Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, developers and designers. This is episode number 99 of the Drunken UX Podcast. I am your host, Michael Fienen and I could not be more excited because this being 99 means our next episode is number 100 and I am absolutely stoked.

this episode. You’re gonna want to listen to all the way to the end next episode. Let’s just say I’m putting some announcements in my pocket that are gonna be coming out there. It’s really gonna make into the season hard because there’s only four more episodes after that and I have to come up with a season finale to do them. And I’m, I’m burning all my gas here on these two episodes.

So we’re gonna have to um, Aaron, I have some homework for you to say the least. Okay, plan the finale for me and all of it, all of it.

Yeah, sure.

folks, I’m super excited about this and if you want to know how excited, I am, Be sure to check us out over on the social networks, if you have twitter, if you have facebook slash drunken UX, if you’re on instagram, it’s slash drunken UX podcast. If you want to chat with us anytime discord is up and running, just go to drunken UX dot com slash discord. Well, I went to the liquor store, I have stocked up on some new Scotch.

I’m gonna break out something particularly special for our next episode. Um this episode I will be enjoying and I’m pretty sure I have had this on the show before, but it’s a Cardhu 12. Um Cardew is a somewhat harder to find. Is that a fair, it’s not easy to find, it’s not like super special or anything either.

Oh no, no, no, no. Car. Do I enjoy rocks? Yeah, on the rocks. Um Cardoza, space side scotch, it’s quite nice. I think of it very much like a very rich apple pie, like it’s sweet but not sugary, it’s not sugary sweet at all. It’s like a really old fashioned like rich apple pie or apple cobbler, like when you bite into one of those apples and it’s got a little bit of crunch to it, but like you’ve got that sort of soppy white fruit flavor to,

little nutmeg, but it’s a very, it’s a very fruit forward type of scotch, which is typical for space side.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Um the right way to drink tequila is the way you like it.

before we jump into our our topic for this evening, which I know I have not told you yet. That’s silly because you’ve seen the title of the episode at this point. So you know, kind of where we’re going with this. But um it is the start of october. There are two big things happening right now that you should definitely go and check out. The first is and we have talked about this in past episodes.

The 2021 state of CSS survey is now open for submissions. All right. That they collect a bunch of information about what, you know, new CSS features. People are using what newer newish features, you know, in the last couple of years that have now had a little time. You know, what have people learned are they using it? Are they not using it? Um What frameworks are they using? Uh It is always interesting.

It’s a very well put together survey. It’s a very in depth survey. So it always it produces a lot of really good data in my opinion.

Yeah, it this is up at state of CSS dot com. You have to sign up for an account for it. It’s super painless because what they do is um the survey is long, I will warn you ahead of time. Um It’s multiple pages of lots of questions. You’re probably not gonna want to sit down and fill it out all in one go. I’ll just warn you ahead of time.

But if you have the time and you’re willing to sit down and go through those questions, it is very helpful for understanding how designers are using CSS right now, but so you set up the account, that account can save your progress that way.

Um So that state of CSS go check it out, go felt the survey contribute some data to it, even if you’re new and I should emphasize that like it is okay if you are a junior front end developer or designer that you don’t know anything about CSS that data is still valuable to the survey to help understand because one of the things they ask is how many years of experience you have and they chart that out to kind of show where respondents are in their journey across stuff.

So even if you don’t know a lot of that stuff, it’s okay to go fill that survey out. So check that out number two,

and I mean they’re probably out right now.

there. Okay, I just use a good first issue.

with so remember the overlay fact sheet when we were talking about that Karl Grove’s little project, I say little project as the guy is not the stalwart of the industry.

Um he’s got this site where you can go and sign your name to it to say, hey, I am an accessibility minded or designer or developer, I’m going to commit to these principles and so you go to the github repo you pull the files, you add your name to it and you make a pr those don’t count and they even explicitly call that out now in the, you know, sort of rules of Octoberfest that those kinds of prs do not count towards your total.

There is a discord for

That’s cool. Yes. Yeah. Discord dot g slash Octoberfest. Nice. So I will throw a link to that in the show notes in case anybody wants to uh to find that um to help we have a couple of projects we’re working on. You’ll learn more about these very soon. But if you go to git hub dot com slash drunken you x, you’ll find a couple of repose there. We have been actively tagging some issues that are marked as good first issue.

