Lisa deBettencourt - Good Intentions and Bad Actors - #NUX7 - @ldebett

lisa has worked with a large group of recognizable recognized recognizable brands and recent was the VP of Design at confer health a biotech company building the first-ever clinical greed diagnostic testing for use at your home please welcome Lisa to give her talk good intentions and bad actors unleashing our true design superpowers [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so I said yes when Rick asked me to come here and speak and then I my pants so it was all very true but I also agree with what he said about it's a really really exciting time to be a designer it's so exciting there are so many things going on and I like to talk about how you know we have superpowers I want it I want to explain exactly what that means so if you think about what we do if you just take a moment and think about what we do what we're capable of every single day that I think we take for granted we take nothing and turn it into something that makes money for companies we take an idea we take a problem statement we take an observation and we run it through our design process and out the other end we make an amazing solution for people and along the way we also align our organization around that vision we say come on guys let's go this way we work with our developers we get things going and we make it happen we turn technology into value and in my mind that is an amazing superpower so the internet you know hasn't been along around for very long the world wide web has been around for about 25 years and the amount of things that we have been able to do in this short amount of time has been phenomenal I mean this this chart it always makes me laugh because now it's like literally a basic human need for everyone that we have access to this so for a few examples you know after I leave here I can peace out I can tap a little bit a couple taps on my on a piece of glass and I can a car shows up and off I go it's like I'm a James Bond supervillain and it's really amazing what was what what was what came together to make this happen I face time with my kids last night back in Boston before I went to before I went to bed we are able to keep in touch with families and distant countries nearby cities we do business online this is face to face real-time we have robots controlling the energy in our homes we have more power on our wrists than the computer that put a man on the moon and think about that for a second and at the same time it's also collecting all this data about us we have this gig economy we can take things that we own now and we can start to sell them when we can start to share them we can start to make money out of that or I can show up in Manchester and say where am I going to stay tonight oh this looks really cool and we've been able to sequence the blueprints of human life and the power and the technology is so amazing that it's now consumer eyes you can get genetic tests off the internet you can find out about now that the FDA changed some things you can find out about your history and less about whether you have a bracket gene or not we've basically democratized the out of everything we've taken middlemen out of all of these industries and we have direct access to this powerful powerful technology however there's a lot of risk involved every single one of those examples have come with some sort of downside to them some consequences happened to every single of those companies you know the nest it suddenly just turned your your house up to like let me do the math 80 degrees what's that 35 degrees Celsius when our products get out to market we often have no idea what's really gonna happen out in the wild how people are actually going to use our product we can do usability testing we can prepare for errors and omissions we can prepare for workflow challenges but when real people when the real market get a hold of our products we have literally no idea what's gonna happen and what about the bad actors what about the trolls what about the that get a hold of what we do what can they use what can they do with our products to cause harm and we really need to think about this because as designers we spend so much time thinking about how amazing things are going to be and we worked so hard on ensuring that that actually comes true we have the best intentions we want to make people's lives better we want to make things easier and yet it doesn't matter what your intentions were the road to hell is paved with good intentions it doesn't actually matter what you intended well we're trying to move the meat needle we're trying to we're trying to improve people's health we're trying to make things easier these disruptions have not happened without consequence and we really really need to pay attention to this like I said the nest you know it can be annoying that it changed the temperature but what about what happens on something like snapchat where where teenagers are being bullied to the point where they actually commit suicide what about what about some other things some other criminal activities what if venimos you being used for drug transactions what are these kinds of things that that could actually happen in the real world how do we get there what what's going on we spend so much time thinking about our processes right we have codified our design process and then I did a quick search and this is this is what actually came up and I have to say one of the great things about being an in design is that we have the most beautiful design processes if you look at engineering if you do this like mechanical engineering design process it's an absolute disaster so we spend a lot of time codifying our design processes so how is this that this is happening how is that we're not really truly thinking about the impact that we have because intentions are important but impact matters more so let's chat with my friend Alyssa and I was talking about this top