff like that. So reducing their identity to a way that they are in a certain context and you know, over achiever, that’s only in relation to what the researchers define as an appropriate level of achieving
B	Or an important area of achievement. Yeah. Turning a person into one word. That’s a one-dimensional person.
A	But I mean, at its root, that’s what personas do is they reduce. They reduce lots of data into smaller, more comprehensible, bite-size chunks for your design team.
B	True.
A	And like to some extent that’s necessary. But
B	Well, of course you’re never going to take one person and be able to describe all facets of them. Know that at some point during your efforts, they’re going to change because time happens.
A	Yeah. And here I want to introduce an idea from Natasha Jones on feminist narrative inquiry. She defines it as “a form of qualitative research that emphasizes the importance of lived experiences.” So for instance, ask users to tell a story about their experience with a technology. Narrative inquiry should be a dialogic process, it should be a reflective process. And it’s a way to counteract that very reductiveness that I was just talking about. So instead of aiming to generalize with your personas, you keep users stories intact. And they are your persona, like an actual person, a story that they’ve told. In the spirit of reflection. I’m thinking back to a publication I did about patients who use eHealth to answer their questions about their conditions. And I kind of did that one word labeling thing.
B	Hmm.
A	Yeah. I had categories like the planner, the explorer, the pragmatist. And those were derived from interviews. I wasn’t saying these should be the personas, that someone’s identity can be summed up with this label. It’s more saying this is an aspect of people’s identities that you should include in your personas, which is what are their goals for searching for online health information. So the pragmatist, for instance, would be, I need to know if I need to go to the doctor. The explorer might be my chronically ill child has this condition and I want to know everything there is to know about it. And the, the tricky thing about using those labels I see now is that I should have instead labeled them, planning, exploring, right, to emphasize the action versus the identity.
B	Yep.
A	Because even for one person, they might shift in those activities or goals in the context of a single Internet search or over the course of a particular disease as their needs change.
B	It could change based on what they find in their search too. If they’re looking for information on planning and then something sparks that, oh wow, weird. Then then they might shift into, you know, there is a responsive element to searching, I imagine.
A	Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve talked about personas, different ways to make those more potential for social justice. The next methods I want to talk about are kind of a group of approaches to the design of intercultural communication. These are things like participatory localization, cultural usability, culturally reflective UX.
B	Okay.
A	These methods stand in contrast to more traditional, unhelpful, perhaps unjust ways of thinking about culture. And Agboka cause these large culture ideologies. So this would include things like Western people are more X and Eastern people are more Y. Already there are problems in generalizing like an entire hemisphere of people as more likely to have one personality trait over another.
B	Binarizing.
A	Yeah.
B	A little bit problematic there.
A	And he makes a great point. Cultures don’t communicate. Individuals within cultures do. All right? Yeah. Just like we were talking about with oh, this person’s from Iowa. That means XYZ. When you know someone is of a particular culture that activates those stereotypes. Here’s, I think, an even clear example of how this can play out with gender stereotypes. Do you remember the XKCD comic where there’s two people, doing a math problem, they both get it wrong.
B	If it’s a male who gets the math problem wrong, you’re so dumb.
A	You suck at math.
B	You suck at math. It’s a female who gets the math problem wrong. Girls suck at math.
A	Exactly. I struggle with gas pumps because I’m a woman.
B	You struggle with gas pumps because you suck at gas pumps.
A	Thank you. So some ways to move beyond that large culture thinking and get at more the individual needs. One method is participatory localization. This comes from Agboka. Have you heard of localization? In the context of tech comm, it means taking a product or a piece of communication from one culture into another. This happens a lot when you have like global multinational companies creating stuff that goes out across the world. Localization is the idea that things get customized for each of those different cultures or countries.
B	So that would be like the Ford Nova that had appalling sales in Mexico because they didn’t realize that in Spanish it means doesn’t go. Yeah, that was a, a failure of localization.
