 So right now I want to thank Lauren Jarrett, Chief Marketing Officer from Acquia, and she's going to come up and introduce today's keynote. Good morning, everyone. I'm so excited to be here this week. It's my first DrupalCon. Very exciting. So I feel like this is something that you really have to be here to really understand and experience. It's just awesome to see firsthand how the community all comes together and kind of the creativity that can come out of everyone just kind of supporting each other and helping each other and collaborating and working on things that folks jointly care about. It's just, it's something very special and I just keep thinking that this is something that the rest of the world and other organizations could probably learn a lot from looking at a community like Drupal and how it operates. And this is such an exciting time also in the development of Drupal. With, you know, from my perspective and working in this industry for a very long time and being a marketer myself for a very long time. The way digital is fundamentally changing the way some of the world's most influential organizations can offer their products and services, can differentiate themselves, can have an impact, and the way that they can completely change the experience their customers have with them is just being fundamentally altered and transformed by digital capabilities. And it's exciting to be sort of at the mecca of that. With DA out now and adoption escalating and really starting to take off, kind of the impact that we can have as a group is just only going to go up from here. I spend a lot of time in my job working and talking with the industry analysts, the folks whose job it is to really look at the industry and figure out what's happening in web content management and digital experience and what organizations need to do moving forward. And something pretty amazing has been happening recently and what I've been hearing. All of the things that we've been talking about this week and that we heard and we talked about and heard about in Dries' keynote, whether it's headless, Internet of Things, an API-first approach and assembly of experiences, or use cases that are not just about marketing but really about fundamentally how businesses operate and what they do. Experiences that are beyond the browser, right? Web and webless and Dries Gates, some great examples of this in his speech. These things are real, open source. It's amazing that the analysts are now all saying that these things are not only sort of fundamental elements of the platform for innovation today, but are really what's going to drive our world moving forward. So just really exciting stuff. So just thank you for having me. Thank you for having us. I'm just really excited to be here and to be a part of this. With that, I would like to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, Sarah Wachter-Betcher. Sarah is a content strategist, an author and a speaker and a UX design specialist. She has her own consultancy focusing on user experience design and content strategy, working with the likes of clients like Harvard, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Teach for America and more. And she specializes in taking a business vision and translating it into UX design and content strategy. She is the author of a couple of books. She, Content Everywhere, a 2012 book, as well as Design for Real Life, her new book. So please join me in welcoming Sarah Wachter-Betcher. Hello. Good morning. Thank you all for making it in bright and early. So as I get started today, I want to mention just one thing, and that's that this talk is actually a little bit personal and it has a few challenging moments in it. So I want to give you just a little warning. We're going to talk about some touchy subjects. If that makes you upset in any way, I understand if you need to leave the room. I happen sometimes. All right. So I think we need to get my slides up, maybe. Welcome. The story starts out a while back when I was about to visit a new doctor's office for the very first time. And in advance of this visit, they had sent me a link to a new patient form. And so I get the link in my email and I open it up and I start filling in the form. I get through all of the normal fields, right? It's like, has anybody in your family ever had a stroke? Do you smoke? All that standard stuff. And then suddenly I get to what I call the question. Have you ever been sexually abused or assaulted? And it's just sitting there staring at me. I don't know why they were asking. It didn't say. I don't know what they wanted to do with this information, where it would go. There was no box to tick for, well, yeah, actually. But that's not why I'm coming into your office today. And I'm not afraid to talk about it, but I don't know you. And I kind of don't want to talk about it with you. And could we just have my appointment? There is no space to breathe. It's just this tidy little binary for a story that didn't feel tidy to me at all. And so I remember staring at it and thinking, yes or no? What happens if I tell the truth? Where does this information go? How will it be used? Is this going to be on some file of mine from now until the end of time? I thought about checking no. And I thought, you know, I spent a lot of time lying about this already. I spent a lot of time denying that this has ever happened to me and feeling ashamed about it. I don't feel good saying no. So I check yes. I go in for my visit. So I'm in there with the doctor and she says to me, so you've been sexually assaulted. It's not a question that she stands there waiting expectantly. I let her wait. I think about answering. I think about telling her more. But instead I just say yes. It gets to be awkward. And she finally says, I'm sorry that happened to you. And she moves on with her visit. Because for her, that was it. That was the end of the story. But for me it wasn't. Because I was sitting there thinking about that question in the office. And I was thinking about it the next day. And I was thinking about it the next week. Yes or no. And so what I realized in this story is that everybody has history. I don't know what anybody in this room has gone through. But I do know that all of you have gone through something. That something might be just difficult to talk about. It might be painful. It might be complicated and hard to explain. Everybody is carrying something around with them though. Everybody has that burden of life. And because we don't know what people are carrying around with them, we also don't really know how they're going to react to the scenarios that we put them in when we ask them to fill out forms or interact with us. We can't necessarily know what's going to trigger a memory for them. Or know what's going to be hard for them. Because there are some days when I can stand up here in front of what is a very large room and tell all of you that yeah, I was. I was sexually abused and, you know, that that filled me with shame for a lot of years and that I don't feel ashamed anymore. And there are other days when I might hook on all of that, when I might not be able to get those words out. I always know which thing is going to happen next. I don't know which of the many varied