And so if you want to go grab one of those and lend a pr to it or some assistance to it. Those who are great starting points, they are some of them are incredibly trivial.

Um and I am intentionally leaving them out there in case somebody wants to come in, your learning html, you’re learning how git hub works, whatever and you want to take something very simple and I have intentionally left some of those out there so that those can be grabbed for anybody wants to take part. We would love to help you do that.

So run by its Octoberfest dot digital ocean dot com or just google Octoberfest. We’ll post some stuff about it throughout the month as well. Um I’ll share some of those issues and things so um check it out and have fun, go make some commits, its october

Okay, so

It’s 20, I welcome a fiery death, thank you very much

I have favorite fire. Uh so in preparation of this episode, I went through all of our previous episodes and found 24 different episodes where we are kind of like flirting with this idea and we didn’t have a name for it at the time but we kept getting closer and closer to this kind of this intersection or nexus of like accessibility and inclusive design and like away from dark are hostile patterns and just like this general like, you know, almost a design philosophy like we discussed with Greg Padonovich Way Back in season one, was season one or is it the season 2? Beginning of season 2? episode 14 and

that would still have been one. Oh, was it 26 episodes?

Yeah, it’s something that we’ve, I think especially recently, cause when, uh, when Aaron told me, Hey, yeah, the first time we used that phrase was an episode 90, I’m like, that can’t be right. We had to have said it earlier than that. And I went back into the search on the website.

I’m like, you know, the first time the phrase kind of design shows up in our show notes or in our transcripts is in episode 90 at so it’s something though that we have put, I think a lot of emphasis on, especially as you’ve heard us use this phrase hostile design a lot and hostile design I think extends from the phrase dark patterns. This is something that I think most of you will be familiar with or have heard us talk about before.

There’s a website darkpatterns.org that is pretty well known at this point. Um, this notion of bad things basically um, dark you X is another phrase and, and we kind of, I think came to this understanding that, you know, hostel design is the thing that surrounds dark you X dark patterns and inaccessible design, social considerations

but

And a good example here, just to throw it out there and not to bring politics into any of this.

But it is literally the best example of hostile design in action that we’ve seen in the last four years is the attention that has been drawn to the RNC s um, the Republican National Committee’s um, donation page and the boxes that they include on that with language that is meant to deceive with boxes that are meant to obfuscate their purpose in an attempt to sneak into your, into your cart, which is a specific dark pattern.

Um, the process of making you donate every single month, whether or not that is really what your goal is, uh, I genuinely cannot think of a better example of hostile design in action than that right now.

Yeah, yeah. They’re, they’re definitely foils of each other. I think very directly,

that overlay fact sheet that we mentioned earlier that sprung out of this. Access A B is what is called an accessibility overlay. Okay, what what is an overlay meant to do? It’s it’s meant to cover things, right?

in the messaging in the wording in the responses if you go back. Listen, I don’t remember which episode was where it came up, but do a search on our site, you’ll find it um where we talked about this and what strikes me is this notion of, you know, we’re kind design starts one of the first things I think has to come out of that is your intent.

The same way hostel design brings with it, an intent, an intent to treat the the user as a hostile witness on the stand, so to speak. Um, and kind design implies things like when somebody comes to you and says there is a problem.

You listen and you do something about it. And when users came out of the woodwork during this whole affair and started saying, here are the ways this tool affects me negatively as somebody with, you know, various accessibility needs on a website and their response to that was well we’re not the ones who are wrong, you’re wrong. You know, what’s what’s the Simpsons? The principal? Uh yeah, kids are the kids wrong.

are wrong if the kids are the ones who are wrong. Yeah, it was that kind of thing and that’s where you can draw the line in the sand and say, okay, you’re not practicing kind design because one and we’re going to get into this and talk about like what makes up kind design and there are steps, there are actionable things that you can write down and one of those things is listening and responding to user needs now how you do.

that depends kind of where in kind design you fall, there are many ways that you can respond to that but throwing it away and saying we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing and not make our product better in the face of legitimate criticism. You lost the game

at this point, right? Is it fair to say? And this let me tie in like one of those Clickbait things, right, waterfall is dead. It’s like I said, it’s not, but it should be a waterfall methodology in general and now if you’re not familiar like there are different uh different ideas about how you create a product, right, and how you maintain that Agile is kind of the one that everybody sort of has in one flavor or another.

