On Monday, April 8, 2019 from 6 to 9 PM about 70 participants attended a workshop aimed to redesign how immigrants and advocates connect on immigrationlawhelp.org. The workshop was organized on MeetUp by the New York Chapter of UX for Change and was hosted by Convene (101 Greenwich St.). Additionally, members from The Six, an innovation and strategy consultancy, were present as well as team members from the client organization, The Immigrant Advocate Network.

According to the event invite, “One of their primary platforms, Immigration Law Help (www.immigrationlawhelp.org), strives to connect individuals with legal resources and advocates based on specific parameters such as detention centers served, type of immigration legal services, zip code, etc. While ImmigrationLawHelp.Org maintains the only national directory of its kind, there are opportunities to improve the current user experience and functionality. The vision is to provide a marketplace to connect users with legal providers leveraging dynamic content based on user-specific parameters.”

My intentions for attending the event was to learn more about how UX hackathon-type events are run and to observe the following:

1. Structure of the event – Background, agenda, facilitators, participants, space, etc.
2. Background research – Who did the research for requirements? What methods were used? How will designs be tested to ensure success with defined audience? Generally, how participatory was the target demographic engaged to gather requirements for improvements?
3. How were teams divided and what tools were employed for the process?
4. How were ideas/proposals generated within the group(s)?
5. How were ideas presented?
6. What was the level of success of the event and by what measure?

Upon arrival to the event, I was impressed how nice the space was and how many people were already there. Many attendees were talking and there was food and drinks so the atmosphere was very lively. The work tables had Post-Its, Sharpies, and stickers for each seat and a large projector screen displayed a PowerPoint presentation while portable whiteboards were scattered around the perimeter. There were some materials about current immigration issues posted in a couple places as a means, I assume, to generate empathy for the target users of the site we would be analyzing.

Our host, Kandis O’Brien, who co-organized the event spoke a bit about the mission of UX for Change, which “connects non-profit organizations with the UX community to raise awareness of how the discipline of User Experience Design can contribute to the goals of any organization.” Then she introduced a representative from the Immigrant Advocates Network (IAN) to speak a bit about their mission, products, and services, and to introduce the website for which there were seeking design help. Rodrigo Camarena, the Director of IAN, described how individuals who classify as DACA, people under temporary protective status, and asylum seekers are currently threatened by our current political climate and how IAN is a non-profit, legal, tech organization that seeks to connect their network of over 8,000 national members with immigrants who need legal and other types of help.

The website, immigrationlawhelp.org was created in 2011 and is not responsive, does not fully support all languages, does not meet accessibility standards, and is text heavy. IAN are pursuing a re-design that helps to increase empowerment and engagement among the immigrant site visitors and families who have a variety of languages and backgrounds. Rodrigo mentioned that, based on site analytics, it is mostly visited during business hours—with peaks during times of crisis, which signals that legal and non-legal advocates may be the primary users of the site.

After the introductions, each table of participants operated as a group and we began with created Lean Personas based on the information we received from the client. From that, we created “How Might We” Post-Its to try to narrow in on the key problem our group should aim to solve through design. Then we used the whiteboards to create a User Journey that might address the problem based on our Persona and HMW’s.

After the team work, we individually began a “Crazy 8’s” sketch session to ideate eight ideas for the translation of the User Journey into an interface. With that exercise complete, we each chose one of our ideas to then extend into three interfaces as a more developed feature. In our groups once more, we all voted with our stickers to decide which solution (or combination of interfaces) we would present as a group. We loaded images of our solutions into a Google Slide document and each group presented on their thought process and outcomes.

I was surprised at how similar each group’s solutions were given that we all had different personas (i.e. ‘immigrant’, ‘family member of immigrant’, ‘service organization’, or ‘legal advocate’). The client team members expressed gratitude for the help and seemed genuinely interested in the solutions that were presented. The organization was open to continuing the conversation after the event if anyone was interested in volunteering.

From a UX student perspective, I was encouraged that all of the activities we completed were mentioned (in some form) of Jentery Sayers’ “Before You Make a Thing” including: personas, user stories/journeys, wireframes, and paper prototypes. And the mission of IAN seems in line with the point about “resisting oppression” through engaging directly with the power of technology and to examine the “default settings” and for whom and by whom technologies were built.

