Designing for Social Change: Resources

On November 14th, the local Interaction Design Association (IxDA) chapter in Columbus, Ohio invited our founder Morgan Landis to lead a roundtable discussion on Designing for Social Change.

Designing for social change are often what non-profits, and even social entrepreneurs, do to when they are designing solutions for their community’s ‘wicked problems.’

To set a foundation for the discussion, we shared a few resources about designing for social change. Below you can see how human-centered design needs to be inclusionary when designing for social change (the meat of it is between 28:02-44:12).

Antionette Carroll – Design Leadership for Civic Change from MidwestUX on Vimeo.

Participants could also read 3 Principles To Guide Designing For Social Change.

During the discussion the groups did an activity on types of privilege (race, gender, and socioeconomic class), as these often can create biases on what and who you think needs to be involved in creating the biggest impact for your community. You can view a version of the diversity walk below to understand how different privileges apply to different people and how they can effect you on a daily basis.

We love having these kinds of discussions and are constantly curating a list of resources to learn and share more about designing for social change. Here are a few more sources for you to help you understand how you can help your community when designing solutions.

Books

Classes

Systems Practice: An Approach to Move from Impossible to Impact
A specific methodology and a more general approach to grappling with adaptive problems in complex environments with the aim of making enduring social change at scale.
Designing for Environmental Sustainability and Social Impact
Discover the dynamics that contribute to complex environmental and social challenges using systems thinking. Explore how behavior change principles can encourage people to act in ways that benefit the planet.
Design Thinking: Ideou
Learn IDEO’s approach to designthinking and creative leadership through IDEO U—an online school that equips individuals with the tools and mindsets necessary to ignite creative confidence and tackle complex challenges.
Social Norms, Social Change
Diagnose social norms and distinguish them from customs or conventions. These distinctions are crucial for effective policy interventions aimed to create new, beneficial norms or eliminate harmful ones.

Putting a Face to Your Online Customers

In a brick-and-mortar establishment, it’s second nature to attend to your customers’ needs.

Say you run a bakery. A clearly harried mother walks in with a baby in arms and a toddler darting around her feet. She wants a gluten-free cake for her son’s birthday. Already you know a lot about her—her gender, her rough age, and that she came to your bakery looking for a specialty item. You even know her emotional state.

You’ll store this interaction in your memory, and if enough people come in asking for gluten-free cakes, you’ll start stocking them in your ready-to-go fridge. You’ll also remember this information for future marketing—people who are in a rush and don’t have the time to bake sweets might make up a big sector of your customer base.

On the web, it’s easy for things to feel faceless. The online cake order form is impersonal, but the web doesn’t have to be faceless. There are plenty of ways to gather information on your site visitors and tailor your website to fit their needs.

Talk to Colleagues

You may already be collaborating with colleagues in other departments to improve your website (if not, it’s time to start). The fields of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) do overlap, but specialists in each field will have different experiences with customers, and different stories to tell.

Image Source

Take the instance of gluten-free cakes. They’re in the ready-to-go fridge, and the staff at the store knows they can make them to order when someone asks. That’s good customer experience. But when the gluten-free option was added to the order form, users found it wasn’t clickable. And it was listed under “cake flavors,” where users didn’t expect it. Bad user experience.

Talking to both customer experience professionals and user experience professionals can help you figure out what site visitors want and need. And these colleagues—especially those in marketing—may have already gathered some of the information you’re looking for.

Read Feedback

If your site has a Contact Us button, chances are you’ve received emails with comments or concerns about your site. If you’ve received a few emails with cake orders in them, it might be telling you that some of your site visitors either couldn’t find the cake order form or had trouble using it. They may even point to why they didn’t use the form.

Listening to your current clients  is one of the best ways to gather information.

Read through your:

  • Site feedback
  • All Reviews (Facebook, Google, etc).
  • Social media conversations
  • Customer Surveys

Take notes on what’s being praised or lamented. Do you see trends?

Insights and Analytics

There’s  few free tools that can help you figure out who your site visitors are and what they’re doing on your site.

Google Analytics is probably the most useful free tool on the market. Try these features to start:

  • Site search lets you see the terms people are searching on your site. This gives you key information about what they want from your site.
  • User flow reporting shows what users click on and the paths they take to get information, which is crucial for testing the user experience.
  • Demographics reporting will show the demographics of those who visit your site, so you understand what type of person is coming into your site.

