Resources for Design Forge 2024

Here are the Trauma-Informed Design slides presented at the Design Forge Conference in 2024.

Academic articles Referenced

Benjet, C., Bromet, E., Karam, E. G., Kessler, R. C., McLaughlin, K. A., Ruscio, A. M., Shahly, V., Stein, D. J., Petukhova, M., Hill, E., Alonso, J., Atwoli, L., Bunting, B., Bruffaerts, R., Caldas-de-Almeida, J. M., de Girolamo, G., Florescu, S., Gureje, O., Huang, Y., … Koenen, K. C. (2016). The epidemiology of traumatic event exposure worldwide: results from the World Mental Health Survey Consortium. Psychological Medicine, 46(2), 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715001981

Eggleston, M. and Noel, L.A. (2024). Repairing the Harm of Digital Design Using a Trauma-informed Approach. Diseña, 1-19. (English and Spanish versions) https://www.revistadisena.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/58767

Kelly, S., Lauren, B. & Nguyen, K. (2021). Trauma-informed Web Heuristics for Communication Designers. Proceedings of the 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 172–176. https://doi.org/10.1145/3472714.3473638

Scott, C. F., Marcu, G., Anderson, R. E., Newman, M. W. & Schoenebeck, S. (2023). Trauma-Informed Social Media: Towards Solutions for Reducing and Healing Online Harm. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23-28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581512

Other VALUABLE Resources

• Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.

• Trauma-informed Technology learning page (a few favorite trusted resources such as SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma report and info on why trauma-informed technology is important)

• Trauma-informed design resources (collection of articles, podcasts, blogs, journal articles, etc.)

• Trauma-informed pedagogies by Janice Carillo and Phyllis Thompson
  

Any questions? Please contact me.

Resources for All Things Open Attendees

I’m speaking at the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh this year.

“Getting Started with UX Research” is scheduled for Monday, October 22nd at 2:15pm in Room 301A.

Here are the slides. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Resources referenced in talk

10 Usability Heuristics from Jakob Nielsen

UI Tenets & Traps Cards from Microsoft

Google Analytics Academy

WordCamp Raleigh

Nielsen Norman Group newsletter

Invision’s “Inside Design” blog (you can also learn a lot from UX Pin’s ebooks)

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug - FREE downloads here of a usability test script and a recording consent form

Web Accessibility Initiative

Baymard Institute - a gold mind if you work in ecommerce

You Should Test That by Chris Goward - Covers conversion rate optimization, A/B testing and more

Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirkson

Local Resources

Triangle UXPA - now hosting a new 1-day conference called UX Y’all

Ladies that UX Durham - events happen around the Triangle

Explore UX

Resources for EdUIConf Attendees

Slides from my talk at EdUI Conf: Humans Not Zombies: Identity-Based Content Strategy for More Engaging Websites

One-page website communication plan (Word doc)

Example of page level content strategy spreadsheet (Excel doc)

Resources for NCCASA Conference Attendees

Please use and/or share any of the following items with others.

• Slides from my talk "What Would A Trauma-Informed Website Look Like?"
• Editable One Page Communication Plan
• Editable Action Plan Handout
• Hemingway Editor (Use Free Version)
• Broken Link Checker (Free)
• Spell Checker (Free) 
• Google Speed Test (Free)
• Pingdom Speed Test (Free)
• WebPageTest Speed Test (Free)

Great book for further learning about UX: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

The webinar on August 11 will be on NCCADV's webinar page soon. 

Let's make trauma-informed websites a trend so we can better help survivors!

Is Your Website Trauma-Informed?

In the field of user experience (UX), we often talk about designing for delight. We focus on how good we can help a person feel when interacting with a website or other technology. But in some cases, website design and content choices aren't about delight at all. They might be about relief. Or they could be as serious as life or death.

I'm studying how to improve websites serving domestic violence (DV)/interpersonal violence (IPV) survivors. How can these websites meet the complex needs of this group of people? There are neurological, social, and physiological effects of trauma and interpersonal violence. Plus, there are safety and privacy issues in these situations.

Looking at the websites of organizations that serve survivors has led me to these questions:

• Are the websites helping survivors feel empowered to take the next step toward help?

• Or are the websites aggravating the symptoms of trauma itself?

• So...what would a trauma-informed website look like?

Here's a screenshot of the current North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence homepage. We are addressing the UX issues and also thinking about survivor-sensitive features. A grant from the staffing agency Aquent makes this possible!