Yeah, yeah. So what waterfall does is a series of steps. There are five steps that you go through, you do requirements, building design, implementation, verification, and testing and then deployment and maintenance and then you are done. Mhm There is no cycle to it, that deployment and maintenance step is sort of vague and un encompassing and it doesn’t ever mean that you necessarily start over.

Mhm So waterfall in general is I think a method that has outlived its usefulness in our industry everything now while even and what we’re going to talk about here is not necessarily agile. The thing that makes agile valuable is the notion that it is a cycle. So just like you say accessibility is not a goal, it is a process, you’re always working on it. Why are you always working on it? Because technology is always changing.

We have, you know, voice over technology now that we didn’t have 10 and 15 years ago we have, you know, assistive technology for motor skills didn’t have, you know, back when we first started building these websites, Technology changes. So process changes and engaging in these cycles of development is what helps you do this.

So, this will be a refrain that you hear, not just in this episode, but anytime you’re talking to people about good web design, good web app design. The ones that are really successful are the ones who have this sort of cycle that goes over and over and over because that’s how you do this. Right. Mhm. So let’s let’s dig in on this a little bit. Kind design is an umbrella.

And The reason like to kind of give you some scope on what Aaron did. He went and found 24 of our episodes 24 episodes is a full quarter of our shows at this point. That’s not including

which I was lazy to keep producing it.

drunken Ux. Episodes one in every four episodes talked about something that falls under this umbrella that But we get into things and the phrases that we’ve used in the past. Uh we said episode 90 was where the words kind design finally came out, what you may have heard before, that were things like universal design, accessible design, inclusive design.

And I think maybe it’s important to take a second and understand what those are because it’s easy to say, well, aren’t you know what, why do we have three names for the same thing and why are you just calling it kind design? Are you? You know why? So you’re just trying to game out some, you know, we’re trying to make fetch a thing. Can I say that? Is that is that that’s that’s I’m sure our audience look at that.

Is that a reference that I’m too old to make now? I don’t know, you’re not

Okay. Yeah. So we’re not trying to make fetch a thing uh for what it’s worth. Universal design. Let’s start there. Right. Because this is one that you probably have heard of. Maybe you haven’t heard of. But it has, I think the longest lineage, where does universal design come from? You’re going to see it if you start researching back in it, it’s a very architecturally architecturally focused discipline.

Um Industrial design was big on the universal design process. Like this came out of the analog world and it was picked up and we started applying it two the web and similar. You know, this is where you what we’re gonna be talking about here is similar to well, are you using them? Or atomic CSS or attack eons. And it’s like they’re all conventions and they’re always to help you write CSS better.

There are some things about them that are similar. There are some things that are somewhat different but they all have a similar goal. They’re all a set of conventions and that’s why Aaron had said like kind design is sort of the philosophy. It’s the thing that ties these together these individual practices.

motivation

Oh that who on one planet with somebody delete the A. And triple A. Records for their D. N. S. I mean, come on,

There is 1/4 spoke to this wheel that what you just said made me realize we didn’t put it in the notes. And the fact that I missed this really says a lot about me, um ethical design also falls into this because that’s where like what you were just talking about.

You know what the art of data collection and data privacy deals in absolutely deals in kind design. But also ethical design helps you actually outline the steps and processes by which you will say here is the data we will collect. Here’s how we will review it. Here’s how we will get rid of it when we are done with it.

one of 2 or three episodes on GDP our new

Yeah, let’s say that.

um this actually leans also into what you were saying about like the notion of hey I can check the boxes of accessibility but not be exercising kind design. You can check the boxes of G. D. P. R. And meet their requirements and not be exercising privacy.

If you are working in kind design and you are looking at something like G. D. P. R. The first question you’re gonna ask is, well, why would I give more rights to the people in europe than my users in America? Why don’t I just build to that standard because everybody deserves that power over their data over their profiles.