Facebook Audience Insights  charts users who have liked your page according to age and gender. You can also use this tool to see their location, if they choose to share it.

Twitter’s Dashboard Feature also provides audience insights. All twitter users can use the dashboard to gauge interactions with their tweets. For those with advertiser status, they have incredibly in-depth demographic information about your followers, such as favorite types of foods, whether a follower rents or owns, and who their cell phone provider is. 

Use this data to give your online customers as good service as you would a human in your store. A great business keeps its customers’ needs front and center, both in person and on the web.

My Facebook Interviews

By Morgan Landis

 

A Facebook Recruiter Reached Out on LinkedIn

She said she would like to see my resume and portfolio for a content strategist job.

“Are you sure?” I wrote back. Seriously.

It’s not that I have low self-esteem. Maybe about my body, but not about my work. In fact, my work is the one aspect in my life that I’m absolutely sure about.  I am constantly testing my skills (part of the job), reading every new book in the industry, and if I don’t know something, I’ll learn as much as I can until I get it right.

So when I asked, “Are you sure?” it was more about the job itself.

When she sent me the job description and I was like, “While I’m honored to be considered by Facebook, I’m not sure I’m the right fit. I haven’t been focused on writing for a while; I’ve been doing mostly information architecture and interaction design for the last few years.”

She said that she’d like me to send my stuff over anyways.

 

The Content Strategist Job

For those who are not in the industry, a content strategist does a multitude of things. Generally, it’s “the planning, development, and management of content—written or in other media.

Any kind of information you digest is considered content:

  • Copy
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • Video

Unfortunately, some companies think they want a content strategist when what they really want is a UX writer or editor. UX writers are incredibly good at creating and labelling content, but their focus is mostly on the words – telling stories and instructing users.

Content strategy is not. just. writing.

What a Content Strategist actually does:

  • Analyze content (finding out what content users are interacting with)
  • Organize content (what type of content goes where)
  • Manage content (how it’s updated and who does it)
  • Govern content (ensuring it stays within company’s brand)
  • Market content (assists with types of content used and editorial calendar)

There’s more, but these are the top five elements.

Now Facebook’s description was very vague. The description also seemed to emphasize content, not strategy. Especially concerning the types of samples they requested- a lot more copy-centric then how/why we made decisions.

 

The Interviews

Even with my hesitancy and unclear expectations, I sent in my stuff. It is Facebook after all, so I would at least get a cool story or blog posts about it. (Running poll: Can I put this on my resume?)

Phone Interview
Pretty standard. The woman asked me questions about my background and my skillset. She mentioned that there were many “villages” at Facebook – meaning it wasn’t a big corporate structure. Each team worked on specific parts of Facebook.

I asked for a more detailed description, and she said they were vague on purpose because they were potentially filling up to 50 roles.

50?!? Yea, knowing the number does make one feel slightly worse about not getting the job.

But why so many? I have worked on some big websites, and I’ve never had more than one content strategist. Maybe two or three, and I often do some of the work as an Information Architect as well, but that seems like overkill.

Strategy is about the big picture, overall direction towards a goal, and the steps to get there. If there’s 50 different villages that are getting their own strategist, who is in charge of organizing the strategists’ strategies?

 

Video Interview
Since I’m pleasant enough on the phone, I was then scheduled a video interview. The interviewer was a super nice guy who worked at instagram. We talked and joked about how no one really understands what we do.

I had sent in samples that were mostly strategy related; personas, flows, digital campaign numbers. The one he wants to talk about? The user interface copy that was highly regulated by legal.

I, again, asked about the role, and he talked about how the different groups are like their own separate villages. I’m beginning to see a pattern here.

Didn’t have to wait long, as I got a call that night to talk about the next step.

 

The Design Challenge
A design challenge is a way for companies to get new ideas without paying people for it. I’m kidding (sort of).

A design challenge is a way for a company to see what your skills/thinking/process are before hiring you (much like a portfolio). They’ll ask you to complete a task or two (without data or research) and you come up with a solution in the vacuum (thus not really understanding your thinking because you have no data to analyze).

Facebook gives you two days to do three tasks. Two of these tasks are issues you decide you want to fix (one desktop, one mobile) and then one task they give you.