The US government offers some direction on being trauma-informed in general. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the US Government (SAMHSA) has Six Key Principles of a Trauma-Informed Approach:

1. Safety

2. Trustworthiness and Transparency

3. Peer Support

4. Collaboration and Mutuality

5. Empowerment, Voice and Choice

6. Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues

Some of these principles overlap with those of UX. For example, trust is often critical to share personal or financial information with a website. It's important to be trustworthy both to be trauma-informed AND to have great UX. Plus, a positive user experience can feel empowering. A poor one can feel overwhelming and disheartening.

I'm exploring how these SAMHSA principles combine with those I've learned in my UX career. I'm hoping to translate these principles into action items to make websites trauma-informed. There are also a number of survivor-sensitive features that are necessary for service agency websites. 

Becoming trauma-informed and user-friendly may not require a costly redesign. I suspect it's often about making smarter design and content choices. With a UX and trauma-informed lens, we can improve survivors' experience.

I'm speaking at the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault conference in May. I'm not going there knowing all the answers. But I'll share what I've learned so far about making a website trauma-informed. This work is important for the safety of all people suffering within violent relationships. 

I'm all for designing for delight, but I'd love more people to help on this more serious issue too. Please get in touch if you want to join forces for good.

See trauma-informed website resources here.

Resources for High Five Conference Attendees

Here is a PDF of slides from my talk Go Go Bananas with Research: How UX Research Can Better Your Marketing (and Even Change Your Business Model).  It's possibly the longest talk title ever!

Books recommended and referred to:

• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
• The UX Team of One by Leah Buley
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
• Don't Make Me Think, 3rd Edition By Steve Krug
• The Zombie Business Cure by Melissa Eggleston and Julie Lellis

Other resources:

• Take a guerrilla usability class with Girl Develop It Raleigh-Durham. I'll teach the next one in the Fall.
• UX research fundamentals course on Lynda.com taught by local UXer Amanda Stockwell. 
• Any classes by IDEO U.

8 Highlights from edUI Conf 2016

I have a new favorite conference called edUI! I attended it few weeks ago in Charlottesville, VA. Following are some highlights from it, including resources for you:

Steve Krug kindly plugged my usability workshop with Julie Grundy of Duke University. He then joined us as a helpful participant!

1. Running with a keynote speaker is a unique experience. What a memorable jaunt planned by the conference organizers! It was worth getting out of bed early to hit the pavement with the inspiring Josh Clark. Wonder what the future of tech looks like? Watch Josh's fun talk Magical UX and the Internet of Things. 
2. Steve Krug first sparked my interest in UX in 2007. His fantastic book was required reading in grad school. If you are a person making choices about a website, read Don't Make Me Think! Your website visitors will thank you. At edUI, Steve gave a keynote speech. But he also participated in workshops, including mine, and made them better just by his quiet presence and helpfulness. He offers a great example to follow.
3. Charlottesville, Virginia, is a walkable, fun and friendly location. How did I not realize this before?
4. Aussie Donna Spencer rocked her workshop on moving from research to design. She wants us to write down a coherent story before jumping to content and functions. UXers, see Donna's detailed slide deck here. 
5. Getting fresh air between sessions = a better conference. Two thumbs up for having 3 interesting venues. How great not to feel stuck in a hotel with terrible carpet all day. 
6. You can hike to beautiful Humpback Rocks in the morning and still make an 11am session!
7. Analytics master Mitch Daniels of the interaction agency Viget wants you to stop wasting your analytics budget. So stop tracking everything and focus on the KPIs for your organization.  Learn from Mitch about analytics.  
8. The edUI organizers know how to put on a conference. They also made themselves very accessible throughout the event. If you work in the higher ed, library or museum field, attending edUI should be a high priority. 

Learn more about the edUI conference here. Maybe I'll see you in Charlottesville next year! 

edUI 2016 Workshop Resources

How to Implement Low-Tech High Impact Usability Testing

Melissa Eggleston & Julie Grundy, Oct. 24, 2016

Find the slides here.

And the workshop materials here. 

Video Games Inspire TurboTax: Highlight from Lavacon 2015

Top content strategists and technical communicators from companies such as Google and PayPal showed up in New Orleans for the Lavacon 2015 Conference. The conference organizer, Jack Molisani, put on a useful, inspiring and quirky event - jazz bands and coloring books included! There were a number of great speakers at Lavacon, including David Dylan Thomas of EPAM, Sarah O'Keefe of Scriptorium and Emily Shields of Facebook.

