I heard about the phrase, "the human bits", from Andrew Maier's twitter bio. If you work in tech like me, you're naturally disconnected from the interactions people have with your product. You spend day after day immersed in how it works, and you work with a team to build it. You have an internal perspective. If you want to understand the human bits like Maier does, it takes effort.
This is a hard skill to develop. It involves a balance of curiosity, skepticism, and thoughtfulness. It's easy to learn about this in books, articles, talks, and workshops, but it's much harder to do it in practice. l clearly remember the first time I tried to do user research and was met with a wall of resistance. Like an organism fighting off an intruder, the company I worked for did everything it could to maintain its internal perspective.
But it's possible to find the human bits. And honestly, it's worth it. We build technology for a paycheck, but what we make has an effect on so many other people—the people who use our technology. Our best work elevates and includes them.
One person I interviewed for Writing is Designing didn't just find the human bits, they helped their team see the importance of doing something about them. Lauren Lucchese is a design leader in Chicago, and in the book, she tells a story about error messages. She was given a spreadsheet of scenarios and asked to write generic messages for them.
Lauren Lucchese, a design leader in Chicago, shares how to rally a team around user needs in Writing Is Designing.
There were lots of human moments in this spreadsheet, and Lucchese found them. These errors were meant to cover things ranging from an expired password to a deceased account-holder to suspected fraudulent activity.
She went beyond generic errors by acknowledging the user's situation and sending them on a path that would provide help with what they were going through. She also got support for this by making a business case.
Here's what she said:
That's where you start thinking about metrics and measurements. You have to monetize the risk of not considering these things. That becomes a huge part of work and my role.
Lucchese's work ended up making interactions for people in difficult life situations faster, easier, and more empathetic.
Read Lucchese's story and many others in Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience.