because I'm really really passionate about this I've worked so much of my career in these really complicated environments in healthcare in security and so in enterprise as well you know a lot of these things are constantly baked in we're always thinking about when things can go sideways but as I started working with startups I'm realizing that they don't have that especially the designers the design team who I'm really closely working with they don't have that that muscle memory they don't have those processes baked into what they do every day and the culture and the teens that they're in they're not they're not there yet we always have impact the work that we do always has impact it may be intentional impact right we want to make things better and then we can see hey things are made better things are easier things are faster this is great but we also have unintentional impact and we have to really think about that and prepare for that once your product out there once your product is out there it really doesn't matter what your intentions were so let's take a bigger look right so like I said I'm starting to work with more and more startups more and more small companies the Lean Startup model I love this it's super complicated but again beautiful in its way the first two circles of the design process but in a larger context so if you look at design thinking we find a problem we work it through the process we have a hypotheses we try things out then we start to sketch out some solutions we work with the developers and we iterate iterate iterate we might pivot come back but we basically let the ball go between the yellow and the green circles we're done and we go back to the beginning of the process right we let the business figure out the rest of it so we're in here cycling through this ideation concept development detailed design working with the dev team all of that kind of stuff and we rinse and repeat we take the next JIRA ticket or we texted we take the next problem statement from our product manager we're letting the business figure it out we're not spending any time in the spaces that I'm that I'm working with now not so much in insecurity that's pretty much baked in but where we're finding that we're not spending the time to think about what could go wrong at a larger scale what can happen what can break what can fail how can people abuse the system and in my opinion this is making us irresponsible and bordering on negligent and this is really really important so as I've been talking about this with people in my community I'm starting to see okay I'm trying to look for signs it's actually people or other people thinking about this or other people worried about this and and I'm trying and I'm starting to pick up a little bit so this was a tweet that came out actually a few days ago as I was finalizing my slides I thought oh my god this is perfect I'm gonna I'm gonna take a screenshot of this it's truly time for us to take responsibility for the work that we do it is time and that's and that comes with design maturity you know we've only been a software and digital designers we've only been working in the space for like 20 years and I've seen the evolution and it's time for us to actually start thinking ahead and thinking about that impact more seriously and also bake it into our design process start thinking about what is the what does the future look like when this thing is out there what's at scale what happens if people start to abuse it and so on and so there's tools out there as I said the engineering processes if you google those you'll see a lot of interesting ones the basic process is pretty simple so we don't have to go oh my god I gotta go reinvent some some new tools I gotta go find a process that that's gonna work for us it's actually pretty standard you start with identifying the problems you start with identifying what could potentially go wrong what could go sideways who could abuse if I was a criminal and I was thinking of furiously what could what could I do with this feature project product right what could actually happen consider consider when a lot of people a lot of people are on it or using it think about those kinds of things and do it at every step of the process even when you just have an idea an idea for a problem that you need to solve assess what are the chances of that actual bad thing happening they could be high it could be low and then what's the impact what's the potential impact that could happen if it actually goes sideways how bad could it be then you analyze it you say alright what are all the environmental conditions that need to occur for this bad thing to happen is it like you know this one thing happened and this other condition is true and then something else happens something else happens so it's really really rare or is it like oh no actually just you know launching me up anybody using the app anybody using the product it could actually happen and then try to mitigate it so put a mitigation in place so poka-yoke a-- if has anybody read poka-yoke a-- before oh sweet you guys awesome um comes out of Toyota lean manufacturing the 60s and so the idea is that you're basically you're baking in you're designing in the prevention mechanism into the into in their case manufacturing so that it can't be it can't have any problems right it your mistake proofing it which is what polka yoga means your mistake proofing that part so if something could go wrong you're actually preventing it in the design itself from happening and that's the most important one and that's why I've highlighted here because you really want to think about how do I actually bake in the prevention of abuse and criminal activity into the system this is very high level and then last you want to verify can is it actually gonna do the thing that is that actually gonna fix it is actually gonna do the thing that I wanted to do and so you know we need to we need to think about this like I said at