emotional responses I might have at a given moment. That's life. That's what life is like. It's a lot of different feelings at the same time. And so, as an industry, I think we've started talking a lot about how we want to make things for humans. We want to make things for people. And this comes up all the time. But oftentimes, when it does, I think we're really only talking about making things for happy people. Making things that are going to make somebody feel welcome and excited. We spend a lot of time designing for things that are going to work really well and that are going to be a great experience. Somebody who is celebrating a new relationship or a new baby. We don't often think that much about how we make things for people who are having different kinds of experiences. And so that's what I want to talk about today. How do we make things for whole humans? For people who are hard to categorize. For people who are going through any number of complex or contradictory emotions. For people that we ask to fill out a form field without thinking about how to make them feel comfortable providing information. How to make them feel safe. Or whether we ought to be asking for that information in the first place. So whenever I think about designing for humans, I think about this talk that Paul Ford gave a couple years ago at the School of Visual Arts. He gave it as a commencement address. And he said, you know, when I look out at this room, I see a comparatively small number of faces. But I also see a trillion heartbeats. Not your own heartbeats, but those of your users. If we're going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure, than we are right now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely? So you know I actually think about this question every day now. How can we be far more sure than we are right now that our users are spending their heartbeats wisely with us? And what I've come to is this idea that we can make everything that we do, every decision that we make in content, design, development, that we can make all of it an act of kindness. Every time we write a word, every time we pick a form field, every time we do anything, we can think about kindness at the core of that interaction. And that's what I'm going to focus on by talking through a few different principles that I've come to to help in that process. The first one is to rethink what we think of when we think of normal. To do that, I'd like you to take a moment just sitting in your seats and just do this for me. Imagine your user real fast. Just put them in your head. Can you picture them, hear them? Imagine them using your site. So now that you have that first person in mind, I'd like you to be honest with yourself. What was the very first thing you pictured? The very first moment you got them into your head. Did you imagine their gender, their race, their age? Did you imagine how they're feeling when they're using your site right now? What did you think about them? If you're being honest with ourselves, we're often imagining some really narrow people. And you know, if you're like a lot of people in tech, myself included, right? Like, I'm sure I have been guilty of this as well. You may have been picturing a white man. It comes up more often than you want it to, because that bias is actually really deeply entrenched. And even if you didn't, even if you were imagining somebody to look a little different than that, odds are pretty good that you were imagining somebody relatively narrow. Now, it's okay to have a target audience, and that target audience might be a narrower piece of the population, right? Targeting everybody is not necessarily a goal. But the thing is, oftentimes, we think we know who our users are, and we don't ask this question. This question that I've decided is really important. Just what if we're wrong? What if somebody who is a little bit different, who looks different, has a different background, has a different experience than what we imagined in our head uses our product? Do things still work? Or does everything break down? Does our design alienate people, and does it hurt them? I want to talk about an example of that that I learned about from a woman named Maggie Delano. She wrote a media article about this a while back, and the title is pretty good at explaining the thesis of the article. I tried tracking my period, and it was even worse than I could have imagined. So, period tracking, if you're not familiar, is something that women have done for a very, very long time, long before they had apps for it. All it is is a system for knowing when you're going to get your next period. And some women might track other information around that, like moods before, after a period, or other kinds of symptoms they might be having, feelings, that kind of thing. There's lots of things that somebody might track along with their period. So, of course, now there are apps to help people do this, right? And since a lot of people have periods, a lot of people use these apps. So, Maggie went out looking for one that would work for her. And she downloaded a bunch of them, and she kind of showed her walkthrough of how they worked. And you know what she found? She found that none of them actually worked very well for her. And there's one particular example I want to talk about, because I thought it was so interesting. I downloaded the app myself, and I started playing with it. And that's an app called Glow. So, Glow is one that, just so you know, I'm going to go through a couple screens here. There's no personal data. This is all fake data, as I'm just messing with the onboarding process. But the first thing you get when you download Glow is this screen. This is your first onboarding screen. And I want to note something here at the very top. It says, choose your journey. So, right away, I'm like, oh, it is not a journey. I don't, I mean, look. Like, if you, if you get, if you get periods and you refer to your period as a journey, good for you. You do you, that's great. I don't think that this is a typical response. Because it's, it's a period. It's not a freaking journey. And I understand. I understand why they had that kind of message, right? Because they want Glow to be friendly and welcoming and personable, right? They don't want it to seem clinical. But instead, it just comes off as kind of condescending. Like, you're on some special mystical journey every month. My options are, so what journeys can I take today? Well, there are three of them. And there are only three. You are avoiding pregnancy. You are trying to conceive. Or you're undergoing fertility treatments. Those are the only three reasons that you can use Glow and have this product actually work for you. That's it. None of those apply to you. Maggie is gay. Is a woman. Probably not going to get her pregnant. Most likely. She wasn't trying to conceive or having fertility treatments, which obviously is a thing that many people do regardless of who their partners are. So what does she select? What should Maggie pick? So immediately from square one, right, this onboarding process, it's left her out. And she can pick something that isn't actually defining her, right? She can select avoiding pregnancy just to get into the app. But here's