A	Precisely. And translation is certainly a part of that process, but it’s not the only aspect. Acharya says, “from a localized design perspective, a successful product is one that is developed by recognizing socio-cultural, legal, linguistic, and political systems in the target culture, all in light of multicultural users’ needs, preferences and expectations.” A big problem with localization is when it takes place at the developer site. So this company is headquartered in the US. That is where the decisions about localization are being made.
B	What could go wrong?
A	Yeah. Participatory localization, quote, is more intuitive and user sensitive. An approach that will be undertaken from the ground up. So do it locally and do it with user participation. And in fact, users are already doing their own localization, whether or not the developer expects it. So Sun gives an example in the context of text messaging in China. And another facet to consider with localization is the physical setting in which a product will be introduced. Acharya draws from St.Amant’s contextualized design theory to explain usability challenges of medical devices that were being used by health care providers in Nepal. This biomedical equipment was developed in the global north, he calls it. And one of his findings was that the physical setting really mattered here. Things like the portability of the equipment that was not considered in the development of that product, but was really essential in these hospitals in Nepal. The power required to run these devices. There was a much less consistent power supply in Nepal. And if you’re running machines that people’s lives depend on, like you need to build in some backup power into that. But because it was not developed in that context, it wasn’t doing the job. And then another method kind of in this vein of socially just intercultural communication is what Sano-Franchini calls culturally reflexive us. She says, “there’s currently limited work that centers on issues of race and racism in UX scholarship even while examples of the challenges of race and other kinds of bias as facilitated by technology design abound.” The example I’m thinking of here, I don’t remember who tweeted it, but the example was featured in the book, Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin. Somebody reporting that their GPS stated, turn right on Malcolm 10 boulevard. The tweeter was saying, you know there wasn’t a Black person on this design team. She says “There seems to be an understandable reluctance and slow uptake when it comes to bringing race to UX design. Understandable in the sense that there is indeed the risk of approaches that make easy assumptions about large, diverse, and multifaceted groups of people.” So she presents basically a set of questions that designers can ask, such as “are particular races, identities, or features cast as desirable or undesirable in this product.” It’s a way of making race a part of the discussion in a way that it hasn’t been in the past.
B	To be fair. It looks like the Sano Franchini, that was published in 2017. Bit has happened since then.
A	That’s a great point. So 2017, a lot has happened. And I would say, right now as we speak, Republicans are trying to censor discussions of race in K-12 schools right now.
B	The whole nonsense about critical race theory.
A	Next I’m going to talk about a category of participatory visual methods. And this comes from Brock Carlson. She talks about photovoice as a possible visual method. And this is a method that’s been used in things like public health. Where you give participants a camera and you say take pictures of things that speak to you in relation to this topic and then talk to us about those photos you took. Mapping is another way to do this. Have people create maps or revise maps to reflect a community’s needs, for instance. Those are all ways to include your users and to do it in a way that may be more accessible than strictly verbal methods. And I would group within this participatory video methods. This is the rose and Cardinal piece again, so similar to photo voice except give a video camera or ask them to take video on their phone. They write “by deputizing participants to collect data for themselves and to act as researchers, their frustrating experiences are legitimized in a way they might not be without giving them the ability to literally hold the tools of research.”
B	That’s great.
A	They talk about a fascinating example of giving video cameras to riders of local transit, homeless people specifically. And at one point, one of the participants was able to interview like a local politician about the bus situation,
B	Okay.
A	And capture that on his camera. Which is really cool because he was really taking agency in that moment. And in another publication, Rose talks more about what she was able to learn from this study. Things like riding the bus was almost a form of safety or refuge. for these audiences.
B	You get out of the weather.
A	Get off the street. Another was around the challenges of the fare system. So in that particular city, they were moving to a fully digital fare system.
B	Oh.
A	And you can see how from a designer standpoint, this is going to streamline everything. We’re using technology to solve problems. Maybe it is an improvement for certain riders who have a cell phone where they can download the app,
B	Access to digital resources.
A	What about the homeless riders?
B	Back when I was taking the bus in Fargo. So I know that I have seen instances where someone who doesn’t have means asks for a transfer, which is essentially asking to bum a ride off someone.
A	And if they’re not going to use that transfer, why not give it to someone else?
