 So I want to do a little warm-up exercise, get us all in the mood, get thinking. I'm going to ask you a pretty simple question. I want you to count the number of dots I show you on the next screen. So everybody, just take a moment, very difficult task, count the number of dots. Okay, now, hands up if you counted one dot, how about two dots? How about three? How about four? How about five? Okay, there's some people who are thinking I'm tricking you. I'm not tricking you, it's three dots. So that's just priming you so that we're ready for the actual experience. I get it, yeah, you can ignore the paint splash on the right-hand side. That's gratuitous. So I'm going to do another task here. I'm going to read this passage. I want you to count, so first of all, many of you have seen this before. So if you know the secret, don't tell anyone. Just let the newbies figure it out. I want you to count the number of Fs that are in this passage. Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years. Okay, pretty simple. So how many Fs were there? Hands up if you counted one F. Two Fs. Three Fs. Four Fs. Five Fs. Six Fs. Okay, no, there aren't six Fs, so I don't know what you saw. There are, no, I lied, there are six. There's the F that starts with finished, F that's files. There's an F hidden in the word scientific. And then there's three Fs in the word of. So the sixes of you, you got it right, good job. Congratulations, I have no prize. The reason why I wanted to bring this up is because I'll be talking about one of the coolest things about being a designer and a researcher in our industry is we have to design for situations like this all the time. We're trying to design people to support tasks like count the number of Fs. And we know that when people are talking or even when you're reading, you tend not to see the F that's in the word of because it doesn't sound like an F. And it also ends the word. So our brain doesn't pick it up as quickly. This'll be relevant in a moment. Jeffrey Veen, founder of Adaptive Path, also a VP at Adobe, Google, now at his own consulting firm called True Ventures, says I've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what we designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving. And I think most of us would agree that at its core, design is about solving problems. And here's some examples of problems that I think that are really great problems to solve. These are called monsters. They were designed by a woman named Shirley Rodriguez and they're designed to support children with juvenile arthritis. Juvenile arthritis is a really challenging condition. It can't be treated or cured, but it can be treated into remission. And the unfortunate thing is that for children with juvenile arthritis, the only way to treat the condition is to exercise. And because they have arthritis, exercise is very painful. So children don't exercise. So Rodriguez designed these to encourage children to engage with these little toys. They're also connected to your iPhone, your tablet, iPad, et cetera, to get the children to not think about the pain while they're completing challenges. I think it's a great way that we can use design to actually solve problems related to health. Another great way to solve health related issues is the ecstat from RevMedx. This is a syringe. It's filled with micro sponges and it's for use on the battlefield or even in civilian applications where somebody might be suffering from a gunshot wound or a knife wound. You inject the sponges into the wound and within 15 seconds the bleeding stops. That could be the amount of time necessary to save a life. I think that's really, really a great example of design. More mundane, but just as important is designing for sustainable travel. This is the Slotta. It's designed by Swedish design firm Veride. And it was designed to basically promote bicycling by non-cyclists. The Slotta is designed out of aluminum so most people can lift it and carry it up and down stairs if you're commuting via train or via bus. It's also designed to be maintenance free. I don't know if I believe that, but all of the gears and all the mechanisms are hidden and the drive belt doesn't need to be oiled. It just needs to be rinsed off with water when it gets dirty. So great weight encourage people to explore more sustainable forms of transportation. And then this is my favorite. I know this is a little bit silly, but insect transport. So for people who aren't comfortable like me killing things, this is a humane way to transport an insect or a spider or a scorpion from your home or another location you don't want it and relocate it. There's a long arm and then there's these bristles that open as a basket and then gently close around the insect so that you can then drop it somewhere else. If you think this is really silly, if you look at social media, there's been over 300 million shares of this. So at the very least, this is satisfying or resonating with some individuals' needs. So I think designers do a great job solving some problems and I think those are great examples. Unfortunately, we also compound problems and that's really why I'm here. One of the big problems that we're all probably familiar with is the problem of access. Here's a wonderful ATM. I searched around online and I think this is real. It looks like it's an ATM in Iran and apparently it's made for giants because no one else can access it but if you think about it, think about the designer's task of designing an ATM. You wanna build it so that it's rugged and it can survive outside but oftentimes they're installed in places where a person in a wheelchair or a person with crutches or a person who isn't completely mobile can access. Also, ATMs have issues with solar glare so when the sun is in a certain location, you're not able to actually see what's on the screen and even if you can see what's on the screen, maybe the ATM doesn't support your language or maybe your level of literacy isn't at the same level at which the ATM keywords and functionalities were designed. So access is a critical problem that I think designers need to take more ownership of solving. Rob Pert of Testbed says, problems by their nature are born out of existing systems so by layering a bespoke solution onto problems, we may inadvertently reinforce those systems whether we believe in their effectiveness or not. The designer of the ATM didn't intentionally say, I'm gonna design this and then make it