the thing. Because they have forced a false category. They have created fake categories that you have to fit into. Every single thing that she would encounter after that first screen, it's going to be wrong for her. Every single little micro interaction is going to be designed around an assumption that's actually fake. So this app is going to think all kinds of stuff about her. For example, it's going to shame her for not using a birth control method and tell her about her increased chances of being unintentionally pregnant. Because they decided, right, they decided that women had to fit into three neat journeys. Now, it's not just that onboarding process. There's also all kinds of stuff that Glow does as you go through it. So one of the things that happens if you go in and you select that you are avoiding pregnancy, you can enter all this data about what you're doing in a given day. And it really wants to enter you to enter information about, like, you know, did you have any sexual activity? And you can also enter things like did you exercise and all that stuff. And so if you answer some of these questions on a given day, the Apple update, and one of the things that it does, if you said that you had sex, is it says, I had intercourse. And that gets added to your profile. But here's the thing I want to call out here. Do you see that little heart, that little heart icon? I didn't pick that heart. Glow picked it for me. Because what Glow has done is Glow has decided how I feel. Glow has decided that I had a heart experience that day. So here's the thing, like, I hope that everybody who is in a sexual relationship and who wants to be in a sexual relationship and has a sexual experience has a perfectly healthy and happy one. When I was messing with the app, I selected that I had taken the, it asked me about birth control and I selected morning after pill. Man, what if I had had a really shitty experience? And you just told me how I felt about it. I look at that and I think, why are you assuming my feelings, right? Like, why are you telling me how I should feel about this scenario? Because in Glow's mind, everybody using this app is in a healthy, committed relationship, having great sex every time they use the app. Because if you're not, it literally doesn't work for you. Not just about sort of sexual health stuff. Actually, Glow gets into a whole lot of things that are interesting. Here's an example. So it wanted to know if I'd had any alcohol. So I went ahead and just put in that I had four drinks one day. I'm like, let's see what happens if I four drinks. Maybe I'm at a conference, right? This answer. You had many drinks. Thanks. And then there's this long, shady message and it says, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a few drinks every now and then, but heavy drinking can become a problem when it is very frequent and high intensity. Binge drinking is considered more than four drinks per sitting for women and blah, blah, blah, blah. So one time, I told my period tracking app that I had four drinks. And it decided what I needed was a big, long, shady message. Like that that was what I wanted from this experience. I think that this was your job, right? Like, why did you do all this stuff that I didn't ask for? This is an app that's supposed to be empowering me to better understand my body. So shouldn't it make me feel more in charge and not less in charge? I said I was interested in tracking my period. And you told me that I needed to be on a specific journey. You told me what I cared about. You told me how I felt. You told me about me. So many assumptions built into a product like this. When you start unpacking them, it's over and over with so many assumptions. And it made me think, you know, what kinds of assumptions am I bringing into my own work? What kinds of assumptions am I making about people that are just plain wrong? For Maggie, she said, you know, these assumptions are yet another example of technology telling queer, unpartnered, infertile, and or women uninterested in procreating that they aren't even women. These assumptions are telling women that the only women designing technology for are those women who are capable of conceiving and who are not only in a relationship but in a committed relationship and in a sexual relationship with someone who can potentially get them pregnant. Those are the assumptions that that product is making. In those three little boxes, in those few little screens, they have built in so many assumptions. And so I look at a product like Glow and I think, you know, they were probably trying to make it feel smooth, right? Make the onboarding process really easy to get into. But I look at that and I think it's to have that experience. And who gets left out? I want to be inclusive to our users. I think we have to recognize that that takes a level of nuance. We're careful about asking people what they want and accepting nuance in their responses to us. Because, you know, people don't fall into three neat categories. They need to be able to define themselves. So if you compare something like Glow to something like Clue, which is another period tracker, you'll see that they are worlds apart. One of the things that Clue does that I think is really interesting is that it doesn't ask you to define yourself on their terms. Instead, their onboarding process is a series of simple screens. It's pretty quick to swipe through, but it's a number of screens where you just set it up. And it's designed as a setup. Do you want to do this thing, yes or no? Do you want to use Clue to track things like how long your period is or your emotions or birth control you're using, right? And there's a little bit of information about why you might want to do use that piece of the app, right? That's like, you know, if you use this to track your birth control, this is what that will do. It asks you what you want to do, right? It asks you what you want to do with the product, as opposed to asking you who you are, asking you to force fit into their own decisions. And I think that this is a really important concept. How do we let people define themselves in our products? Because, ultimately, we're always going to have users who are a little bit different than what we imagine in our head. We're always going to have people who need to be able to express their identity in ways that we have not thought about before. How can we have the flexibility and the nuance to allow them to do that? It brings me to this concept of making space. Making space for real people to exist. To talk about making space, I want to talk a little bit about names, because names are such an important part of identity. I know, for example, that my name is very important to me. And I get frustrated every time I see a form field like this. This is Twitter. I cannot actually put my name into Twitter. It doesn't work. It's missing two letters at the end. And this happens to me all the time, right? Because the form was not designed for a name like mine. Sometimes it's rejected because it has, like, a hyphen or too many capital letters. You just can't handle it. And I find this irritating. Now, I don't think that my frustration is actually anything when you think about what Shane Creeping Bear went