every stage in the process is this a very high level process but these are the basic steps along the way let me let me show you some examples of other domains that use this kind of process throughout their whole their whole design process so architecture I worked for five years with a company audit called Autodesk you guys from the Autodesk hopefully 3d modeling tools they do a lot of really interesting things I was working in architecture engineering construction discipline and if you look at their process in architecture right they've been around for hundreds of years and they've kind of you know perfected the way that they build buildings so at every stage in the process before a single grain of sand is moved on-site they're thinking about risk mitigation in their concepts they're thinking about impact of the building on the site they're thinking about the impact of the building on it neighbors they're thinking about how to shape and form things not just physically but also from a social perspective are the neighbors gonna be pissed off who's gonna be really frustrated with this new this new thing happening or the the people in the community going to be frustrated with the school renovation they're thinking about all of these things at scale micro and macro and then they actually have a literal analysis process a step in their process that they use and but it's it's a little bit it's a it's their they call it out here but it's really actually happening throughout the whole the whole beginning of the process so let me show you an example so this is a solar radiation tool this is actually something I worked on this is the tool that I worked on eight years ago and you drop a 3d model into this and you can simulate how the Sun is going to react or act on the the building and the site and you can move the Sun around and you can see during the different course different times of the year how it's actually gonna work is the building and again enough daylight in certain areas or enough people inside going to have access to daylight if this is a school that's really important if it's an office building it's really important it looks at shadows does it cast shadows in certain directions and you can and you can also measure the heat load so how much air-conditioning you may have to pump into this and you can shape the building in a different way so you don't have to have this is building performance you don't have to have as much energy demand which affects you know the climate on this building just simply by using this tool and then it's scale you can put the you can put the building the model inside it's an urban environment on the site and you can start to see the impact on other buildings you start to see the wind movement with this new building put in place and you can look at it over different points of the year and you can start to prepare yourself for the discussions that you need to have with other people whether it's the owner of the building or the or the community is their neighbor gonna be mad that you just block their line of sight there's line of sight laws that they have to worry about and on and on and on and architecture isn't the only one they're not the only folks that start thinking about this analysis and what's going to happen when their design is putting to use is this a six gonna get you know literally lift up off of the ground as it starts to hit speed so they do a lot of these models a lot of these analyses and then what's the impact of those cars on the road so Road designers they simulate traffic conditions over the course of a day over the course of a month over the course of the holidays over the course of the year and they say do we need to change the road design do we need to put some mitigation in place to actually minimize the impact on people's commutes or or change the road or add another exit or something like that they think about this in advance and then lastly as as you just heard I was working on a medical device before the FDA requires that we actually document go through that process and document every single step in the process and we have to file that documentation with the FDA to say we thought about all these things here's the impact here's what we think is gonna happen and here's our mitigation plan okay so you might say okay that's great lovely but you know what I'm doing really cool stuff why do I need to worry about this stuff I'm good I'm good where I am I get paid pretty well business figures at uh nobody's asking me to actually step up and think about impact and think about risk but I say why not us why aren't we getting ahead of this why aren't we considering the impact of our design we're seeing what's happening out there right we're seeing what's what's changing we're seeing the impact of organizations that don't think about what could be done with their tools and their services you know I constantly hear designers especially young designers that are like you know the business doesn't value what I do they don't value me and I think well they do value because they hired you and they're making a ton of money off of you right but they want to be they want to be at the table where the decisions are made they want to have more influence on the business and I say if you want to influence the business you need to think about what the business cares about and business cares about risk mitigation they care about legal fees they care about how much money they're making they care about what happens when things are out there and if you can be someone that raises awareness and talks to people inside your organization say I can help you fix this I can help you prevent it from happening I can help you make sure that when your products get out there people aren't gonna be harmed or that bad things aren't going to happen or things aren't gonna go sideways and here's how we do it then your value inside the organization actually goes up so I'll tell you a quick story