impossible to use. The designer failed to understand that the ATM was used in a larger system so we need to think about what is the larger system in which our designs are utilized. Another area where designers do a great job of compounding problems is the area of understanding. For those of you familiar with the work of information visualization expert Ed Tufty, this is one of the charts that he demonstrates. It's a chart of irrigation water going to different kinds of crops in California. And the designer really wanted to show that different kinds of crops were getting different amounts of water. However, it's really a terrible design if you think about it in terms of actually locating where this water is going and what crops it's associated with. Tufty loved these examples so much that he gave it a nickname of a duck. He basically said that these types of designs remind me of this store. It's a store in Flanders, New York. It's literally designed to look like a duck. It's just a store. There's no reason why it needs to look like a duck. Tufty basically said, any design that focuses more attention on the design elements and the decorations than the actual functional purpose of the item is a duck. And as designers, we probably should avoid building ducks. So remember that task where I had to count the dots and that was pretty easy and then I had to count the Fs and some of you were like, oh, that's kind of hard. And maybe a bunch of you were like, oh, I totally know this because I've done this before. But if you've never done it before and you don't know what the secret of the count the Fs exercise, you're in an intentional problem. And this is very similar to the world that I grew up in when I was doing my PhD. There's a lot of research to show that people do not divide attention effectively. This is a head-up display. Head-up displays have been designed and have been proven to show that pilots have better, more accurate control of their aircraft. That decreases fuel consumption. It gets passengers and cargoes from point A to point B faster. Unfortunately, pilots using head-up displays like this are also more prone to miss items in what's called the fire domain. So if there's another aircraft in the background or if you're taxing on a runway in foggy conditions and maybe somebody or a truck is on the taxiway, pilots have been shown through research, including my dissertation, that at the very least, they're much slower to respond to those threats. At the very worst, they just blow right through them. So designing to support attention, I think, is a critical need and I think oftentimes we ignore that at our peril. Communicating is another thing that we design for. How many of us, this isn't a real question, it's rhetorical, but how many of us have been in a situation where you're trying to hire the right candidate for a job? We might spend hours or even days with committees of people trying to come up with a perfect job description. So here's an example of a job description. I want to take a moment here, we're going to read through it. I have two versions of this. And what I want to ask you is, which job description is written for men? This job description says we're a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients. We are determined to stand apart from the competition. Qualifications include strong communication and influencing skills, ability to perform individually in a competitive environment. If you look at the responsibilities, direct project groups to manage project progress and ensure accurate task control. Let's contrast this with this other job description. We're a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients. We're committed to understanding the engineering sector intimately. The qualifications are proficient, oral and written communication skills, collaborate well in a team environment, provide general support to project teams in a manner of complementary to the company. So which, just show of hands, is this more directed toward females or males? So yeah, okay, you can't do it with hands. Males, is this a male job description? Got a few votes. How about a female job description? Few votes. How about this one? The first one we saw, male job description, female job description. Okay, so some researchers at University of Waterloo and Duke demonstrated that when using these types of job descriptions, they actually looked at six different kinds of jobs and they were phrased in ways intended to bias toward it being more male or more female. They found that every participant in the study overestimated the number of men who were at the firms that were represented by the male, the male verbiage. And for the women, they were much less interested in applying to companies that were phrased in a masculine tone compared to being phrased in a feminine tone. And the reason why I bring this up is because if we're truly trying to ensure a diverse workplace and trying to have a workforce that is diverse, then we really need to think about how we are designing our communications to ensure that we are targeting the right people for the right jobs. The last challenge I wanna talk about is probably one that many of you might be dealing with right now as you look at your mobile device. The challenge of focusing, we design all of these applications that are promoted to drive adoption, to increase stickiness, to get your eyeballs attracted to it. We might have screens that look like this. This one freaks me out. I don't know if you can see it down here on the bottom, but 66,000 email messages? Like, why do you even have that on? Like, that's crazy. That makes me stressed just thinking about it. Unfortunately, we work in a world that believes that multitasking is actually an effective way to work. But researchers in study after study have demonstrated that multitasking doesn't really exist. It exists in very limited forms, but most of the time we don't multitask. We single-task. And that requires us to context switch from task to task. And those context switches do require costs in terms of performance time as well as accuracy. And if we look at things from an affective perspective, we find that individuals who are in multitasking environment report increased amounts of stress, increased amounts of frustration, decreased amounts of memory for task-relevant details. So what can designers do for all of these problems? I think Christina Wookie, she's the starter of boxes and arrows. Many