through. So Shane Creeping Bear is a Native American, and he had his name rejected by Facebook. He was told that his name was not approved, that it didn't meet Facebook's standards. Now, it wasn't just Shane Creeping Bear. It was actually a whole number of people with Native names. It was Lance Browneyes. It was Robin Kills the enemy. It was Dana Lonehill. They were all told that their names did not meet the standard and couldn't be used. Now, see, Facebook has an authentic name policy, so you're supposed to use a name on Facebook that you go by in everyday life. And they've been evolving this policy recently because of problems like this. And we could talk about whether or not they should have that policy, but they do. Look for a second at what they told people when they said that their name wasn't approved. This is the copy that they had. Your name wasn't approved. It looks like that name violates our name standards. You can enter an updated name again in one minute. To make sure the updated name complies with our policies, please read more about what names are allowed on Facebook. I'll tell you I read that copy, and this is what I hear. First off, your name is wrong. Your name is the problem here. And if you say that your name is wrong, what I also hear is you don't belong here because those were these people's real names. They were following the policy, right? But they're told that name violates the standards. If your name violates the standards just by it existing, how welcome does that make you feel? It also says you're the one who has to change. You notice there are no other options. There's one thing you can do from that screen, and that's in one minute you can enter a new name. Now, technically, there was a kind of behind-the-scenes, like if you went to the help center and then you got in touch with somebody and then you told them the problem and then they could do a whole work-around thing, right? But then none of that was explained. It just said you're wrong, you have to change. So Facebook has actually changed this copy just a few months ago, compared to something that's working a lot better. They have helped us confirm your name. We ask everyone on Facebook to use the name they go by in everyday life, blah, blah, blah, blah. If this name is your authentic name, please choose confirm name to help us confirm it. If you aren't currently using your authentic name on Facebook, please click update name to update the name on your account. There's a little link in the bottom left there that says what names are allowed on Facebook, and then you see on the right there's two options, right? You can confirm your name or you can update it. So they're not saying that you're necessarily doing something wrong and they're not saying that you have to change your name. They're leaving room for the system to be imperfect here. They're saying, you know, we might be wrong. We may have made a mistake in flagging this name. We're much more focused on how they can help you fix it, right? It's much more about we would like to fix this with you. And they're very direct about what you can do about it. If you got that message, you might still not like having to fax in a copy or email in a copy of your driver's license or your birth certificate. You might not like having to go get your name approved. But at least you'd feel like there's space within Facebook's universe for you to exist. And that brings us to that lesson about kindness. It's really about adjusting to users' needs instead of always asking them to fit ours. Because, you know, we think we know what a real name looks like. We think we have a good idea what a name is. But we're wrong. Because there will be real names and real people who fall outside of those standards. How can we help them get things done rather than telling them that they have to adjust to us? Something you can do this kind of thing, though, without setting aside some ego. You'd be able to set aside a little bit of your organization's pride. And I want to talk about an experience I had with that. Back when I used to edit a list apart. So I was the editor there from 2012 to 2015, at the end of the year I left. And during that time, you know, we had a lot of conversations about, well, what does it mean to edit a magazine about the web? If you're not familiar with a list apart, it's been around since 1998, and it's one of these early web magazines that's for web professionals, for people like you. But of course, since 1998, the web has changed a lot. And there's many, many, many places that you might go for content that would relate to learning how to do your job better. So it's not just the only place that you would end up. So just because I'm not, okay. Okay. So when I worked on a list apart and we were trying to figure out, well, how do we make sure that we're attracting people to write really good stuff? How do we attract good authors? I started taking a look at what we were saying about attracting authors. This is the copy that we had on our About page. It says, maybe you can be one of us. The few, the proud, the ALA contributing authors. A list apart is written by the community. It serves designers, developers, architects, producers, project managers, and assorted specialists. Publishing in ALA confers prestige and has helped some of our authors gain book deals or find favor with the editors of print magazines. Interested in writing for us? See the Contribute page. All right. If you click through to that Contribute page, here's what you would get. So you want to write for a list apart magazine. What we're looking for. We want to change the way our readers work, whether that means introducing a revolutionary CSS technique with dozens of potential applications, challenging the design community to ditch bad practices, or refuting common design or common wisdom about, say, screen readers. If your article can do that, we want to see it. I look at that and I think, so challenging, revolutionizing, refuting. That's some pretty aggressive language. That's some language that's, like, first off, it says we are very important. Like, that's actually the number one thing you take away from that. You guys, people who write for us get book deals. So it says first off, we are the important ones here, right? And then it says, you know, you're probably not good enough, right? Because if we're the kind of place that confers prestige, and we're the kind of place where it's like, you need a revolutionary technique that's going to have dozens of applications. Oh, your little idea. That couldn't possibly be important enough. And so I look at that copy and I thought, you know, it's no wonder when I go to people and I'm like, oh, I saw this thing that you wrote that's really interesting. I would love to have you write for a list apart. Would you be interested in writing an article? They were just like, nope. No, that sounds hard. That sounds kind of scary. And they'd say things like, you know, I just don't think any of my ideas are important enough. Great ideas. Why don't you think that? Well, that's why. Because we made people feel that way. Because we were so busy worrying about, like, making sure that a list apart sounded important. That we weren't thinking about how off-putting and