 

Design Challenge Example

I’m going to share only one of my solutions with you, and mostly so when they come out with it in a 8 months, I can have proof it’s my idea (kidding, sort of).

Problem: Not All Users are the Same
I really, really hate it when I (accidently) end up in a facebook argument, or some other heavily commented section, and I lose other notifications in the craziness. I’ve also previously been a mod in a group and it would be notifications ALL THE TIME. Anything else would get lost in the mess.

The worst of it: I am both a personal user and a business page user. My biggest pet peeve is that whenever I get a BUSINESS notification it’s mixed in with all those political posts notifications, so even if I didn’t want to care about work in that moment, I am now back in business mode.

Solution: Differentiated Profiles and Notifications
Restructuring information on the home page, specifically the navigation and notifications, so that different users (i.e. traditional user and business user) can quickly access the information/task they want.

Simplified: I want a separate experience for my business page vs. my personal page.
First, you’d have different profiles that you could switch between with a tally of their notifications. Much like how twitter does it now:

 

Second, it would be separated by the type of notification; newsfeed (conversations/posts), friend requests, messenger, groups, events, and marketplace.

 

Not only does this separate business and personal use, but it’s also great for group moderators who will be quickly aware if there’s a fire going on. And why wade through game invites when all you want to know is an event’s posting?

The strategy is also translated for business pages (this is the mobile version of it).

 

There would also be additional changes to layouts on both desktop and mobile, so that the whole product works together well, but for a weekend, I felt like this was a good start.

Again, I must mention, this is without any analytics, research, technical constraints, etc., so I don’t know if any of this is wanted or feasible. My driving force was empathy and a strong instinct that business users and personal users are coming to Facebook for two different goals and tasks – thus should be treated differently.

 

I Will Not Be Working at Facebook

Interviewing at Facebook was definitely an unique experience. I was giddy with excitement, wrecked with nerves, cried from disappointment. Why didn’t they choose me? I’m not sure. Maybe I didn’t fit the role. Maybe they could tell I wasn’t in love with Facebook. Maybe they saw this tweet from 2015:

Overall, I think three rounds of interviews is pretty good. It made me realize I want to do more. To work on bigger projects. To continue on the strategy of creating and implementing new ideas and solutions.

And hey… if Google wants to interview I won’t say no. I have some great ideas about education and Virtual Reality.

 

P.S. No seriously, can I put this on my resume?

My Specialty is Information Design

Have you been on a website or app and can’t find the information you want?

The navigation isn’t taking you anywhere, the search bar (if there is one) isn’t giving you answers you need, and you can’t find something that should be simple to find.

Or worse – you’re using a machine or software and trying to finish a process and the steps don’t make sense. Or you need to go back and change something but don’t know how. Or you keep getting an error and you don’t know why. 

My job is to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Technically there are a few names/positions that I do in the user experience field:

Basically I design information, processes, and interactions so that you (the user) can find what you need and/or finish what you started in the most efficient, effective, and engaging way possible.


I call myself an Information Designer.

I design the service or product so that you get the information you want when you need it, including how and when you receive that information.

This means deciding when to use:

  • Media (presents information in images, video, etc.)
  • Modals/popups (gives you additional information)
  • Instructive copy (provides error fixes)
  • Notifications (alerts you to what you pay attention to)
  • Email transactions (reminds you to complete a process)

All of these are different ways, or interactions, that make it a better, easier experience for you.

Designs are based on data, analytics, and psychology.

This isn’t about making something pretty. There are plenty of pretty products out there, but eventually they age, or are not useful, so a better version replaces them.

Creating a feature, laying out a page, or deciding an interaction is about the science of how people interact with technology and information, in the real world and online.

To design a digital interaction, the data tells me that:

  • Eyes follow an “f” or “z” frame on desktop views
  • Eyes get tired with too much contrast
  • Content is skimmed so use bullets and headers wisely
  • Colors can cause someone to pay attention and/or react negatively
  • Interactions need to be consistent for users to trust your site

These guidelines are based on years of research, psychology, and data that comes directly from your users.

My designs will always be based on what works, not what is trendy.

Flash fades (or dies), but your users will never forget how your product makes them feel. Ensure they are content with clean, creative, and concise designs.

tl;dr read my blue section headings