of us are familiar with that. She also is the co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute. She says, success is not checking a box. Success is having an impact. If you complete all tasks and nothing ever gets better, that's not success. So we need to rethink about how we're tackling our design-related tasks. So the good news is these are problems worth solving. That's why we're here. Those of us in the design industry have a call to action to not just solve problems, but look beyond those problems and see the bigger picture. So how might we do that? Let's go back to that issue of focusing. Like I mentioned, multitasking is for the most part a myth. And some interesting research coming out of David Levy's lab at the Information School at University of Washington has shown that individuals in multitasking environments actually perform much better after eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training. So just let that sink in for a moment. What they did was they had numbers of individuals from multitasking-related environments go through eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training, eight weeks of relaxation training, or no training. And what they repeatedly find is that individuals who go through mindfulness meditation training are less likely to task switch, but they still complete the same number of tasks in the same unit of time. But when they complete it, they report decreased negative emotions and also have a higher likelihood of remembering specific details about each task. So how might we incorporate that in our designs? Another area that we can take research and understanding of how humans think and perform is the world of understanding. Think about all the data that's currently being collected. We have companies that are hiring lots of data scientists to start mining through and understanding that data. Unfortunately, in the words of Elizabeth Capuilani, Lindsay, she's a cultural anthropologist who started the Mapping the Human Story project, she said, we live in a society bloated with data yet starved for wisdom. We're connected 24-7, yet anxiety, fear, depression, and loneliness is an all-time high. So we need to do something better with that data. So I've got a number of ideas from the research that I think can help us figure out ways to use our data differently. The first is, let's try to ensure that our design teams are diverse. We need to have a diverse culture. And by diversity, I not only mean diversity in gender and ethnicity and race, I also mean diversity in thinking. So it's not important to only have people who look and sound different on a design team. It's also important to have people who think differently. So in addition to a designer, perhaps have an analyst on your team, somebody who's involved in the business on your team, somebody who's doing research on the team, maybe a data scientist on your team. And ideally, one of the stakeholder end users that your team is trying to design for. That type of diversity on a team has been shown, and there's a number of examples in Tom Harford's book, Messy, that basically shows that having this type of diversity increases creativity, decreases group think, even increases profit for organizations. Another way to design to better solve for understanding is raise awareness. So remember those job descriptions I showed you? There are online, there are actually many online tools. This one's called Gender Decoder, where you can just post some text in and it'll let you know if the text has a bias in one direction or another. I think there's also a number of techniques that we have in research. For example, first impressions. So by doing a first impression test of just showing a person your design or your design idea for five seconds can give rise to what kinds of associations that person is thinking about when they see your design. If those associations aren't part of your intended set of associations, you might need to do some extra work. Debiasing is another area and there's a whole host of articles on this. Harvard Business Review has a good compendium of different types of debiasing approaches. One is to use tools like the one I just talked about. The other is to ask reflection and what else questions. So as you're designing, as you're considering solutions, ask yourself what could go wrong here? And if you wanna take it to an extreme, Gary Klein espouses conducting pre-mortems. So the idea is you sit around the table with your design team and you say, before we do anything, let's just pretend we've launched the product and it's failed. It's a miserable failure. Now take a few minutes and just write down every reason why it might have failed. Going through this activity and then processing through what the team thinks could go wrong helps surface latent problems that teams often don't talk about overtly. So it's a great way to start taking advantage of maybe some of that hindsight bias that we have after we've launched a product and doing it before we launched the product. Clarification is another way. This is a great visualization from data journalist for the Guardian, Mona Chalabi. Chalabi basically says that she tries to aim to ensure that any data visualization that is created basically communicates the intended point and also communicates it honestly. No data set is truly true. Every data set where we collect data has some kind of bias built in. So in Chalabi's demonstration of how much money people earn compared to salaries of white men, she uses a folded dollar bill. And the trend is evident, but by using the folded dollar bill, she's indicating that there's some uncertainty in the data and I love this way of communicating. This kind of goes toward what Ed Tufty talks about as maximizing the data ink. Ensure every pixel that you use deserves to be there. If it's not contributing anything meaningful to your user, then get rid of it. Attending is the last area and attending is really challenging and luckily we have a number of modes that come through a host of different types of systems and devices. Differentiation is one of them. Use a standard mobile device. This is the iOS configuration screen for ringtones. You can use different channels. So basically I can set up my phone so that I have a different vibration and a different tone when somebody from my family is calling me versus when someone from the office is calling me. So if I'm in an important situation like here and