how hurtful that could be to somebody who had an idea but was nervous and hadn't written for a place before besides their blog and wasn't sure if they were going to be accepted or rejected. So we went about rewriting that content. I'm going to share with you what it says today. Or at least last time I looked at it, since I'm not there anymore, they might have changed it. It says, write for us. Yes, you. We're always looking for new authors. If you've got an idea that will challenge our readers and move our industry forward, we want to hear about it. But you don't need to wait for an idea that will redefine web design. Just aim to bring readers a fresh perspective on a topic that's keeping you up at night. Now, if I were going to rewrite this again because I've looked at it on a big screen a number of times, I would probably actually get rid of things like challenging our readers. Because even that, that can feel a little bit too aggressive for a lot of authors who aren't necessarily looking to challenge people. They just have an idea to share. But still, there's a big difference between this content and the old content, right? We're saying, you know what, your ideas count. You don't have to redefine all the things. If you have an idea that you're excited about, if it's holding your attention, then it's probably going to be interesting to others as well. And we want to hear about those. And it also says, you know, you're why we're here. We're not a magazine unless we have people like you. These little words, these little differences can actually make a big change. And we actually started to see a big change in the submissions we were getting. But what it took is a little bit of swallowing of pride. It took us being able to take a step back and say it doesn't really matter that a list apart was one of the first places that was doing this. It doesn't really matter that we want people to think that we matter in some way. That's not actually important. What's important is we're trying to provide useful, interesting articles that will help our industry. And to do that, we need authors who can write them. And if we're scaring them off, that's on us. To get there, though, what it took is being, I think, a lot more intentional, right? It wasn't enough to just write some copy on that page. We had to be really thoughtful about why we were saying what we were saying and what we were doing. I want to talk a little bit more about being intentional by talking more about forms. So just like I wish the doctor's office had been more intentional in the forms that it had given me, I think this comes up a lot in our communications with our users. I'm going to tell another story. It takes place about a year ago when I was applying to get a German passport. So I'm half German. I've always been eligible, but I never had any documentation of this. My mother's German. And so I wanted to go ahead and make sure that I had all my citizenship stuff in order in case, you know, I ever want this dual citizenship. So I go about the process of collecting the documents that you need to get a German passport. There's a lot of them. And so I'm collecting things like notarized copies of my birth certificate and marriage license. And then I have to collect all this stuff from my mom as well, right? So it's like her naturalization paperwork and her birth certificate. It's a notarized translation of her birth certificate and all of this stuff. And I bring it all with me. It's basically like a narrative of my life and hers all in a little manila envelope that I bring with me to the consul's office in Center City, Philadelphia, where I live. And I go up to the consul's office on the 28th floor and I start filling out forms. And so I'm filling out, you know, this and that and this and that and just kind of going through the motions through all this paperwork. And suddenly I get to this form that asks this question. It says, blank, kind, manila motar. And I start filling it out. And so the first thing I start writing is a two. I'm writing this two down on the page. I'm like, wait a second. I'm not really the second child. I'm the third. And suddenly I'm not actually filling out forms anymore. My brain is elsewhere. It's sitting around the kitchen table, our house in San Jose, California. I'm probably six years old. And we've got the photo album spread out on the table, which is something I love to do as a kid, right? And I would look through all these albums of, you know, my parents, they met in the late 70s and everybody had beards and ponchos. You know, there's all these faded photos of California. And then there would be this album that you would get to. It was an album of a trip to Europe. It was an album I see my older brother. He's a toddler. He's running around in cobblestone squares. And I see pictures of my grandmother at her house in Munich. And then you get to Jamie. Jamie was born in Italy prematurely. He lived for 13 days in the hospital there where he caught an infection and he died. And so there's a picture of Jamie. There's a picture of his grave. Jamie was a brother I never had, but he's a child my mother had. And so as I'm sitting there, what I'm thinking about is I'm thinking about her face around the table. It goes dark. I think about how I know, even as a little kid, that she's not really there. I think about moving over to her side of the table and kind of getting in her lap and I think about how distant that felt at that moment. How far away her eyes looked at me. The thing is, I'm not at the kitchen table with my mom because I am in fact still on the 28th floor of the Wells Fargo building in Center City, Philadelphia. And I have a lot more forms to fill out. And so I shake myself back to attention. And finally, I fill in a three. I kind of scribble in Gestorben that 1982 next to it. I don't know if that's what they wanted there, but I didn't know what else to say. But what I realized is that every single form field, every piece of information we collect, no matter what it is and how significant it might seem, they all carry weight. Because the thing about forms is that they demand that we define ourselves. And they actually demand that we reveal ourselves. Sometimes that's okay. I was applying for a passport. It's a pretty big deal. I'm not necessarily upset that they asked me for that information, right? I'm not upset that that form field existed. But just like that time in the doctor's office, I will tell you that that experience kind of left me reeling. It took me a while to shake out of it. I think that we can change that. I don't think that that's our job. You can't always predict when a question is going to lead to a reaction like that. Although there are touchy subjects where you might know that it's likely. But I think that whenever we ask about identity and whenever we ask about history, what we need to know is that we are taking on risk. It's always a risk. And so the best thing that we can do, the best way that we can mitigate that risk is that we need to be able to ask why. Whatever role we're in, whatever work we're doing, we need to be able to ask why. Is it a good reason? Or are we doing this because this is what we've always done? Because forms always ask for this. Are we doing this