Mindful Design: How and Why to Make Design Decisions for the Good of Those Using Your Product by Scott Riley

Mindful Design: How and Why to Make Design Decisions for the Good of Those Using Your Product by Scott Riley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A wonderful book touching many aspects of design. One should not expect any technical suggestions or any process suggestions.

The key message that the author is giving in this is that instead of following a linear design where the user is guided through a path to achieve a goal one should design systems which allow the users to explore and learn the system and let them use the system in ways not anticipated by the designer. The second message that the author gives is that we need to move way from the penchant to make applications addictive and instead make applications which are assistive. I.e. applications that help the users solve a real problem in their life. One needs to be more empathetic and ethical in one's design. To be more empathetic one needs to consider a diverse set of persona and not just "white males" who can afford a $1000+ mobile phone and keep upgrading.

Here are some excerpts (some extracts and some summaries) from the book.

General Points
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Think of your structure and categories from an emotional perspective as well as a thematic one. What makes sense to you or your internal team is often a source of frustration when asked in the real world.

By grouping objects and content astutely, we allow the brain to disregard an entire “block” rather than having to selectively filter every item.

Structure and hierarchy form the backbone of a good UI. By surfacing what’s important and filtering out what isn’t, we can replicate the mind’s attentional system to a degree.

The state of an interface is changing all the time. Our goal isn’t to present a static structure of information, but to have our interfaces adhere to the perceived goals of the person using it at any given time.

Change and importance are the two key factors we can utilize to guide someone’s attention around our interface. With good use of contrast, hierarchy, and animation, we can ease people through tasks that would otherwise be taxing.

Attention is precious and limited. We operate under a genuine constraint in a zero-sum game, and a huge part of good design lies in the simplification of the dense and the difficult.

A very valid point "As I mentioned in Chapter 2, the acceptance among a population of a particular pattern or signifier portrays an extremely valid argument for convention; however, countless innovations, including the touch interfaces that revolutionized modern technology, would have never occurred if we always relied on or settled upon such conventions. "

"Often our work is best directed toward creating effective tools of cognitive easing."

Furthermore, we can and should embrace the avoidance of attempted forced motivation. Great design can lie simply in the acceptance that many times our products plainly do not need any explicit plan for reward-motivated behavior—whether that’s because they’re autotelic and provide their own intrinsic fun or value, or simply because the value they do provide is in their invisibility and essentialism."

To make a product attractive rather than just talk about the features
1. Let the user experience the features by running them through a sample.
2. Solve a user's problem rather than give a technical mechanism. E.g. Adobe photoshop allows the users to "remove red eyes", "darken the photograph", "lighten the photograph" etc.

Linearity
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We can and should embrace the avoidance of attempted forced motivation. Great design can lie simply in the acceptance that many times our products plainly do not need any explicit plan for reward-motivated behavior—whether that’s because they’re autotelic and provide their own intrinsic fun or value, or simply because the value they do provide is in their invisibility and essentialism.
To make a product attractive rather than just talk about the features
1. Let the user experience the features by running them through a sample.
2. Solve a user's problem rather than give a technical mechanism. E.g. Adobe photoshop allows the users to "remove red eyes", "darken the photograph", "lighten the photograph" etc.
Gauging intent is globally important, but especially when ushering someone into a linear flow from a more open, explorative environment. This comes purely down to the parallel between increased linearity and reduced control. By limiting options and directing someone through a constrained path, you’re essentially taking control away from them. Do this for long enough, and you run the risk of people becoming disinterested and losing motivation. Once you’re sure that a linear process is necessary and you’ve determined the essential elements and features for this linear flow, keep the following optimizations in mind:
1. Limit Options. The first step to linearity is to limit the available options and actions to the bare minimum required. When entering into a linear flow, we can reasonably assume that we must cater for a period of focused attention. That means being ruthless with the options we present and removing any distractions, clearly grouping and spacing related elements, and ensuring that copy is terse and clear.
2. Understand the Path to Completion. By their nature, linear paths have an ideal endpoint. Keep this endpoint in mind and constantly question how any decision you make allows for progression toward this.
3. Display Progression. Similarly, find ways to communicate someone’s progression through this process. “Linear” doesn’t always mean short and doesn’t ever have to mean compressed. In many cases, our linear flows might be broken down into multiple smaller steps. Whether our linear flows are explicitly stepped through or progress is a little more ambiguous, we should look to communicate how far toward this aforementioned end goal someone is at any point. This can be done through explicit progress indicators, such as numbered steps or progress bars, or through implicit indicators, such as Almost there! prompts.
4. Be Explicit and Timely. Linear moments in interfaces suffer immensely if ambiguity is introduced into the equation. Furthermore, delayed responses—such as waiting until the end state of a checkout flow to show an error in the first section of the address form—can be equally as catastrophic. Shallow processing and linear flows go hand-in-hand, so ensure that any signifiers and mental models used in communicating concepts are as universally recognizable as possible. A truly linear interface, although rarely encountered in real life, would rely exclusively on recognition and not require any learning or memorizing at all.
5. Design the End State. One of the most important aspects of any flow, but specifically a linear one, is how we present the success or completion state. If the flow involves some form of deletion, then take the learnings of empty states and apply them here. If it involves the creation of data, such as a new Tweet, then present an All done!’ message of some kind and, wherever possible, show their creation in context. If someone has given up control to follow a constrained and linear path to creating, removing, or editing something, the least we can do is let them see clearly that their changes were successful.