my phone lets me know that my wife is calling me, then, oh, I might want to attend to that. But if it's the office, I can probably ignore it right now. Anticipatory design is another way in which we can help to ensure that our users are attending to the things we hope for them to attend to. We can predict likely actions. You'll notice on the far right, that's good old Clippy, remember Clippy? So Clippy is kind of an example of not an awesome implementation of anticipatory design, but it was going in the right direction. Microsoft was basically capturing what was going on from a functional perspective, trying to understand what a user was trying to do before they got so frustrated that they quit. And so I think that's a great direction. Amazon and many other online companies also do that. They take advantage of what they know from your usage and your data and give rise to predictions as well as consequences, such as maybe now isn't the right time to purchase this book or to purchase this flight because our data shows that it's more likely to go down in a few days and we know that you're price sensitive. The last problem is accessing. So accessing, remember that the ATM for giants? So there's an entire framework called universal design that we ignore at our peril. We need to think about these principles. And I won't talk about these at length, but I'll just encourage you to check them out if you're not familiar with them. Universal design is about designing things so that they're equitable, so that everybody regardless of their skill, their physical ability, their cognitive ability level can access and use a device, a space, a service. It's ensuring that products are designed flexibly and simply and the information is perceptible, whether or not you're sighted or you can hear or you can use all of your limbs. They're also designed to be error tolerant, requiring low physical effort. Think of that as efficiency. So if you're clicking all over a UI, maybe there's a better way to make that more efficient. And then finally the size and the space for the approach and use. If you're designing an ATM, make sure that an individual in a wheelchair or on crutches or carrying a big bag of valuable things like your laptop case can use the device without being constrained. PropJot saying the director for the Arnold Institute for Global Health says we spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it. So my final set of slides here is about a recommended framework that I think we can use as a design community to improve the way that we focus on the people and not so much the bridge. And the framework comes from ethics and I get my information from the Belmont Report. This was created in 1978 by, I have to read it because I always forget, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. So if any of you have gone through a university and dealt with an IRB and Institutional Research Board, this is where those ethics guidelines that they're using come from. We don't need to worry about IRBs and getting research approved, but I think the process that the ethics framework provides is helpful for all of us. There are three guiding principles. One is respect for all people, respect people as autonomous agents, and if they're not autonomous, if they're not able to think and act of their own accord, we have to protect them. We have to think of in ways that enable us to do good for them. And that goes into the principle of beneficence. It's not just important to do a good job, but it's important to be charitable and do the best job we can for everyone. And then finally, justice. Let's make sure that we don't disenfranchise anyone because of their physical, their cognitive, or their sensory capabilities. So there are four applications that the Belmont Report, I think, have that are directly applicable to those of us in the design world. One is informed consent in any type of research initiative. Even in usability study, we go through a process of making sure that the participant knows what they're basically getting into and what they're not. So how could we apply that to the design of our products? Think about a product that you're designing and ask yourself, am I informing the user of this product into everything the product can do and can't do? I think that's a helpful place to start. Comprehension is another area. This is a great image that I saw. It's a joke, but it's a iPhone software update that basically says you're on page 46 of the Terms of Service Agreement and no one's reading this, which I think is awesome. It was done by the Huffington Post. Just check it out. We need to make sure from an ethics perspective that people can comprehend the information. Think about the last Terms of Service update that you looked at. I've seen three in the last two weeks from various systems that I use. I've never read them. There, now I'm on tape. I've never read them. You have it on video. So I've just indicated that I'm not able to sue those companies if they do something bad. We need to ensure that our designs are comprehensible to everybody who's going to touch our designs. Also, voluntariness. We need to make sure that people who are using our products are doing so in a voluntary nature. A person in the usability study has the ability to quit the study at any time with no penalty. So do we do the same thing when we design our products? What about our cloud-based products where we have tons of data that are owned by all of these companies? Is it easy to quit? Is it easy to leave? Think about it. Are you using any systems or any tools? For me, it's Yahoo Mail. That you know to probably not be the best tool, but you have so much data invested in it, you just, the cost of switching feels so high. The final point is stated risks in benefits. It's important for us as designers and those of us in the design industry to say, am I communicating? Not only all of the potential benefits, I think, are associated with my product, but also the risks. How many of us have been affected by a data breach from a credit card company or a financial firm not realizing that, wow, by using this product, I have all of this private data out there and I never actually realized that if someone hacked into those systems, my data would be accessed and that can make me vulnerable for other systems, maybe because I use the same password or maybe because it has personal identifying information in it. Thank you very much. Thanks, you guys.