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My keynote - suggested title: '''"UX Is A Social Justice Issue".'''
== Intro ==
Thank you so much for having me.
For a few years I've helped run internship programs that bring new people into the community of practice that is open source, and I've done my share of mentorship, and I also want to talk with people about that this week, but not right now.
And last year I took a sabbatical and I went to [http://hackerschool.com/ Hacker School], in New York City, to improve my programming skills, and I found a tremendously educational and transforming experience. And I came back to Wikimedia and decided to stop being a manager and dive into tech writing and coding instead. But that's ALSO something to talk with me about later.
And [http://jobs.wikimedia.org/ we're hiring].
But today I am following in the steps of Jeremy Prevost and Bess Sadler and Mark Matienzo, among others, in their previous Code4Lib presentations and writings about emotion and design.
== The last mile problem ==
So, we have a really big hurdle, for most services and products we make, and that is choosing to make the right things and make them usable.
Earlier this month there was a conversation on MetaFilter about coffee machines, especially about those pod machines, Keurigs. And one person said, "This convenience thing is a bit overstated." And librarian Jessamyn West had a really interesting response, which I'd like to quote. She said:
: "Not that I'm not more in your camp taste-wise than the Keurig camp but I see this as a great exercise for people generally in the "other people have different priorities in life and aren't just bad versions of you" direction. Not you [personally], just the general you. I know a lot of people for whom Keurigs solve a problem and they don't mind the downsides. I respect that. I also know a lot of people who wouldn't be caught dead with one and I respect that as well.
: "I know it's tough to get your head around but the goal state for people with Keurigs is generally not to just have the best cup of coffee. It's to have a coffee solution that is easy to clean up after, or that turns itself off, or that has pre-measured sizes, or that has all the brands that people like, or that makes cocoa, or that offers holiday flavors, or that you can buy at the department store, or that is easy to clean, or that can be modified to accept change, or that you can put in a place with no running water, or that descales itself, or can be put in a place without a kitchen, or that has funky modern lines, or that can make ten cups of passable coffee in five flavors (caf and decaf) in ten minutes. These things do not solve problems for me, but they solve a problem for an awful lot of people which is why these things are so popular." http://www.metafilter.com/137379/Your-New-Coffee-Overlord#5456577
So, yes, usability makes a difference in what coffee people drink. And if you care about health, and education, and the working class, then this is actually scary, because the difference between user experience in two services is driving people to make bad choices. I want to give you a few examples.
== Examples ==
* Payday lending and check cashing services have sprouted up in lots of working-class communities. And often it's just predatory or incredibly expensive, compared to traditional banking. And these services don't give people any way to save and earn interest instead of paying interest.
PGP is basically the common standard for email encryption. But PGP is incredibly hard to wrap your head around, and encryption tech in general has terrrrrible usability, customer support, and localisation, and thus abysmal adoption rates. And as a result, journalists and dissidents and activists generally don't use it, even when the stakes are really high. Instead they're using Twitter and Facebook and unencrypted email, because those are just a lot easier to use. The Open Internet Tools Project's James Vasile said in his Open Source Bridge keynote last year that the privacy tech community would be better off spending the next year of our time on user experience design, localisation, and end user customer support, rather than writing new tools or features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHsRPd_U-0
== Why the bottleneck? ==
So these examples - banking, lending, Wikipedia, healthcare, encryption - show you how bad usability can really change what choices people make.
And we need to be able to see from many different users' points of view, even when it's uncomfortable or shows us that we have failed.
== What you can do ==
This means treating customer support, those front-line desk and phone tasks, as a first-class responsibility and a source of important data. These are your bug reports. This is how you know if you aren't being as hospitable as you want to be. I heard some lore yesterday about a library that logs every time they have to say "no" to patrons, and then tries to fix it.