B	Exactly.
A	But digitizing it makes that kind of thing impossible. And theoretically, it is better at making money for the bus company or the city, whatever. But again, as a socially just UX practitioner, that should not be your priority. And Rose even suggests here that in developing personas, make personas that represent the most vulnerable populations so that you’re not leaving them out. And then the last method I want to talk about is called productive usability from Simmons and Zoetewey and this focuses on designing for civic audiences. Conventional usability is not enough for civic websites. So like a city website or a local organization or something,
B	something that by definition has to serve everyone in the community.
A	And those sites might pass traditional usability testing, but not enable, quote, citizen collaboration, work or action. And those are things that users might want to do with those websites. So the authors argue we should focus on not just usability but usefulness, which Mirel defines as the ability to do better work, not just use an application more easily. They provide a model of what they call productive usability, which allows room for users with goals and purposes that the designers may not have prioritized or even considered. Simmons and Zoetewey watched people use these civic websites. They discovered that people wanted to engage in these websites beyond the educational purposes that the websites were defined for. They wanted to be problem solvers. They didn’t just want the definition of storm water regulation. They wanted to know what actions they could take to minimize pollution in stormwater. They didn’t want just summaries of research. They wanted to be able to see the data themselves. That’s where participation by users is really important in the design process. Think of ways to empower users and think in terms of what do they want to accomplish versus what does the designer want to accomplish. Last, I want to talk about some cautions and challenges with doing socially just UX.
B	Challenges and cautions?
A	For instance, we have to watch out for UX, human-centered design, even participatory design as terms to be co-opted by industry.
B	Oh, yeah, they’re great at that.
A	Yeah. Opel and Rhodes write, “UCD is attractive in its seeming values, its optimism and its ubiquity. It is attractive and it seems to be in the air these days.” Yet the more ubiquitous an idea, the more meaningless it can become.
B	Mm-hmm.
A	So it can become a label to put on things versus a philosophy that’s genuinely driving something.
B	So the concern here sounds like it is the, the social responsibility version of greenwashing.
A	Absolutely. And they note an example where the words efficiency and engagement cropped up in a practitioner’s definition of user-centered design. And so they ask, where did this come from? Since when has efficiency been a goal of user centered design?
B	No joke.
A	Even engagement. We think of that as an ultimate good. Like if students are engaged in our classes, we know they’re learning. Well. I mean, ideally, we don’t know that. And again, let’s think back to that example of Nextdoor. They are engaging with the app by reporting suspicious activity. But is that the way they should be engaging? Not exactly. Another caution is that some types of participatory design could put your users at risk. Let’s think back to the public transit study and the author absolutely acknowledges this. Some of her participants might reveal that they had strategies for fare evasion, for instance. And that could put them at risk.
B	Mm-hm. Yeah, it could, at the very least put their strategies at risk of being fixed.
A	Right. So what’s going to happen with that data? Is it going to be used to make it harder for these people to get by. And another thing I want to add is that participatory methods, social justice methods. Human decenter, if human, human decentered design, yeah, let’s not do that.
B	Human dysentery design. Sorry.
A	You can’t overlay those on an already oppressive product.
B	Ah. If oppression is a feature, not a bug, you can’t remove the bug,
A	Right? Again, just a caution to practitioners that sometimes you cannot solve the problem through your methods because the problem doesn’t want to be solved. And I’ll give you an example. One of my former students actually, Michela Sims, recently published a piece about the US application for asylum. And she analyzed it using plain language guidelines, which are theoretically more socially just than bureaucratic legalese. Unsurprisingly discovered that that’s not enough to judge whether something is socially just or not. I mean, not that it would have mattered because these forms were a nightmare, not readable. And I love what she says here. “On the surface, TPC, technical and professional communication, communicates varying levels of complex information or instructions to enable an audience to act. However, TPC may be constructed to compel audiences to act in ways that place larger agendas above human beings.” And that’s absolutely what’s happening here.