Non Linearity
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By thinking beyond the obvious visuals and offering multiple paths to the same solution, encouraging exploration and learning, and consistently providing timely feedback, we’re able to create environments that are open enough for self-expression and perceived mastery, but not so opaque or idiosyncratic that they’re too dense to be usable.
VIM and Trello are two examples which follow the non-linearity path. Trello balances between the two.
Research is what takes the amorphous, fuzzy blob that is the idea we have of the people who we’re designing for and turns it into a sharpened, well-documented set of findings, examples, hypotheses, and problem definitions. Most importantly though, everything we do at this stage is bubbling with potential sources of empathy and compassion. This is our chance to truly learn about the humans for whom we’re creating our products. To observe our audience, in all their fallibility and idiosyncrasy, while our project is still comparatively free of bias and guesswork is the best chance we get to truly understand why the thing we’re creating needs to exist.

About Personas
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Customer Research must mean  "Getting to know people on an emotional and motivational level is absolutely critical at this phase. While data is an essential part of presenting research findings, it’ll never be more important than the intrinsic understanding we can get from delving into the emotional underpinnings of people’s problems, frustrations, excitement, and motivation."

Regardless of how deep into a project you’ll be involved, your understanding of the human aspects of the problem it intends to solve will be of much more important than an accessible and well-documented market analysis.

Now, deep breaths because here are my problems with user personas. First and foremost, they are manufactured empathy, an abstraction of a human being often distilled into a banal and mundane list of life experiences, skills, abilities, and preferences. Human beings do not fit into such a box. All of us have idiosyncrasies, bad days, things we enjoy, secrets, desires, dreams, and ambitions. It’s impossible to cram all of this into an entire book, never mind the single PowerPoint slide format that most personas occupy.
Second, personas can suffer greatly from a cascade of bias and assumption, depending on how many people there are between the people who’ve been observed and the weird, digital protohuman that sits in your research slide deck. It’s impossible, when creating these fantastical fictional characters, to avoid project-level, colleague-level, and personal-level biases and assumptions. So we often end up with personas that not only fail to represent even a fraction of the humanity that we’re really designing for, but that are essentially pre-judged and pre-victimized by the unconscious and systemic biases that live within our teams and ourselves. The overwhelming majority of manifestations of user personas I have witnessed in my career have served both as placation for executives that we feel are too busy, too important, or too removed from the project to display true empathy and as a convenient dictionary of the biases of our teams and companies.
Once we’ve traded away people’s frustrations, eccentricities, and self-expression for nicely formatted human-shaped pigeon holes, these artifacts often become the single point of reference throughout our work until we finally get some working prototypes and ideas in front of real people. This is a dangerous and insidious precedent in an industry that is already insufficient in the empathy department.

Persona Identification/Creation
Research and planning should provide you with answers to the following key questions:
How do I succinctly define the problem we are solving?
Who are we solving this problem for and what makes them tick as human beings?
What frustrates these people?
What motivates them?
What distracts them?
What kind of environments are these problems encountered in?
What mental models already exist in this problem space?
How could our product hurt, or otherwise negatively impact, someone who uses it?

Research and planning usually result in some of the following artifacts:
Competitor and customer research reports
Stakeholder interviews
User personas
Empathy maps
Problem definitions
Research videos and documentation
Usability analysis (for existing products or for your competitors)

Design Brief should answer the following questions
Who are we designing for?
What is the proposed solution?
What features are we going to include?

Design Testing
THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
Design testing should answer the following questions:
What false assumptions have I made?
What biases have I introduced in my work?
Does our product “work” in real-world situations?
Am I still solving the correct problems?