just because we can? Too many of us spend a lot of time kind of taking those things as status quo. And I feel like I probably used to as well, right? I wouldn't think that much about what specific fields are being asked for. Oh, that seems reasonable. Let's write a little interface copy to help them and move on. It's just a form. So a tool that I learned about from a woman named Carolyn Jarrett is called a question protocol. And it's really helpful for changing that perspective. And helping you to sort of make sure that you're asking good questions and that everybody in the organization is thinking about it. She talks about it in a book called Forms That Work, which she wrote with a co-author, Jerry Gaffney. She talks about techniques for making sure that your questions are going to work for your users and that you're actually asking the right stuff. And she uses this protocol that's been adapted from surveys. And so what it is is really just a tool, a framework for consistently making sure that you actually need the information. So it's just what are all the questions that you want to ask? Who within your organization is actually using that information? Are they using them for? Whether that answer is required or optional? And then what happens? What happens if somebody enters bad information just to keep moving in the form? I think you could even adjust the question protocol a little bit to start thinking about how do you make sure that the information you're gathering from users is being used ethically in things like algorithms or recommendations, right? How are you using their data to decide what information they get? Who's making those decisions? Because a lot of times we talk about this stuff things like algorithms as if they're neutral but they're not. They're designed by people, right? They're designed by a culture. And so if we're not asking these questions we're going to take on more risk than we realize. This is really the best we can do is make sure that we're questioning everything that we're asking. Making sure that we're really thinking through what we're taking. Because ultimately, as author Roxane Gay says, there's an uncomfortable truth which is that everything is a trigger for someone. You don't know and you will never know all of your users' histories and touchy subjects. We can't prevent that at every moment. But we can train ourselves to be intentional in everything we communicate. Make sure no decision is left unquestioned. Make sure that we're only asking for what we need. And that we're kind to our users when we're getting information from them. Kindness also comes down to finding fractures in our work. Finding out where things break. I'll tell you an example that made the news recently. Back in March, a study showed that major AIs from smartphones like Apple's, Samsung's, Google's and Microsoft's all weren't really programmed to help during a crisis. They didn't understand things like this. I don't know what to do. I was just sexually assaulted. One can't know everything. Can one? Siri didn't understand rape. Siri didn't understand queries like my husband is hitting me. And the thing is, it wasn't the first time. Because back in 2011, when Siri was really new, if you told Siri you were considering shooting yourself, Siri would give you directions to a gun store. Yeah, this is a real thing. Apple got a bunch of bad press for that. Right? And so what they did is they partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. And so if you had a query that Siri could recognize as being potentially suicidal, a screen would come up to offer if you wanted to get help and connect you to that lifeline. It was in 2011. And so here we are five years later. And Siri still hasn't really been tested for crisis scenarios. Instead, Siri tells jokes. Siri told me it wasn't a problem. Siri's pithy little quips they broke in the context of an actual scenario. And you know, I can almost hear the meeting where this kind of stuff goes down. Where you start talking about situations where Siri's jokes are not going to be funny and somebody will be like, yeah, but you know, that's just an edge case. I mean, like a statistically small number of people are going to have an experience like that. And so, you know, most people are going to be fine and they're going to think it's really funny when Siri says something witty, easy to write things off as an edge case when they're in the abstract. Which is kind of part of the problem. When we talk about something as an edge case, we're saying we don't have to care. We're sort of relegating it to the corners. We're actually explicitly pushing it to the fringe. And so instead, what I've been talking about with Eric Meyer, who's the co-author of my book, is the concept of a stress case. A stress case is something you bring to the center. A stress case is something you focus on because it tells you a lot about how well your design works. Because what stress cases do is they show you where your weaknesses are. They show you where things break. It's like if your doctor wants you to do a stress test and they put you on a treadmill and they want to see how much stress can your heart be under until you have an abnormal rhythm. We want to know the same. How much stress can we put our content and our design under before things start to break down? Before they don't work anymore. That was certainly the case for Eric. Eric, you may know as being sort of one of the, you know, forefathers of CSS and sort of this grand person on the web and one of the earliest bloggers. They also know him for something else. A couple of years ago, his daughter Rebecca got sick. She had cancer. And Eric started writing about it on his blog and he wrote about it all the way through her treatment and all the way through the moment when she died on her sixth birthday in the summer of 2014. And then a few months later, as Eric's going through the worst year of his life, he logs into Facebook on Christmas Eve and he gets this. This was his year in review. A Facebook feature that they launched just at the end of 2014 to create little collections of your moments from the year. And so what he got was a picture in the center that was his most commented upon picture all year. A picture of his daughter Rebecca. And Rebecca is surrounded. Rebecca is surrounded by balloons and streamers and party goers. The copy says Eric, here's what your year looked like. Little exclamation point at the end and all. And Eric looks at that and he goes, you know, that is what my year looked like. But I don't want to celebrate this. And I didn't ask for this. I don't want to relive it here on Facebook. It wasn't just Eric who had a bad year. There were tons of people who had bad years. There are people who got pictures of their apartments burning down, pictures of a grave, pictures of any crappy thing that you may have shared on Facebook because people share everything on Facebook. In the center of the celebratory party going festive atmosphere, that's a stress case. And it's not just on Facebook, right? It's all kinds of places where maybe you don't expect people to be sharing as much personal stuff. My friend Kevin Hoffman got this email from Medium. He had recently posted an article memorializing a