B	It is designed to be a barrier. The whole concept of closed borders didn’t come into the international awareness really until World War 1. You could go wherever you wanted through most of human history. World War One, one country was like, Hey, don’t leave our country. You’ve got to stay here and fight. Rutger Bregman’s most recent book is where that can be found.
A	Back to this application. It was not written in plain language. But even if it was, that does not mean it is sensitive to the audience. Because as she notes, the audiences of this form are often traumatized. If they are fleeing their home countries for asylum, they may have been tortured. The form has language like I would I would almost call it gas lighting through tech comm in a way because
B	Ooh.
A	there’s one, there was one place where it asks people to describe their experiences that justify asylum. And it even says, like, if this is hard for you, then ask a health care provider to help you because we need enough information to legitimize your claim. So it’s basically saying, we don’t care what effect this has on your mental health to detail how you’ve been tortured or whatever. If this form, we’re designed in a human centered way, then this form wouldn’t exist. Do you know what I mean?
B	Yeah.
A	And the system wouldn’t exist because it’s inherently unjust. So there’s ways to do some surface level revisions of these things, but it’s not going to transform an oppressive system. Sorry,
B	Right.
A	Another caution for UX practitioners to be aware is that participation by real marginalized users may place an additional burden on them. They already have potentially limited time, resources, finances. There’s going to be limits to how much they can participate or that they want to participate. And those things need to be taken into account. Part of that might mean being really sensitive to the locations of your research. Can you go into the community versus trying to bring them to where you are? How can you compensate them to make it worth their time? This is hard. My, my final note to listeners is, don’t give up. You may have been thinking, as we’re talking about this, that seems impossible. My company would never support that, that kind of thing. And again, there’s no such thing as a perfectly socially just research design because we can’t see the future. We cannot anticipate every conceivable consequence of our choices. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try at all.
B	Right.
A	And part of this work is going to require practitioners and academics to advocate for the additional time and research it takes to make projects truly participatory. Thinking in terms of the academy, that values very specific things. If you want to get hired, if you want to get promoted, if you want to get tenure. Committees are going to be looking at things like peer reviewed publications and how many you completed in a certain time-frame. That is not conducive to long-term sustained engagement with a community.
B	Longitudinal studies are not attractive to academia.
A	And it’s not even necessarily a longitudinal study, but it takes time to connect with the community and not just drop in and out as it suits your needs as a researcher. So this is also a message to people sitting on hiring committees, tenure committees, grant funders, journal editors, and of course, workplaces where UX happens.
B	Mm-hm.
A	Um, you know, if you are in a decision-making capacity, then you need to shift towards valuing and investing in those practices that are more likely to lead to socially just designs. View that as part of your job description as a technical communicator, a UX practitioner. You’re an advocate as well. Thanks to Natasha Jones for that idea of technical communicator as advocate versus someone in a strictly neutral role who relays information objectively. That is impossible in the world we live in.
B	I think it’s really interesting the point that you brought up about how when we’re encountering like systemic issues of non-human centric design. There is in fact a built-in limitation to how much a technical communicator can actually accomplish. If the problem is capitalism, no amount of money you throw at the problem is going to fix it. Because the money is the problem. And a technical person in a for-profit workplace is sometimes going to be asked to do something that is literally impossible because it looks good for the company. When in reality it is a smoke screen.
A	Yeah, people are going to be asked to bend ethics in the workplace. And ideally, people would be able to take a stand against that, but people also need to feed their families. You know what I mean? I don’t want to black and white this. But I also don’t want to say that because there’s no clear answer, just give up.
B	The only hope that you have is in trying. And in fact, you can be pretty confident that if you don’t try, things will get worse. The status quo created the myth of progress as a smokescreen. The status quo wants things to be humming along just as they are. And so
A	privileging the same people,
B	of course, they’re going to tell stories to mollify the unsatisfied masses. The myth of progress is really just like the inherent belief that things get better.
A	Society is always getting better.
B	Society is always getting better.
A	Which is tricky because society is a lot better in a lot of ways, but not for everyone.
B	“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” And that’s a quote from William Gibson.
A	Thank you for that. Thanks for talking TC with me today, Benton.
B	Thanks for having me.
A	Happy birthday.