Whatever your extent is in that case, kind design says, let’s let’s give this democratize this and give it to all of our users and not just say we’re going to cut out half of our users because only eu technically needs this. Okay,

no, you’re absolutely right.

I I can’t think of a more way, a more hostile way to demonstrate this practice when you have a choice for doing something and doing nothing at what amounts to no cost to you, right? And you choose

no, no, I believe me, I have plenty more to talk about. Let me get you off facebook, Can I do that? How about we talk about google that better because here’s the thing isn’t there? There is a reason why do bring that up though, because like facebook, we’re talking about a giant corporation google, what was one of google’s founding principles do no evil and

away Yeah, goes away. That seems

And certainly in the years because they didn’t pull it out until I think it was 2018 and certainly before 2018 they were engaging in practices that would be considered people by many. And that’s, I’m not gonna argue that what I am going to say is don’t be evil is a great motto if you are going to practice kind design because again, like hostile design, evil is diametrically opposed kindness.

And so by removing that, it’s just it’s taking down an artificial wall that just says, yeah, it could be a little evil.

So universal design I mentioned is this principle that comes from architecture and industrial design and its it’s a system, it is a literal system by which there are principles. It involves equitable use, flexibility and use simple and intuitive perceptible information tolerance for error, low physical effort and space and size for approach and use that last one.

Especially you can see like that the notion of curb cuts elevators, ramps, you know, having space, having your

So size and space is kind of one of the yes as it applies to digital then we think about things like the new weekend three that says now, you know, if you’ve got something clickable, it needs to be 44 pixels by 44 pixels. We want to make sure it’s big enough that we get outside of the precision error a problem. So universal design comes at this with the set of like here’s how you practice universal design.

your retrofitting. Maybe maybe you come in after the fact you’re not dealing with something you’re building from scratch your building with something that was built 10 years ago and you’re trying to improve it,

Um and that’s where I think we get into other these these two other three, if you include the ethical side, um these other design patterns, Universal design is meant to produce an output. One thing um coming from where it comes from. That thought was I have produced a building that is, you know, that is universally usable. I have produced a product. You know, I I can’t make three versions of the product Can’t build three versions of the building.

I have to build one thing that that adapts to all of these things. We aren’t confined by that in the digital space though. This is where we get into inclusive design. Now, inclusive design is where we get into this cycle. We start thinking in cycles right? Once you’ve built a building, a building is a waterfall, you build the building, the building is done and then you get into deployment and maintenance, You don’t re architect the whole building.

I mean, some people do, obviously that’s what a remodel is, but generally speaking that is a labor intensive, usually don’t tear the building

Um, so with inclusive design, you get into the cycle of what they call managing. So what should we do next? Exploring what are those needs creating, how can the needs be met and then evaluating how well are the needs met and that becomes a cycle of process that you do over and over.

research is key both in inclusive design and accessible design. The research is the piece.

You have to always again because the technology changes that users change, you have to always be talking to them, working with them, seeing how things work. There’s um one of my favorites. So, inclusive design differs from accessible design. Let me let me see if I can mash these two topics together into one coherently accessible design is easy, accessible design is about dealing with people who need to have different accommodations for different needs.

That then breaks down into our series of checkboxes, right. That we need to meet certain requirements in order to make sure that we’re dealing with people with little vision, people with motor control, people with cognitive limitations and and more. But that list is a pretty finite list. It’s something we can test something we can experiment with.

And generally accessible design is usually termed usable design because by doing all of those things, you’re inherently making it better for everybody else as well. Inclusive design deals with all of that inclusive design is pretty encompassing of accessible design. But it also takes into account things like cultural differences. So, and where we get into this notion of it being a process, right? Good.

And if you have a a well designed site that has inclusive design at its heart, It would have somewhere in the area of 6000, almost 7000 different translations, wow. Because inclusive design thinks about things like other cultures, other languages and making sure those are accommodated in your design as well. I have a really great example of inclusive design. That is also a really great example of exclusive design.

