Sometimes, the agent will assume I prefer to be searched by a female agent; sometimes, a male. Occasionally, they ask for my preference. Unfortunately, “neither” is an honest but unacceptable response. Today, I’m particularly unlucky: a nearby male-presenting agent, observing the interaction, loudly states “I’ll do it!.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1Muhammad Khurram” and strides over to me. I say, “Aren’t you going to ask me what I prefer?” He pauses, then begins to move toward me again, but the female-presenting agent who is operating the scanner stops him. She asks me what I prefer. Now I’m standing in public, flanked by two TSA agents, with a line of curious travelers watching the whole interaction. Ultimately, the male-presenting agent backs off and the female-presenting agent searches me, making a face as if she’s as uncomfortable as I am, and I’m cleared to continue on to my gate.

Most notably, if you choose just one persona, and that persona doesn’t adequately reflect the diversity of your users’ behavior, or you don’t use the persona to faithfully predict users’ behavior, you won’t find valid design flaws. You could spend an hour or two conducting a walkthrough, and end up either with problems that aren’t real problems, or overlooking serious issues that you believed weren’t problems.

Making more money is easy to measure. But if your definition of success is harder to measure (e.g., there’s less hate speech on your platform), A/B tests might be much harder to conduct.

Now that Google’s results are more hierarchical—a list of recipes, a floating box on the margin with knowledge about apple pie, and a list of results, they are much harder for screen reader users to navigate, but not much harder for sighted people to navigate. This demonstrates how, once again, no design choice is neutral, and serves all people equally well.

In this case, the designer is the “wizard”, secretly operating the vehicle while creating the illusion of a self-driving car. Wizard of Oz prototypes are not always the best fidelity, because it may be hard for a person to pretend to act like a computer might.

When explicitly offered the economy as a response, more than half of respondents (58%) chose this answer; only 35% of those who responded to the open-ended version volunteered the economy. Moreover, among those asked the closed-ended version, fewer than one-in-ten (8%) provided a response other than the five they were read. By contrast, fully 43% of those asked the open-ended version provided a response not listed in the closed-ended version of the question. All of the other issues were chosen at least slightly more often when explicitly offered in the closed-ended version than in the open-ended version. (Also see “High Marks for the Campaign, a High Bar for Obama” for more information.)

Know when to stop. Start with 3–5 main competitors. Once you uncover the information you need in order to inform your design decisions, it’s time to stop.Don’t simply copy the designs you find in your research. The competitors may not be using best practices. Instead, be inspired by the solutions found in your research and adapt the solutions to fit your brand, product, and users.

Another form of critique that can be applied to design is Socratic questioning. In this form of critique, the person giving the critique wants to deeply probe the designer’s way of thinking and dig beneath the surface of their design. Some types of questions to achieve this include:Clarification  questions, which encourage the designer to clarify their thought process.Questions that challenge the designer’s  assumptions .Questions that encourage the designer to consider  alternative perspectives .Questions that encourage the designer to spell out the  implications and consequences  of their design.

There’s a reason that Leonardo da Vinci kept a notebook in which he sketched and wrote every idea he had: it allowed him to see those ideas, share those ideas, critique those ideas, and improve those ideas. Had he kept them all in his head, his limited capacity to see and reason about those ideas would have greatly limited his productivity.

Notice how a good argument actually looks something like a scenario. The difference is in the structure and the intent. The scenarios are structured as narratives and you create them to help you envision and test design ideas. Arguments, in contrast, are inherently about the causality of a problem and you write them to persuade someone that a problem is real and important. They help model the causality of a problem, revealing factors that influence, events that trigger it. They also highlight the consequences of the problem, surfacing what about the situation is undesirable to the people you’re trying to design with or for.

Let that choice be a just one, that centers people’s actual needs. And let that choice be an equitable one, that focuses on people who actually need help (for example, rural Americans trying to access broadband internet, or children in low income families without computers trying to learn at home during a pandemic—not urban technophiles who want a faster ride to work).

in the United States, this means (cis) male, white heterosexual “able-bodied,” literate, college educated, not a young child and not elderly, with broadband internet access, with a smartphone, and so on. Most technology product design ends up focused on this relatively small, but potentially highly profitable, subset of humanity.

If you’re engaging in design, how do you choose from these paradigms? If you have the freedom to choose, you have to consider your values: if you’re concerned with social justice, it is hard to recommend anything but the design justice perspective, as it places justice at the center of design. Other paradigms might be easier, since they involve giving up less power, working less with affected communities, and therefore taking less time. But that just means designing something that may be less effective, sustainable, and successful. In most professional design contexts, however, you might be forced to work within design paradigms that are less justice-focused, with more attention towards profit and speed. In these contexts, you’ll have to decide whether to compromise on just and effective outcomes to optimize speed and profit, or whether to advocate for change.