Here’s a recap of just one of the sessions I thoroughly enjoyed:

Two presenters from Intuit at Lavacon 2015

When Easy Isn’t Enough: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Content Strategy and UX by John Caldwell and Ria Hagan of Inuit

Who would have thought that the people behind TurboTax would turn to video gamers for direction?

These content creators at Inuit had one goal in mind:

To increase emotional engagement with TurboTax customers

They knew the video game industry was killing it in this realm. So, the Inuit team spoke with video game designers and others in the gaming industry to learn how they achieve that emotional response from users.

The four main conclusions from their research are:

1) It’s the customer’s story, not yours.

The customer is the hero, while TurboTax is the supporting character in the game. It’s up to the customer to determine how much they want to learn, and it's TurboTax's job to anticipate players' desires.

Book Cover, Predictably Irrational

2) Give them what they want. Not what they don’t.

Just like gamers skip stories called “cutscenes,” users skip items they don’t want. Sometimes it’s not about making the content more efficient. Even if it’s a well scripted video or a short paragraph, if users don’t want it, it will be skipped. Just give users what they want - and offer optional learning for anyone who would like to go deeper.

3) We must accept that people are crazy.

We use our lizard brain to make decisions (there’s no way around it) so we need to plan for this. The book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a good start to understand people’s illogical nature. Side note: Ariely is from my hometown of Durham, NC and very nice!

4) Get comfortable with being (really) uncomfortable.

“Can we do more than just talk about actions?” Ria asked. She suggested that perhaps TurboTax could acknowledge the shame around money and empathize with customers' vulnerability as they do their taxes.

To this end, the software now asks customers how they feel about doing their taxes today and gives them some buttons to choose from. Depending on which button you select, an appropriate empathetic message is shown. This human touch is unexpected from tax software.

For each of their main points, the presenters gave terrific examples from both video games and “real life” to explain their learning. The result of their research and newfound knowledge is revamped content within the TurboTax product. The voice and tone are now more human and empathetic.

For example, the title “Education Expense” has become “Let’s get you some tax breaks if you went to school.” In time we will see the degree of success of these changes. But many of the folks in the room were Turbo Tax customers and seemed enthusiastic.

Despite rarely playing a video game in my life, I still found the presentation intriguing and may even considering switching to TurboTax to do my taxes. I heard authenticity and care for customers from both of the excellent Inuit presenters. Thanks, John and Rita!

And I’m going to pay attention to their lessons learned and see how they might apply to the content on my latest project, a website related to sanitation. This topic might typically be subject to the same low enthusiasm as taxes.

Can you apply any of these video game ideas to your business or projects? Do you think this could improve the UX for your customers and increase their emotional engagement?

If you have questions on the presentation or want to talk about one of these ideas, please get in touch with me.

Three Reasons to Go to WordCamp

I had a fantastic weekend attending WordCamp Raleigh, a conference for those using or working with WordPress (WP). Just in case you don't know, WP is an open source content-management system and blogging tool based on PHP and MySQL. I use it to run my website and those of my clients.

I learned a bunch of helpful things at WordCamp - plug-ins and e-commerce tools and even some of the history of WP. There were three tracks of sessions you could attend - users, power users, and developers - lots of options no matter what your level of understanding of WP is. Some folks had been using it for years (WP has been around 10 years,) but others had just started exploring it two weeks prior.

Here are three reasons to go to a WordCamp:

1) Ubiquitous use. Approximately 20% of the websites in the world are run on the WordPress system from tiny blogs to major sites like CNN. Even if you think you don't want to use the WordPress system, it's good to understand it so you can compare other systems to it. How else will you know if WordPress is right to use for your business or blog (or those of your clients)?

2) Unbelievably friendly users. Maybe it's the open source thing, but wow, I was impressed by how forthcoming and helpful WordCamp speakers and fellow attendees were. The conference organizers were on site and very nice as well. The event was organized but informal, which I liked.

3) Unbeatable value. Professional development was a stellar deal for a mere $35 conference fee, which also included lunch and a t-shirt. And I was able to sit down with and ask questions directly of core contributors to WordPress. All of my questions were answered, and during the various sessions, I was exposed to features of WordPress that I was unfamiliar with. Super helpful.

So, go check out the upcoming schedule of worldwide WordCamps and see if you can attend!