Personally, I was impressed not just with how organized the entire event was, but also how diverse the UX participants were, which is encouraging in terms of how important participatory models for design should be in the field, as discussed in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s “Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice.” Having groups that are vested in helping non-profit organizations who have limited budgets while also helping students and other new to the UX field get experience and connect for future volunteer opportunities is a mutually beneficial situation and I’m glad for the experience.

References

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2018). “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696.

Sayers, Jentery. (2018). “Before You Make a Thing: Some Tips for Approaching Technology and Society.” Retrieved from https://jentery.github.io/ts200v2/notes.html.

On Saturday, February 16, 2019 about thirty Pratt students attended a three-hour workshop at Pratt Manhattan Campus called “Emotionally Intelligent Design” hosted by the school’s chapter of UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association). The event was led by Pamela Pavliscak, founder of Change Sciences—a design research studio focused on emotionally intelligent design, author of the fall 2018 book Emotionally Intelligent Design (O’Reilly), and current faculty member at Pratt Institute.

According to the invitation posted on the Pratt School of Information listserv, the objectives of the workshop were to teach students how emotionally-sensitive AI tools work, as well as methods to prototype, test, and evolve experience with emotional intelligence. During the workshop Pamela shared a statistic that emotion-centered AI products and tools will be a $50 billion industry by 2025 and it will be integrated with most industries. Anecdotally, we are already seeing major trends in this direction, for example, in the realm of online dating, facial recognition technology, voice assistants and chatbots. Yvonne Rogers’ “New Theoretical Approaches for Human-Computer Interaction,” supports this claim by explaining that due to the rapid pace of technological developments, new opportunities are being created to augment, extend, and support user experiences, interactions, and communications. Therefore, designers and technologists now have new methods and practices to conceptualize and evaluate a fuller spectrum of interactive products to support a broader range of goals (e.g. aesthetically pleasing, motivating, fun) and evoke an emotional response from users or participants.

The format of the workshop was students participating in several different activities completed in 2-3-person groups that were interspersed with short presentations about tools demonstrating technology imbued with elements of emotional intelligence. Some examples of technologies introduced included: social robots like Pepper, healthcare support technologies like SimSensei that use facial reading and other biomarkers to sense emotion, CrystalKnows which uses social media and text (i.e. email) data to aid in better communication with coworkers, candidates, etc., Affectiva which enables facial emotion analysis in context, and the Toyota Concept-i car that “anticipates” users’ needs to create a better driving/riding experience.

We began with an ice breaker asking some of the questions to fall in love in our small groups. Once acquainted, each group was assigned a specific context (i.e. conflict) and a challenge (i.e. building empathy) from which we would operate and ideate throughout all of the other activities. My partner and I we completed an interview where we discussed a specific conflict. The scenario that my partner shared was that she and a friend were attempting to find an apartment together while the friend was based in New York and she was out of the city for the summer. It posed a challenge because only the friend was able to view the apartments in person. Communicating about desired apartment features was a challenge as well as being completely transparent about priorities. The situation became so tense and uncertain that, in the end, they eventually decided to not find an apartment together.

This scenario framed our further explorations into sketching and visualizing what happened to the relationship over time and what sensory experiences were involved. By the end of the prototyping, my partner and I had sketched a mobile app complete with front-view and self-view cameras with embedded sentiment analysis software so that a remote person could view a physical space while the person showing the space could get a sense of how the viewer feels about it. In our pitch to the rest of the groups, we said this type of app could help in a number of scenarios: roommate to roommate, realtor to potential tenants, venue managers to clients and more. It would potentially save the time, money, and hassle while offering communication tools and insights to help people make good decisions and become better communicators.

My main takeaway from these somewhat abstract activities were to keep the people and context centered in every part of the process and to allow myself to be surprised in the process of discovering solutions. With this conclusion, I am reminded on Don Norman’s “Being Analog” essay in which he describes a false dilemma: we can continue trying to make people more like computers – precise and logical and unemotional, or to make computers more like humans: creative, resourceful, attentive and able to change. When, in fact, humans and computers can elevate one another to ultimately help humans evolve and deal with the ever-evolving complexity of life.

References

Norman, Don A. (1998) The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer is So Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. MIT Press. Chapter 7: Being Analog https://jnd.org/being_analog/.

Rogers, Yvonne. (2004) “New theoretical approaches for human-computer interaction.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 38: 87-143.

Sengers, Phoebe. (1999). “Practices for a machine culture: a case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence.” Surfaces VIII.