/2018
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Whoa: probably not a verb, but I got "sketchnoted" at the World Usability Day Hamburg! Big thank you to Ania Groß for this souvenir from Hamburg.
Sketchnote of my talk at #wudhh 2018; by Ania Groß of sketchnotes-hamburg.de (republished here with the artist's kind permission; original in full size on Twitter) -
Using the WiFi on a Deutsche Bahn train is a great example how accessibility efforts (here: image alt text on Twitter) benefit everybody:
As the WiFi keeps failing, the user can still imagine the photo by reading the alt text. -
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8 Nov is World Usability Day - the 2018 motto is "Design for Good or Evil".
I am thrilled about being invited to present on "Privacy as UX" at the WUD Hamburg/Germany (event in German), and excited for a day of inspiring talks and people!
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Designing accessible web with privacy - when web browsing reveals information
In "Designing accessible web with privacy - when web browsing reveals information" Lukasz Olejnik (in yet another spot-on analysis of privacy threats on the web) presents how the current efforts to improve accessibility features in web browsers may at the same time make the users of assistive technology more susceptible to profiling.
Most importantly, it will simplify information access for disadvantaged people. However, the design rationale behind this piece of technology are both challenging and unique. The choices made now will define for long how people with disabilities will be using the web. These choices and decisions will impact on the handicap disclosure process when visiting sites. I admittedly focus on the privacy aspect, but I stress that there is an important digital ethics case here.
This is a major concern. While, as Oljenik points out, the Accessibility Object Model (AOM) and the related APIs are extremely important to ensure equal access to the web, the architecture of the web makes it difficult to shield these features from misuse.
For the further development of the browser APIs, neither of the outlined scenarios feel right: Either (exposing the features openly) they can be used to identify individuals using assistive technology by default, or we run into the common "consent" UX of asking for users' permission without them being able to completely understand the far-reaching implications.
Plus, I want to add, in case of the latter scenario, where browsers would ask before exposing their use of assistive technology to a website, we might end up with a two-layered opt-in: After the browser has done its thing, the website itself may (depending on the use case) also have to ask for permission for processing that information - as, constituting "data concerning health", it may easily fall under the "category of special data" where consent is the only legal basis (Art. 9 GDPR). Two consent pop-ups, aimed at users who already may use complex solutions to access the web - this sounds like a designer's nightmare.
The blog post does not propose a solution (thought it suggests that one potential solution space could lie in exploring possible mappings of the accessibility layer before exposing the interactions). It acknowledges and comments on an ongoing debate around the AOM, and stresses that the described dilemma is an example for an easily overseen trade-off in technology:
The security and privacy trade-off is perhaps the one known best. But there is more to impact assessments, so often it’s actually security vs privacy vs accessibility. When rotten compromises need to be, or are made this does not always lead to best designs. The case described in this post is especially challenging. It will touch many users. It concerns sensitive information. And yet, good choices need to be made.
So, while the trade-off between security and privacy is commonly discussed (just to name an example: logging IP addresses in order to counter DOS attacks), there appears to be another: efforts to design for privacy and for accessibility may clash as well. It is yet another complex aspect to be taken into account as we create ever more complex technology.
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Today is the day: secure your ticket for web accessibility conference "Accessibility Club" in Berlin, Nov 5. Non-profit, great speakers, wonderful ppl behind.
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The Digital Human - Jigsaw
Even if you are the most careful person in the world when it comes to your data, little pieces of your personal information are constantly being uploaded into the digital world without you being aware of it. How? Because of your connections to everyone around you.
In just about 28 minutes, the "Jigsaw" episode of the BBC's "The Digital Human" podcast makes the case for why "privacy" is beyond the control of an individual and actually a societal, rather than a personal concept.
Discussing, among other things, how "data ownership" is different from "owning things" in that the latter is a question of property and the former a question of human rights, the podcast explains why it is so difficult to deal with personal data as if it were something a person can control like handing on a physical object.
It illustrates how people, even unknowingly, make privacy decisions on behalf of others: sharing their contact list with a social network is rather obvious, but the case of a person accused of a crime based on a DNA sample their parents gave to researchers over a decade ago is a chilling example of why even seemingly "safe" disclosure of personal data can backfire when combined with other data later.
This is such an interesting - and important - debate, and it reflects some of the key issues brought forth during several talks at the recent Privacy Week Berlin as well: protecting the human right to privacy is something that cannot simply be solved by providing people with consent forms. The Podcast episode does a great job in making the rather abstract formula that "privacy is not about individuals' decisions" tangible through real-world examples.
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Law By Design — the book by Margaret Hagan
This "living e-book" by Margaret Hagan -- summarizing her learnings of 3+ years of practice -- is likely the best primer to be found on the topic of "legal design":
This book sets forth an agenda for innovation in legal services, with practical, agile, and user-centered methods to make the legal system clearer, more efficient, more usable, and friendlier. It scopes out what it means for legal professionals to embrace a designer’s approach to solving problems.
Reading it as a designer, the first chapters make it apparent that this is at the same time an intro into "design" for lawyers (though repetition of the basics, with somebody else's eyes, can never hurt), but overall this is just as inspiring a read for designers as it is for legal professionals.
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The Legal Design Summit Recap: Uncharted Territory
A summary of the Legal Design Summit Helsinki 2017.
