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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]. {{TOC left}} = UX Is A Social Justice Issue =

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

: "The glue at RiteCheck is the customer/teller relationship. I interviewed 50 RiteCheck customers after my stint as a teller and, when I asked them why they brought their business to RiteCheck instead of the major well-known bank three blocks away, they often told me stories about the things the RiteCheck tellers did for them.....At RiteCheck, the tellers treated the customers as individuals and went the extra mile to assist them, perhaps in the same way that a neighborhood grocer might allow a trusted customer to run a monthly tab. On busy days, tellers regularly skipped lunch and coffee breaks in order to keep the wait times down. Ana Paula, our manager, often joined us at the window. The customer always came first and knew it."

* 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.)

* 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.

* 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.

* === Encryption === OK, final example. Let's talk about privacy tools. Pretty Good Privacy, PGP - who's heard of it?

Free access to education and free expression of political opinions and privacy from unwarranted surveillance are human rights (in the [http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml UN Declaration of Human Rights]), and even if you don't want to go that far, in general they're social justice goals that we all like. We're here because we share a vision -- less waste, more empowerment, getting knowledge into people's hands. But actually getting these benefits to our users requires that our users be able to use our software. So, in getting rid of user experience obstacles, we are working to achieve social justice goals.

This is one reason diversity in a group is useful - it includes people with different perspectives, AND is likely to have more people with the ability to see from multiple perspectives. Including the users' perspectives.''(see: http://blog.melchua.com/2013/08/20/engineering-education-discourses-on-representation-why-problematization-matters-beddoes-2011/ ; "hegemonic masculinity" as coined by coined by Raewyn Connell: Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press; "strong objectivity" (coined by Sandra Harding) and standpoint theory, Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: what is strong objectivity? In L. Alcoff & E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist Epistemologies (pp. 49–82). New York, NY: Routledge. Much thanks to [http://blog.melchua.com/ Mel Chua] for research on this.)''

So, we have some resources that I've just mentioned, and I know I missed a lot of people and guides and groups who can help out. So someone is starting, right now, [https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1403&L=CODE4LIB&O=D&P=327030 an email thread on the code4lib list], to share usability resources. And if there's nothing at your institution right now, if you don't have what you need, then let's talk about how to hack your institution to get it. Let's talk about that this week, here in Raleigh, and on the list.