Move slowly and fix things: recommended reading for designers
One of tech’s sacred mantras is Mark Zuckerberg’s own, “move fast and break things.” Originally, this was meant to be guidance for developers and engineers to aim for disruption and shun the conventional–you can’t create the next big thing by taking cautious baby steps. But now Meta has tried to distance itself from this motto, because moving fast and breaking things results in, surprise surprise, broken things.
For me, becoming a user experience professional seemed to be signing on to a sort of clean up crew: UX comes in after all the rush to develop and disrupt to tidy up toxic experiences. UX considers the big picture, and what’s more, the actual users. This means approaching tech from a mindful, inclusive, and empathetic place. Move slowly and fix things, as it were.
If you’re interested in making technology that benefits the user rather than taking advantage of them, then this is the reading list for you. When I first started my UX journey, these books informed the development of a dedication to inclusive, empathetic design.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes
1. Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes
Kat Holmes’ guide to thinking inclusively is positively dense with wisdom. Drawing on her deep well of experience at Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce she abolishes the idea of “normal” or “average” and invites designers to be just as considerate of disability as they are of diversity. In her words, “Disability is often mentioned last if at all in that list of human diversity, which I find incredibly strange because human ability is one of those kinds of human diversity that transcends every other kind of human diversity.”
Mismatch details how users could be temporarily, permanently, or situationally mismatched, or unable to interact with, an experience. Indeed, these mismatches are historically what inspired many of the most essential tools we use today, from keyboards to bendy straws. In this way, Mismatch serves as both a history book and design guide. Each chapter ends with takeaways that stick–and indeed should be stuck–in the mind of anyone who has anything to do with design processes. These takeaways recognize our exclusion habits (like creating experiences using our own abilities as a baseline) and how we can move toward inclusion (identifying ability biases and mismatched interactions).
This book should be required (extra emphasis here) for anyone even glancingly interested in design.
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
2. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
My mom has a lovely turn of phrase that applies to the world of design, “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.” In her book, Sara Wachter-Boettcher names and shames the times when various user experiences assumed who their users were and what they were trying to do, thus making an ass out of both themselves and you, the user. Like when Facebook flagged Kiowa tribe member Shane Creepingbear’s name as fake. Or when another experience insisted that two-letter last names like Li (the second most common surname in mainland China) were unacceptable. Or when Tumblr cheerfully sent out a push notification saying, “Beep beep! #neo-nazis is here.”
Wachter-Boettcher gives these and many other examples of gauche, presumptive, obtuse experiences so that we can learn to be more considerate and compassionate with our designs. If tech is left with an unthinking, shallow understanding of users, she warns, “those perceptions lead to products that, at best, leave out huge percentages of users–at worst, take advantage of our personal data and encode bias into systems that hold tremendous power over real people’s lives and livelihoods.” Wachter-Boettcher’s enlightening book emphasizes that the job is not done once the site is up and running–to assume so is to ignore what got broken in the rush to move fast.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk
3. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk
If you aren’t armed with the right tools, then you can’t be expected to do the work. The problem is that many people flooding into the field of UX assume (remember that earlier phrase) that because they have a good understanding of design trends and aesthetics, that they will be fine. An eye for design will only get you so far, however, and what will really allow you the power to make a difference in the world of UX is an understanding of people and psychology. This is where Dr. Weinschenk comes in.
In her delightfully designed book, Weinschenk teaches us how people work in bite-sized lessons that explain the psychology behind human behavior. For example:
Lesson 21 — People have to use information to make it stick
Lesson 55 — People are motivated by progress, mastery, and control
Lesson 74 — Anecdotes persuade more than data
It is only through taking advantage of these psychological tips and tricks that we can form our designs to fit with user psychology. There are plenty of professionals out there already making use of these concepts, and not always to the benefit of the user. If you’ll let me invoke another phrase, this time from the late and great Stan Lee, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Weinschenk’s book contains great power, and it is our responsibility to use it for good.
12 standards from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
4. How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference)
While this webpage isn’t a book, I certainly consider it required reading for anyone who wants to design inclusively. This is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 requirements (success criteria) and techniques, a quick and glanceable guide to designing content that can be enjoyed by everyone. This is essentially a how-to guide on avoiding those aforementioned mismatches of ability. The WCAG consider the needs of assistive devices like screen readers, and thus the page is organized into four guiding principles:
Perceivable — Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
Operable — User interface components and navigation must be operable.
Understandable — Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.
Robust — Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.
This page lays out quite plainly how to design with users’ most fundamental needs in mind. Meeting those needs is truly a first step toward making a difference.
The unfortunate truth is that few sites meet these requirements, excluding whole swaths of the population. That’s what happens in the “move fast and break things” world of tech: people get left behind. It is up to the UX professionals, then, to advocate for these users, these accessibility requirements, and further considerations so that we can make truly inclusive experiences.
Let’s go slow, be mindful, and fix things.