THE COMMON DELIVERABLES
Design testing will usually result in the following:
User testing reports and videos
Usability analyses
Accessibility analyses
UX reviews
A/B test reports
Snap-judgment test reports
Revised versions of other deliverables (new wireframes, prototypes, or designs to accommodate test findings, for example)

On Storyboarding
While storyboarding an important aspect is to capture the emotions associated with the different actions in addition to the friction that the user may encounter in using the interface.
Storyboarding allows us to present a condensed version of the moment story we’re trying to tell while still communicating the fundamental goals, motivations, points of friction, climax, and ending that constitute our moments.
A simple approach to storyboarding is to stick to nine panels, have your beginning panel set the scene—preferably with goals and motivations—spend the next six panels incorporating your potential app steps, and finally have panel seven as the moment of climax, panel eight as your ending, and panel nine as a moment of reflection. You can (and should) produce multiple storyboards per moment if you need to communicate more points of friction, different scenarios, and contrasting or conflicting goals and motivations. My advice for a storyboard is to follow a simple framework, starting with a template and following some set steps
Like any group brainstorming session, you’ll want to go away after the meeting and prune the ideas and suggestions that arose. While nobody wants to see their ideas discarded (and this is why we do it after the meeting, as opposed to looking a developer straight in the eye and tearing their Post-it up in front of them), an integral part of our jobs is ensuring that our work is representative and grounded. If the CEO thinks that someone will feel “delighted and in complete awe” at the “seeing-pricing-for-the-first-time” panel in a story, we’ll need to find a way to ease that out in favor of the more realistic “concerned-about-financial-impact” and “wondering-if-this-product-is-actually-worth-it” suggestions we might have. (In this case, feel free to do the whole staring-while-tearing-a-Post-it-up power play—it’s only the CEO.)
An obvious red flag is the kind of unbridled optimism that anyone who might describe a company as “my baby” (founders, CEOs, investors who like to overstep boundaries, etc.) might display. Being overly attached to a product’s success to the point where one believes it to be a flawless solution, devoid of any potential malaise, represents a special kind of myopia. In fact, one of the most important skills you can learn as a designer (that, unfortunately, tends to only come with experience) is the ability to quell this kind of optimism-ad-nauseum without appearing as if you’re a prodigal spoilsport who only exists to ruin dreams and scare children.
Other red flags include opinions from people who have lived a life of sheltered, abundant privilege, who have yet to prove capable of genuine empathy (apologies, but unless you’re working on an app to dodge mansion tax or a croquet-court finder, then coddling the opinions of ever-comfortable people can be one of the fastest ways to sink a product), suggestions that revolve completely around revenue, ideas that rely on manipulation, and proposals that appear completely rooted in “competitor X does this.” (Tread lightly with that last one, though, as competitor research is a hugely valuable insight into convention and mental model consistency.)