friend of his who had died of cancer. And he posted it on Medium because she worked in the industry as well. She was an information architect and he works in UX. This was a place where people in the industry are, right? So this is a place where he would be able to communicate with peers who also knew this woman that he wanted to remember. So he posted the article and within a little while Medium has sent him this email. It says, fun fact, he got two recommends on his first Medium story. He looks at that and he's like, you know, the last thing I want right now is fun facts. They sent this email to make me feel like better about the fact that I only have three recommends so far. But I don't feel better. I feel really alienated by this. And the thing is when you start looking for fun facts, you will find them all kinds of places. I just got this example a couple days ago from a woman named Janie who is a bank that sends her text messages about her balance. And I think that looking at this stuff is really important right now as everybody's getting excited about conversational UI. I hope these are not the kinds of conversations that I have to look forward to. So what the bank has done is they have sent her her balance for the day. And then they have said, happy Mother's Day to her and then reply mom for a Mother's Day fun fact. She's like, why is my bank sending me a fun fact about moms? Like, what does that have to do with what I signed up for, which is a balance update? And the thing is personally around Mother's Day I saw maybe six or eight different people I know, friends of mine comment about how difficult they find Mother's Day because they have mothers who are gone. They have mothers who are abusive. They have mothers they never knew. Or maybe they lost a child or recently had a miscarriage. Individually those might seem like edge cases but when you add them up it's actually a lot of people. A lot of people have complicated reactions to something like Mother's Day. And so I think that we need to keep in mind is that when we add fun to our interfaces and we think we're going to do something cozy and friendly we are creating risks oftentimes for no reason at all. These risks hurt an alienate real people and they make people feel in a way that those fun facts and those jokes were never intended to make them feel. A company that's really realized this in the past few years is MailChimp. And I bring them up now because they're actually known pretty widely as being really quirky and zany and fun loving. They're known for having this brand that's really humorous. For a long time they had these this-not-that lists that they would share. Their communications director Kate Kiefer Lee has talked about this a lot about their tone and voice and how they want to be fun but not childish and clever but not silly. And so there's all these little guidelines to kind of keep that quirkiness alive in the stuff that they create. And to go along with it they have this thing called voiceandtone.com. Some of you might have used this resource it's really helpful for thinking about voice and tone and how to sort of write for different audiences but you've not seen it. I do recommend that it's great. But in there they have all these different examples. How do we keep our readers' feelings in mind in our content? And they have things for lots of different kinds of content. So it's like success messages if your campaign just went out or compliance notifications if you've been accused of spamming or just informational content or marketing content for new users. And then they talk through all of the different feelings somebody might have that process. But something that they had on voice and tone for a long time was called Freddie's jokes. Freddie is the chimp behind MailChimp. He's the mascot. And he used to tell all of these weird jokes every time he would log into the system. But you know they've actually taken Freddie off of voiceandtone.com. And I asked Kate about this and she said well you know Freddie doesn't talk anymore. Freddie no longer speaks because at MailChimp they have been deliberately pulling back from the humor in their content. What she told me was that you know over the years we've moved to a much more neutral voice. We focus on clarity over cleverness and personality. We are not in an industry that is associated with crisis. But we don't know what our readers and customers are going through. And our readers and customers are people. They could be in an emergency and they still have to use the internet. And that's true. You don't know what kinds of scenarios people are in. You don't know what state somebody is in when they're interacting with your product. And so what do we do with that? Well at MailChimp it's been pulling away from cleverness and jokiness and been really focusing more on making sure that things like their designs or like colors and patterns that those things would do a lot more of that heavy lifting for their brand so that things couldn't fall out of context. And that's actually one of the big questions we should be asking because that's a problem behind a lot of these examples I just showed you. Do we control the context that our content is going to appear within? So when you look at Year in Review and you think about that design it probably looked awesome if that center photo was like you getting married or like you writing a jet ski on vacation. And if you only tested it and you needed content in it that was the only stuff that you used in your prototypes you might not realize, right? You might not realize. And so what we want to do is we want to say well what is the ideal scenario for our content? The ideal scenario is somebody talking about a vacation or getting married or a picture of their new baby that's the ideal scenario. And we need to be honest with ourselves that we're designing around an idealized scenario and admit that who we imagined when we first imagined our user. And then we need to flip that on its head and say well the opposite is true. What would be the opposite of this ideal scenario? How badly does this break? How awful could this experience become? How risky is it? And is that a risk that we are willing to take? In fact, Medium realized once they saw me writing about this that it wasn't a risk they were willing to take they got rid of those fun facts because they thought we don't need to alienate people just because we think we're funny because really the kindest thing we can do is design for the worst because if we can consider users at their worst at their most vulnerable moments then we can make design work for everybody. What all this takes though is really a sense of compassion. I think that's what it all adds up to. And compassion is something you don't hear about much on the web. It kind of sounds like something that belongs in health care or social services but I think compassion is a concept we could talk about a lot more. Karen McGrane has talked about this. She said in the talk at the IA summit a couple years ago we're pretty good at being able to kind of get inside somebody else's head and model their task. But that's cognitive empathy and that is actually only one level of empathy. She said you know there's actually a whole deeper