User Unfriendly

slides.oddbird.net/unfriendly/ethics2101/

Miriam Suzanne @ GA Ethics in Design

January 21, 2021

what makes something? User Friendly?

Easy to learn, use, understand, or deal with

– Merriam-Webster

Don’t Make Me Think

– Steve Krug

It Just Works

– Apple?

As designers We advocate for users

Altered 'What Women Want' movie poster
says 'What Users Want'

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your website to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

– Jakob Nielsen

A young man collapsed on the ground,
clasping his sister's hand

Anne Bogart

A Director Prepares

You cannot create results.
You can only create conditions
in which something might happen.

…in which there is room for the audience to move around, imagine, and make associations.

– Anne Bogart

1989 The WorldWideWeb Project

The first world wide website & graphic browser

It is required that HTML be a common language between all platforms…

– WWW Project

The second browser, a text-only terminal

A Radical Shift

On the web… Everything is Variable

Sizes, Interfaces, Preferences, Content, Features, &c…

A zillion different devices of all sizes (original)

Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod

Web for all. Web on everything.

– W3C Mission Statement

…This implies no device-specific markup, or anything which requires control over fonts or colors.

But… Fonts & Colors are Great

For both authors & users

Cascading HTML style sheets

Håkon Lie, October 1994

This proposal tries to soften the tension between the author and the reader.

– Håkon Lie

An ordered list (cascade) of style sheets

– Håkon Lie

The user/browser specifies initial preferences and hands the remaining influence over to the document.

– Håkon Lie

If conflicts arise the user should have the last word

– Håkon Lie

           User            Author
Font   o-----x--------------o 64%
Color  o-x------------------o 90%
Margin o-------------x------o 37%
Volume o---------x----------o 50%

Not ease But Access & Control

Users are all different

experiences, skills, limitations, goals

The fact we can control a paper page is really a limitation of that medium.

– John Allsopp, 2000

Bootstrapping vs Plug-and-play

Bootstrapping Augmenting Human Intellect

Providing the means for users to create better tools.

Any barrier that exists between the user and some part of the system will eventually be a barrier to creative expression.

– “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk” (Byte 1981)

“Open” or “Adaptable”

Plug-and-play It Just Works

“Intuitive” or “Invisible”

Easy for Who? To do What?

Who defines the “default”?

Girl with a 'skin color' bandaid significantly lighter than her skin

Are you a man or a woman? man, woman, other

First Name / Last Name?

and that name never changes…

Old facebook dropdown for Gender
has 58 options to choose from

Under an increasing pressure to monetize the data they store, Facebook looks for ways to limit difference across the site.

– Ben Grosser, How the Technological Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation

Make things easy With Machine Learning

Facebook Shows Bereaved Parents Their Year in Review

Twitter Apologizes for 'racist' image-cropping algorithm.
Users highlight examples of feature automatically focusing on
white faces over Black ones

The easiest fix for that biased cropping AI? No it’s not to build another AI - it’s to give people the power to select crop boundaries when posting a photo.

– Amy X Zhang, Sep 19, 2020

The most friendly approach Is Respect

Design for Edge A Range Cases

Design for Stress Cases

Adapt to User Needs & Preferences

Please Make Me Think

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Technically Wrong