this is Central Park so in 1853 the New York City commissioned a design competition for Central Park and this guy Frederick Law Olmsted was a horticulturist he was had really strong political ideas and very strong social ideas and he said oh this is interesting and he partnered with this guy Calvert and he and who's an architect and he said you know what I believe that people's activities and behaviors are affected by the environment they're in and Gardens are lovely and people are peaceful when they're in gardens so let's actually build a park where it's the crime prevention is built in let's actually build and design a park where people go there and have lovely leisurely activities they enjoy nature they enjoy their time there and they don't have to worry about being attacked while they're there so he actually they actually won the competition and they designed this greensward plant and this is what was built now part of the plan was actually they had to maintain it over time so like shrubs were always really low there was no place for criminals to hide there were all kinds of things that were literally built into the environment to prevent crime and obviously there were some maintenance issues so there were some some lapses in that but this was the original intent right there was no landscape architecture industry at the time no one asked him to think about crime prevention when he was doing this design but guess what he started getting invited to commissions meetings to talk about what are the things can we do in New York City to prevent crime in the built environment what else can we do to think about ways that aren't just like getting more police on the ground to prevent crime and so his value in the eyes of New York City started to go up okay quickly what I want you guys to do I mean I want you to just take two seconds and think for a second the project or project that you're currently working on and ask yourself what would happen if a million people started using it and including those million people were some bad actors what could they do to it do you have a data store that you're collecting information and all of a sudden that has value could they disrupt it do you creating a backdoor into this network of users what if you already have a million and what a 10 million people were using it how about a hundred million what could potentially go sideways if that was the case and then what could you design in place to prevent that from happening or who do you need to talk to to put in better security measures or think more about strengthening something to prevent that from happening it's a very small thought exercise but this is something that we should be doing every single day as we work on products and services we shouldn't be waiting for an invitation so this is something I'm really passionate about I talk a lot about it with the people that I work with in Boston and I'm talking about it as much as I can I want to start integrating this into into our work right so I would love to hear your feedback your thoughts work with me if you have ideas if you're already doing that that's amazing I want to continue to raise this awareness because we need to actually get ahead of this we need to start influencing the design making bodies including ourselves because we make a lot of decisions to think more about this think more proactively and get ahead of and get ahead of this and then with that I think truly that's gonna that's gonna unleash our true design superpowers not only we're going to be making amazing things and great value for the companies that we serve in our and of course our customers but it's going to raise our value inside the organization thank you [Applause] you talked about maturity sorry of the industry which is 20 to 25 yes ish with Internet so the Internet's been around for that long we a lot of the people in this room will probably be in there a lot less time than that I mentioned earlier on that you know the Facebook has made certain decisions to do certain product things with regards to kind of relationships there are lots of other things in the world where decisions have been made which aand right or ethical or humane do you think it's purely maturity thing and or how can it be flipped around well it's funny because actually in the in the back I was talking with Christina about this because we were kind of joking that this is basic attorneys like an ethics conference for better or worse but we're talking about really really important things and and so we were we were talking about these humane approaches and how I said to her you know I feel like I'm a mom to a lot of these young designers because they're like yeah we can this really cool saying we do this and they just don't they just haven't been there and they haven't experienced the things that that we've kind of been through that we have the experience with so if it's not literally codified in our processes that they learn in school if they learn as part of the design practice then I think it's gonna take a lot of pain for them to actually come up to speed on it so yeah so I think that's why we have to actually start to codify it and put it into our standard operating procedure but I do think that that maturity is a big part of it cuz we've never done that yeah I mean it's a big it's it it's a big challenge because you've got the likes of Google who just revolted against a decision to work with Pentagon and certain contracts and then you've got Amazon who turned around and Geoff Beiser says well if it's not going to be Austin that 10 billion dollar contract it's going to be somebody else right yeah money is a huge motivator yeah and how do you see it join them because if if there's a CEO wanting to make money then they're gonna try and go one way yeah there'll be designers or other professionals who want to go the other way and kind of Google revolted on that because of the amount of people within Google who wrote the