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2014 Keynote by Sumana Harihareswara

436 bytes added, 17:46, 28 March 2014
link to YouTube, a few more links, formatting
An unofficial transcript of my 25 March 2014 keynote at the Code4Lib conference - suggested title: '''"UX Is A Social Justice Issue".''' These are the notes I spoke from, and I know I deviated in several cases with little jokes and additions; I hope to update this with the transcript after I watch the [http://youtube.com/watch?v=_8MJATYsqbY&list=PLw-ls5JXzeNZRQHi51BtyOpIAnhu_VsoR recording], or I may get [http://stenoknight.com/ captions].
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= UX Is A Social Justice Issue =
== Intro ==
This community is super thoughtful and I've avidly read your posts for years; you set a high bar for insight and achievement in thinking about information, skillsharing, and service.
I work for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Engineering Community Team, and I help people integrate with our [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox API ] for Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, and all our other sites, and it's really exciting to me that we're finally moving towards a service-oriented architecture and away from the SCM, Spaghetti Code Model. But I won't really be talking too much about that today. I'm happy to talk about it and I'm here for the whole conference so please do come up to me if you want to talk about it.
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 [http://jobs.wikimedia.org/ we're hiring].
But today I am following in the steps of Jeremy Prevost and [http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=302 Bess Sadler ] and [http://matienzo.org/blog/2013/emotion-archives-interactive-fiction-linked-data/ Mark Matienzo], among others, in their previous Code4Lib presentations and writings about emotion and design.
Now, you in this room are the experts on your pieces of software that you work on. And most of you already know if the user experience of that software isn't what you want it to be. So I want to give you some thoughts and some examples from other communities and products, about what good and bad user experience can do, and then talk about why we technologists usually don't put enough investment into user experience, and what we can do to fix that.
Over and over, in lots of different fields, we see that bad usability makes a '''HUGE ''' difference, and that when choosing between two services, people will make very different choices depending on which service actually seems designed around the user's needs.
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:
== Examples ==
* === Banking === 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.
But Lisa J. Servon, an urban policy professor at The New School, worked in a RiteCheck for four months and found that one reason people chose RiteCheck over a traditional bank was the user experience, the hospitality people got. She wrote in The Atlantic:
Professor Servon believes that to attract these depositors, banks would need a better product -- fee and service structures that work for them.
=== Ebook lending ===
* New York Public Library has been lending out ebooks for years, and New York City has a lot of people who have smartphones or dedicated ebook reading devices. I think we could expect that people who are already buying ebooks would be interested in borrowing them for free. But ebook borrowing rates at some of our libraries are just abysmal. For context, across the United States, as I understand it, for every 100 print books sold, somewhere from 30 to 80 ebooks get sold. (This is from some rough numbers that some friends and I put together and I checked with some Code4Lib folks yesterday.)
So given that New York Public Library lent out about 250,000 print books every week last year, you might hope that NYPL would be lending out, let's say, 150,000, or maybe even just a hundred thousand or fifty thousand ebooks per week. But the number is actually way lower than that: 19,000. So instead of a 3-to-2 or a 3-to-1 ratio it's more like a 13-to-1 ratio.
The reason I know about this is that New York Public Library has this division, NYPL Labs, which you might have heard of. And they have broken down the ebook borrowing experience and found that it currently takes eighteen separate steps for an NYPL user to borrow an ebook. So this spring they're starting a two-year project to take that down to three steps. That's their goal. And I would predict that this would raise ebook borrowing rates beyond this freaking 13:1 print-to-ebook ratio.
=== Wikipedia ===
* At Wikimedia, our number one concern is gaining and retaining Wikipedia editors and contributors in general. If we want a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, then we need diverse perspectives EDITING and providing that knowledge.
And we've found that sometimes little things make a big difference. Like, for a subsection of an article, the "edit" link used to be all the way at the right side of the screen. So it wasn't obvious what it was for, and in fact some users thought it was the way you edited the previous section. When we moved that link to be right next to the subsection's headline, we got a much higher clickthrough rate, consistently -- the rate more than doubled. It went up by 117 percent. And that higher volume of clicks led to 8.6 percent more edits as well. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Section_edit_modification#Overview_analysis_from_previous_test https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Change_to_section_edit_links
One last note about Wikipedia and usability: you don't have to register to read Wikipedia. It's just there, no paywall, no regwall. And there are a lot of really great open educational resources out there, OERs, that have content that readers would really find useful -- except it's behind a registration wall. And that just massively reduces how many people are going to see it.
=== Healthcare ===
* OK, something a little different: let's look a little at health care. I think health care in the United States is kind of fractally broken -- like, it's broken on the macro and the micro levels, and you zoom in and you just keep finding new kinds of breakage. But you don't have to agree with me on that. Let's just look at the kind of traditional general practitioner acquisition, booking, and service. Usability is pretty poor; a lot of offices aren't open at night or on weekends, you have to call them during business hours to make an appointment, you have to book a whole appointment just to get a flu shot, and there's a long wait once you get there.
So in recent years we've seen some new startups that are usability hacks. Like ZocDoc, a website that lets you see doctors in your area who have open appointment slots this week, and lets you filter out the ones who don't take your insurance, and lets you book the appointment online. And MinuteClinics and other quick clinics at drugstores and big box stores are walk-in, low-cost ways to get quick diagnoses or shots.
* === Encryption === OK, final example. Let's talk about privacy tools. Pretty Good Privacy, PGP - who's heard of it?
And who uses it on a regular basis?
Within LITA, some folks have proposed a Usability Interest Group, so that's also something to look into.
== Let's go ==
So, you can see that other libraries are doing this. Sometimes we call it UI, or Human-Computer Interface, or user-centered design, or interaction design, and it intersects with product management, but it all goes to what I've been talking about. Several people on the Code4Lib list in October talked about what a huge difference a dedicated UX person or team makes. For example, Tom Cramer said, "We have been lucky to have a full time interaction designer within our library IT group for about 6 years. It makes a world of difference in the quality of our products." https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1310&L=CODE4LIB&F=&S=&P=243880
Better user experience is the best force multiplier we have at our command, so it's vital that we make it a first-class priority, throughout the development process. And with disciplined empathy we can do that - here at the intersection of libraries and tech, we can figure out how to scale hospitality, fix the new last mile problem, and actually achieve the social justice goals that so many of us got into this for.
 
 
- [http://www.harihareswara.net/ Sumana Harihareswara], Mar 25, 2014
=Response = Tweets and blog  == Blog posts about this talk ==
* http://bakinglibrarian.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/code4lib-day-1/
 
== Tweets ==
 
* [https://twitter.com/BarnardArchives/status/448884704742498304 @BarnardArchives] If you haven't yet read @brainwane's #c4l14 keynote you really should http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2014_Keynote_by_Sumana_Harihareswara … 1/2
* [https://twitter.com/BarnardArchives/status/448885009836171264 @BarnardArchives] "Seeing that causation, seeing the connection between what someone's doing now & all the causation that went before it, is empathy."WOAH 2/2
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