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The Tyranny of Convenience
This NYT Sunday op-ed on "The Tyranny of Convenience" by Tim Wu, policy advocate and professor at Columbia Law School, speaks to me in so many ways. It links my fascination for research on technology non-use with what I call a "constructively critical approach" to interaction design, and justifies all the countless days invested in debates on the Indieweb, on discussions about decentralisation and empowerment, on considering alternatives to mainstream solutions and working to promote the value of design ethics.
Wu outlines a comprehensive cultural history of "convenience", and points out how it has become such a default value in society that resisting it is considered not just an edge case but outright odd:
To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
For more about people "resisting convenience", see my research on technology non-use – often related to choices against "convenience", for a fascinating range of reasons.While this for sure applies for the often oversimplified assumption of all users to primarily be on the search for ultimate convenience (as defined by a tech industry only slowly awaking to the fact that their own utopias may not hold true), it also applies for common practice in many fields of design and innovation - if something has already been solved once by somebody with sufficient market penetration, a doctrine of convenience seems to dictate to use that rather than to question, challenge, and develop alternatives.
Following Wu's argument, convenience can be seen as the source of both monoculture and monopoly. He illustrates this with the highly relatable example of the convenience of shopping at Amazon:
Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. [...] Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
And continues with a warning about the conflict between convenience and other values:
Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
No matter do I think of recent debates about a developer-centredness in the web industry that comes at the price of inconveniencing (even endangering) the user, of the wide-spread resistance to privacy regulation as inconvenient rather than an opportunity to rethink how tech treats human beings, or of the growing risks monopolised convenience poses for entire democracies - Wu's analysis brilliantly makes sense of it all.
The text in the New York Times ends with a call to action, I'd love to see on a wall poster:
So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.
This, I believe, is the true task at hand today: to overcome an often dominant culture of convenience by providing solutions that may not appear quite as convenient (but could well be) but that prove their value by making ever more people aware of the importance of inconvenience, of staying in control, of the freedom to deviate.
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Software disenchantment
As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. [...] I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.
While mostly a well-argued rant about software development practice, in my reading, "Software disentchantment" - a rather personal account by Nikita Prokopov - indirectly leads to two of the things I see most neglected in current technology development: people and the environment.
As the author points out, some websites today are bigger (in file size) than the entire Window 95 operating system. Even text editors may struggle to use the available power of a top-notch PC to create a fluent typing experience. What is wrong here?
Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax.
For me, the very same is true beyond the code itself. The same complexity issues escalate to the user level. Beyond the poor user experience of slow-performing software: with ever more third-party dependencies etc., technologies are being created that completely neglect the fact that it is the user's resources being wasted by building overly complex things: their time (waiting, tweaking, fixing), their money (transferring data, using electricity, having to buy ever more powerful hardware), their dignity (the data transferred to dozens of marketing networks in the background).
And, by the way, our planet's resources are wasted at the same time: imagine the energy wasted on executing code 10x more complex than needed! Or if a five-year old computer would still be able to smoothly scroll a current website.
Prokopov highlights the need to innovate, even at the price of giving up some of what has been done before:
To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away and replace it with better stuff.
This, in my opinion, is equally valid for software development as it is for business strategies, design patterns, all kinds of "best practices" etc.
Lastly, the article makes an important point about the responsibility of creators. Is it really reasonable to simply assume users to quietly accept whatever complexity is thrown at them?
[users] are only learned to expect what we can provide. We (engineers) say every Android app takes 350 Mb? Ok, they’ll live with that. We say we can’t give them smooth scrolling? Ok, they’ll live with a phone that stutter. We say “if it doesn’t work, reboot”? They’ll reboot. After all, they have no choice.
This is "design" turned upside down - complete ignorance for the user. Bigger, more complex, poor performance. Wasn't the main reason we are doing this to solve people's problems, not create new ones?
(via forum.ind.ie)
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The opposite of “insights from user research" isn’t "gut feel." The opposite of “insights from user research” is "random luck." True gut feel can only come from substantial user research.
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Report: Deceived by design
The Norwegian Consumer Council published a detailed report (see press release and PDF in English), documenting how Google, Facebook and Microsoft use UI dark patterns to deceive and manipulate users towards accepting low privacy defaults.
These have been discussed regularly over past weeks, but it is great to have them all documented in one report. My particular favourite are the "flow charts", which reveal very clearly just how "difficult" it has been made to set restrictive privacy preferences (pages 40-42 of the PDF).
This stuff is in conflict with GDPR requirements in so many ways, and the exact opposite of ethical conduct:
The combination of privacy intrusive defaults and the use of dark patterns, nudge users of Facebook and Google, and to a lesser degree Windows 10, toward the least privacy friendly options to a degree that we consider unethical.We question whether this is in accordance with the principles of data protection by default and data protection by design, and if consent given under these circumstances can be said to be explicit, informed and freely given. -
Modern myth: Nothing to hide? Collected responses to a dangerous fallacy
While the previous bookmark I published on the "I have nothing to hide" myth was of rather academic nature, "Modern myth: Nothing to hide?" by Leena Simon from the German privacy and digital rights organisation Digitalcourage* summarizes arguments why this is a dangerous fallacy in ten simple points:
Anyone who is concerned with surveillance will hear this statement over and over again. Though dangerous and false, it is very persistent. And we are fed up with it. Ten points against the notion that you have “nothing to hide”.
* You may have heard their name, as they are the ones giving out the annual "Big Brother Awards" (in 2018, amongst others, awarded to Amazon's Alexa, Windows 10, and the "Smart City" concept...)
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Exciting! Got invited to present my latest "Privacy as UX" talk at the "Webkongress Erlangen" conference in September, alongside a great a11y & webdev/des line-up (event in German)