Conclusions
I feel that, in calling ourselves designers (of any kind), we accept a certain implicit responsibility to leave the world a little better off than we found it. Furthermore, I believe that the privileged among us should caveat that responsibility—to leave the world a little better than we found it—for people more vulnerable than us.
The ability of technology to augment human existence is an undoubtedly exciting concept and, with the amount of money and innovation in the technology industry right now, the impact of digital products on the world stands to be monumental. Yet, we still operate in an industry that’s rife with naivety, bias, and systemic oppression. As designers, this means that we’re often presented with ideas and problem definitions that are rarely harmonious with humans outside of the affluent world of tech entrepreneurship.
To achieve these goals, especially in an industry that seems to operate by its own rules, eschewing ethics in the name of profit under the cover of the mystique of programming and technological innovation, we must ensure that our process serves to elevate those who are far too often underrepresented in our work.
When an industry decides that plucky upstart founders who solve problems and get it done belong on a pedestal, when the distribution of venture capital is based on an almost instinctive appraisal of the usefulness of a product, when a gross misinterpretation of the satire that is meritocracy becomes the prevalent religion to its core demographic of white 20-something Californians, then the problems that get deemed worthy of solving tend to have a very noticeable, very white, very upper-middle-class feel to them.
While tech’s diversity struggles aren’t the only reason we seem so content to disregard self-expression and creativity in the name of control and dominance, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that a predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly affluent cohort presents as a hegemony with these apparent values.
Somewhere in the pursuit for unfettered growth and profit, design’s perceived role has shifted from democratization and empowerment through technology to invasive and manipulative vehicles of pop science at the behest of founders and investors. At a point in time when democracy is failing its most vulnerable, where racism and jingoism permeate every crack in the facade of social media, where the voices of those calling for a white ethnostate are amplified exponentially on a platform that is grossly incapable of suppressing hate speech, where online tools are used in months-long hate campaigns, I feel it’s an important time to revisit our ethical responsibilities. While it would be absurd to lay the blame of such sociopolitical malaise squarely at the feet of design and technology, I feel that, somewhere, somehow, our industry has dehumanized people at a time where we need most to see the vulnerabilities we design for. By breaking away from the common trend of self-serving, narrowly defined problem spaces, by seeing people—all types of people—for who they are, we can look to bring humanity and compassion back into our process.
People are messed up. They do weird things to themselves that fly in the face of survival instinct. Some of us harm ourselves because of chemical imbalances in our brains. Some of us have eating disorders. Some of us have drug addictions. Some of us can’t answer the phone or hold a conversation with a stranger due to anxiety and panic. We’re human beings and we grieve and we screw up and we get excited about silly things and we’re sometimes just as likely to sabotage ourselves as we are to celebrate or reflect positively on our life.
Until we factor this into our work by showing compassion, researching properly, educating ourselves on our privileges and biases, and until we earn our ridiculous salaries, day rates, egregious company perks, and the pedestals our industry so adores by actively designing and building for vulnerable, oppressed, and divergent human beings—how can we possibly say we’re making this world a better place? By releasing yet another product that is only usable by those who meet our ridiculous salaries, day rates, egregious company perks, and the pedestals our industry so adores by actively designing and building for vulnerable, oppressed, and divergent human beings—how can we possibly say we’re making this world a better place? By releasing yet another product that is only usable by those who meet our ridiculously narrow defaults, by those who are capable of the cognitive cost of “normal” attentional faculty—whether through not experiencing poverty, anxiety, sociological impact, or neurodivergence—or by those who simply fit nicely into our abstracted assumption of what makes for a normal human being, what are we really contributing?
Homogeneity’s grip on the technology industry is something that needs to be tackled from multiple angles—and design is but one of these. Many of the tech darling products we aggrandize to the point of hero worship boil down, in essence, into a category of “things white dudes’ parents used to do for them until they moved to silicon valley”. These products make it easy and cheap to get rides to work, while capitalizing on systemic oppression and non-unionized labor. They make it simple to get dinner on the table, while heaping more pressure on an already overworked and underpaid industry of service and delivery workers. They make it easier to get your laundry done, easier to find a place for your fourth vacation of the year. Some of them even make that grueling last half mile of your trip to work slightly more bearable by polluting the streets with electric micro-scooters.
There are many trade-offs to this incessant pursuit of lukewarm innovation, though. An astonishing number of products that we hold up as trailblazing innovators (or unicorns if you want to be as insufferable as the tech press) exist because they’ve found technological solutions to exploiting loopholes. Whether that’s “technology” companies that are able to drive down prices due to dodging government regulations, CEOs with the charismatic depth of an STD claiming anti-union rhetoric as the key to success, the tone-deaf social media platform that refuses to do anything about its Nazi infestation lest it damage vanity metrics, or just your average everyday monolithic company paying 1% of the tax it’s supposed to—the apparent need for tech to subvert humanity and democracy to succeed is a vile byproduct of untempered attempts at innovation—using nothing but a framework of rhetoric, blame deflection, and a tone-deaf agreement that certain, arbitrary metrics are somehow directly translatable into fiscal value.
Modern-day tech capitalism relies on an onion-skin model of subversion. Everything from where the money comes from to pay salaries to the Rosetta-Stone-needed levels of legalese in terms and conditions to the general public’s willingness to gloss over the systemic oppression that is as integral to the bedrock of tech innovations as the server stacks and app stores they exist on (“Well, most of my clothes are made in sweatshops, so why should I care that my taxi driver gets paid an unlivable wage?”) feeds into this implicit, societal permission we give 20-something tech dudes to “go off and innovate.”
All of this leads us to a landscape where social media platforms suddenly become arbiters of perceived truth and conduits of political clout—where the companies that make the devices, operating systems, and browsers on which we live incrementally more of our lives are responsible for everything from waking us up in the morning to helping us maintain our mental health. The more this perpetuates, the more of a responsibility design becomes, and the harder we must work to serve the needs of real, fallible people.
Design, then, leaves us with a choice. As the interface between an underlying system and the model of that system in someone’s head, we can either introspect our system through the lens of humanity, or we can attempt to contort and convince and persuade humanity to interact with our system in ways we desire. The former is, simply, our job; but it’s hard, and we’ll face battles and make enemies, and we’ll likely get pushed back from many sides. The latter perpetuates the rather dystopian notion that humanity—including our cognitive faculty and even our very concept of self—is subservient to technology. That being hooked on apps, feeling the dopamine squirt of notifications and generally being the good user is simply the price of admission into a world of possibilities. At least, a world of possibilities if you’re a well-off white person in or around a major city with a decent tech hub and own a £1,000 phone.
Design should exist to serve humanity. Real humanity. Not some essence or abstraction of humanity, not the privileged, amalgamated assumptions of four white people sitting down to solve the next mundane problem in their lives. But real, fallible, vulnerable human beings. Humans whose daily struggles and sacrifices in the face of a world and an industry that shows them nothing but apathy and disdain deserve more than to just being a casual footnote on a persona, or a box-checking exercise in our research.

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