letter right through they say your Jersey yeah is it will it take another 20 years for ethics and humane decisions to be made where's the thing yeah so so we're already seeing it with Facebook right if we don't do it and if companies are only chasing the money the government's gonna come in and start putting regulation in on us and they're gonna start saying these are the these are the things that you actually have to do which is what happened with architects right they're like you can't build a building that doesn't stand up sorry and it has to be earthquake prone in those earthquake prone environments and it has to be this and it has to be that so the the architects are a they have to abide by certain local state national codes there has to be so much air turnover and circulation and building right so so I don't know what that looks like for software cuz it's not like we all do buildings but there's probably gonna be some kind of regulation if we don't step up and start self-regulating or if the if the organizations don't start to actually have a better humane approach to how do you feel about that because I know I think maybe in last year the air before we did briefly chat about regulation of the industry that we work within we are probably the most unregulated industry yeah for the massive impact that we do have across whether it's a website or a service and or the jumping robot which I mentioned this morning or the creepy robot I see the dances no need to be fame there's a there's the Boston Dynamics just released a video a couple days ago where the robot dances it's a really amazing it's terrifying and hilarious all at the same time because the one that opens doors is just as creepy and yeah it's a you know how do you think it is gonna be another 20 years before decisions are made way the thing is by 20 years time we're gonna not just have dancing robots it's gonna be throwing flames over its yeah please and how do I feel about regulation yeah you know there's also a discussion about licensure are you are you yeah so there's a couple of really loud voices that are talking about requiring designers to be licensed I was fundamentally against that until the past couple of years then I'm like oh no I have to think more about it because of the unintended consequences yeah so I think it we need to start talking about it we need to start getting ahead of it start thinking about what does that actually mean what are we what are we what do we want before we get that regulation imposed on us I mean I haven't spawned people within the depths of Facebook enough to understand their process for working within government for instance we go through something called a service assessments or if we are working on a on a service we will sit down with a panel of a designer really product owner potentially or a lead service assessor user researcher and a technical panelists as well and that is almost a second guess all of the crazy that you could potentially see so you know we would sit down and say have you thought about this have you gone about that why on earth did you go down that road and we will try and bring things back round do you know of other companies that do that in the private world and if not is that something that we could look at you think so I've worked for a lot of companies where that is actually built into their a process but it's not it's number one it's not designed live but it's built in but I've been working for these enterprise companies or like security companies or healthcare healthcare is like full of risk yeah right so if I'm if I'm working on a service that allows a physician to get a quick access to a medical record I have to also think about and we're forced to think about well who else is gonna have access to that medical record if they get access to that physicians identity and we're creating all these great ways to have quick access because like you know someone's on someone's dying on the table and you need to find out if they're allergic to some to penicillin are you gonna kill them you're gonna make them better and there's like life you know life-altering decisions that they have to make and they have to have quick access well as soon as you make this access easy who else can get it and what danger does that does that create so yeah I've worked a lot of companies but not what I'm starting now starting to work in these startups in the consumer space and even hell even health-related startups they just don't have that that that mindset to think about think about those things and actually build it in there just like quick go and then let just let the business figure it out later because it's some point that's in a particular moment in time lines probably a benefit to the fact that they are so widely interviewed as cake spoke a long time ago about you know it's the babies we're to understand something they don't understand anything so they just want it wide view yeah but at some point the parent has to come along and bring them back and see did they break a leg they break up you know they like fall off of something and they break and they go I was a dumb idea or a parent has to come quit you know yeah a parent care Swisher's and may follow Kara Swisher she's a tech writer tech journalist she keeps talking about where are the adults in the room in Silicon Valley where are the adults in the room why didn't anyone at uber say it's really not okay for these drivers to like rape their passengers or for someone to have like a dossier of the of someone who's suing them and like trying to attack them like that's a bad idea guys what are you thinking so yeah so you'd have to have to learn by doing painfully learn by doing or have some adult in the room yeah thank you very much [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: northernux

Views: 110

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux7

Id: 0MQ5ITRLx50

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2019