Improving The Product Toolbox
A presentation at Design & Content Conference 2017 in July 2017 in Vancouver, BC, Canada by Ron Bronson
Improving The Product Toolbox
About Ron Bronson ● Front-end & service design, City of Bloomington (IN) ● Over a decade of experience leading digital teams. ● Wrote “Web Management for Regular People.” ● Speaker at UX, content strategy & design conferences worldwide.
Every problem is a design problem
Victor Papanek (Design For The Real World, 1971)
Defining the default
● A kiosk fails and there’s no offline process for completing the transaction in real-time. ● Microcopy asked binary questions that negate personhood. ● Forms failing to account for things like names don’t fit a narrow conception of what we think they should. ● Apps that assuming relationship status or holidays you celebrate because “everyone else” does. ● “It’s a bummer the implementation looks completely different than what we designed.”
The Bodega Effect
The problem is that in interaction design, metrics tend to boil down to one singular goal engagement. Sara Wachter-Boettcher “Technically Wrong”
Accept that we are part of the problem
Focus on team composition.
www.perspective.cards
Test your own assumptions.
https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
Communicate value in relevant ways to internal teams.
Manipulation isn’t a product strategy.
● YouTube autoplays more videos to keep us from leaving. ● Instagram shows new likes one at a time, to keep us checking for more. ● Facebook wants to show whatever keeps us scrolling. ● Snapchat turns conversations into streaks we don’t want to lose. ● Our media turns events into breaking news to keep us watching.
cruelestoptouts.tumblr.com
Ron Bronson ron@ronbronson.com @ronbronson on your twitter machine.
