Tragic Design

Chapter 6. Tools and Techniques

WHILE WE HAVE BEEN trying to convince you that, as a designer, you have great power and thus great responsibilities (thanks again, Ben!), we understand that we are preaching to the converted. Now, you need to convince the other people on your team: product managers, engineers, the marketing team, and the finance department. We recommend that you perform user tests. They will most likely uncover all the potential issues that could result from your work. There are multiple test possibilities, some more time-consuming than others. There’s nothing like user testing in context, with real customers, to teach us about the impact of our decisions when we are designing products; yet we have all been confronted with tight deadlines and inflexible budgets that prevent us from performing formal testing sessions with actual users. At other times, testing, while super valuable, is just not enough to uncover all potential user scenarios. Finally, even the best findings need to be presented in a compelling way, or they will be completely overlooked.

In this chapter we will suggest techniques to prevent a design from causing harm unintentionally. We hope this can help you justify the importance of empathy in your company. Some tools can be used right away, while others require resources or a team. Applying all these techniques won’t make your design bulletproof, but it will contribute to reducing the potential harm it could cause.

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