level of empathy that you could call compassion. What that means is you have genuine emotional feeling for the struggles that someone is going through and you are spontaneously moved to help them because you feel them. So what she means here is that compassion takes action. It is not a thing you have it is a thing you do. You have to do something with your empathy and sometimes that's difficult. It takes work. It takes work to go about our processes a little differently. It takes work to think through the worst case scenario. But that's what compassion is. It's being willing to do that work. Because of that I think it takes courage. It takes courage to be like MailChimp and not just say oh lighten up when somebody is not laughing at your joke. But instead to realize that those jokes have a cost and that you don't have to have a personality all the time or quite so much. That your work affects people whether you intended it to or not. And that maybe being funny matters a lot less than being helpful. Because of that what compassion really takes is practice. It's a lot easier to be compassionate when somebody is standing in front of you and you know what they're going through. It's much harder so much harder to think about all of these people that we don't know all of these people that we'll never see. It's hard to listen to their heartbeats and not know what they're going through and still feel for them. But I think that's what we're called to do in our field at this moment because we can't just design for our clocks as Paul Ford says. It's not about our deadlines our goals because he says you know the only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. So thank you for spending some with me. Thank you Sarah. Thank you so much for your insights into a complex and difficult subject to understand. So we're very short on time so we'll just spend a few minutes going through some questions here. We have several from the audience. So we'll dive right in and the first question we have is how do we avoid assumptions incorrect assumptions without dumping people into a complex tool like Drupal? There's not an easy answer, right? If you want to get like granular understanding of people without asking them a lot of questions that's just hard to do. I think what's most important is to really prioritize, right? So like if you really need information get granular about it and be specific about what you really need. There's a lot of scenarios though where you don't need as much as you might think, right? It's like I would say if you really think about how do we do more to focus on what people want to do and less on who they are which is so much more fraught than we're better off. So just conceptually I would start there. But I do think it is legitimately difficult, right? Like this is not like you can just say oh it'll be so easy to be super compassionate to everybody and sometimes people are going to have to fill in something that's complicated. I was talking with somebody recently and they have to ask a FAFSA information so federal financial aid stuff which is like you have to get into all of this really specific data that's required in government that happens a lot. But I think that it's sort of like that first step of just thinking through what am I really needing to get and am I asking a question that's an identity question that's more fraught as a proxy for something else that I actually need that's more about like what people want to accomplish and what they really need to realize. There's a paradox here I think with the idea of personalization versus privacy and I saw a few tweets in the stream that talked about it's a form I just want to get through it and just dealing with the privacy aspects of that do you have any commentary about how those two different ideas conflict or maybe... personalization is in some ways such a white whale you have all these organizations who are spending a lot of money on personalization projects and often times I mean this is a little bit of I won't go into a full tangent on this but a lot of personalization is so badly done because the companies aren't actually ready for it because they don't have any foundational work and things like structured content so it's like they don't really have anything to personalize and so they end up personalizing what happens really related to my talk is that when people don't have any real substantial reasons to personalize but they want to add the sheen of personalization they end up wanting to personalize around things that are much more fraught around identity so that's when you get people wanting to personalize based off of things like age and gender which is probably not going to be the most meaningful way that you can personalize something so I think that's really common I also have grave concerns about the sort of like never ending hunger for data that companies have which is a whole other much longer conversation we can have another time and I think we have time for one more question so implementation is always key in the developer's mind and just working through that process but also budget and time constraints are a factor too so how can we inform or what tools can we provide to stakeholders to ensure we're not just targeting that 90% majority for developing products and websites and so on I think that a big part of it is not that we have to necessarily do more a lot of times we can do a little less it's like because we want more information or because we're trying super hard to get our personality out there we're actually like the mother's day message and we're trying to not send that they were trying to engage the user in her balance update and they could have just not done that at all as opposed to the other option they could have written some weird awkward watered down message about moms being great but without making it potentially alienating which to me just seems like don't bother so I think that's one of the things that's so exclusive and the other thing I would think about when it comes to stakeholders is really helping people to understand that alienating people actually has a big cost and that what you think of you don't really know what's going to be an edge case you think oh that's only the edge case that's 90% or whatever but I think something like mother's day is an example that people would easily write off until they start adding up all of the reasons and then you look at it and you go oh no that's actually a lot of people so if you can help people see it as a meaningful amount of people that's really helpful also if you can make it real if you can go from abstract to like an actual person nobody looks at that picture of Rebecca on Eric's profile and says that's just an edge case right but in the abstract they might fantastic so we're out of time unfortunately however and thank you Sarah thank you so much you can if you want to follow up with any questions with Sarah you can go to the Drip Association booth after we're done here and there's coffee nearby so that's always a bonus and there are limited copies of Sarah's book content everywhere and discount codes for design for real life so head to the Drip Association booth and you can talk more with Sarah thank you so much thank you everyone