Okay, if Children Children, if you would turn to page uh page oh crap google ducks doesn’t give me a plate. Page turns to the last page in the show notes stock. Um there is a screen shot waiting for you there erin

Why can’t you see it’s the show notes. I’m well, I know they can’t, but you can, I’m asking you this is this is your quiz. I’m not a child. Yeah, if you shave that beard off, I would be hard pressed to think you were over 12,

This is I’m showing Aaron a screen shot. This is a screenshot from exorcism dot io Talking about exorcism many times Fantastic learning platform. They just launched version three um uh in one of our past episodes, we were talking about that launch um this is from their new profile and so they’ve got this little pop up and pop up a section in your profile settings where you can add in your pronouns.

Mhm Now accessible design would not care about this. This is not something that would fall into the area of accessible design, it meets no criteria. It meets no check box, but inclusive design says, hey, a lot of people really prefer being referred to a lot of different ways and they have put this fantastic little box a it’s great because it’s ad Libs, mad Libs, mad Libs is the phrase I’m I’m thinking of mad Libs.

And also norman did some research on this and found that like mad lib style forms have a significantly better fill rate than line by line forms, which is interesting.

What they’ve done is given you a series of three sentences. Ffynnon was really great. Then there’s a box. He answered all my questions. I’ll recommend another blank him to others because another blank. His advice was very helpful and I can put in there a they give me some the frequents, I could change to female uh feminine pronouns.

I can change to third person plural pronouns, whatever in a lot of felt or I can put in whatever I’m comfortable with. Sure. That way their system refers to me the right way their emails will refer to me in the right way. It costs them nothing. And this again, to go to the political side of kind design. Right?

I know there are a lot of folks who have political beliefs who have personal beliefs that this is a silly thing, right? You’re allowed to believe that it also costs you nothing.

even if you’re the person building it. Yes. It will take a couple hours of your dev time to build this in. But the thing about kind design is getting out of your own head and think about what would be nice for them. Yeah. And if somebody prefers to be referred to another way, this is a great tool. So would you agree with me? This is a great example of good inclusive design that’s well designed on top of it. All the

All of them can be manually added. You can type in what you Yeah. So why is this exclusive design?

I meant to prep you before we got into this because I was like, I I should give him the answer so that I don’t put them on the spot. No. Got to me. It’s cool. He him his it’s a very english version of referring to pronounce, is it not?

if I’m japanese?

What if I’m Egyptian?

An inclusive design would say, what should we do next? And somebody may say we need to make sure that we support multiple different language structures for this, because not everybody speaks a a latin based english centric language, how can that need be met? Well, we give them a language selector in their profile, that lets them switch to different localized versions of our system.

How well are those needs met? Well, right now, and I’m going to apologize in advance exorcism, but I didn’t see a way currently to change that. So, at the moment we would say, well that need is not being met well currently, but as we design this new feature in this new way of doing it, you know, we think it would be much better.

Absolutely, I would not be able to do this and and they have a diverse enough audience and group of contributors that it probably has come up

what’s in VP, right, what can we get out the door now and then? Iterate on like that. That doesn’t make you not kind if you try to deliver everything at day one, you will never deliver anything ever. You cannot deliver perfection. Yeah. You still have to ship, you still have to ship.

Yeah. He was our expert on web components. He built not by himself, he’s got a great group of folks who work with him. Um the hacks CMS and the hacks editor. The it’s a block editor that is sort of a direct foil to Gutenberg but works in web components. It’s highly accessible accessibility first. Yeah. Well, so that’s

and you’ve made me sad for what it’s worth. And Christopher Schmidt was a man, he was dedicated to his craft. He believed in education, the importance of, you know, leading from the front of this industry, you know, accessible design, inclusive design was very important to him. Um if you’re not familiar with him, he’s got a lot of stuff out there to remember him by so please go read it and learn from him because he may be gone.

But his impact is far from gone.

Can I give you your twitter bite? You’re you’re reading by kind design means never having to say you’re sorry, you should never have to apologize for work that you did if you are operating kindly now you may have to say, hey this work wasn’t necessary or this work has changed. You know, the technology has changed and it’s no longer useful for our users but you never have to apologize for it.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s always possible that you focus on the wrong thing. Like I could see a situation where a user comes with a complaint and uh you may read into it too far and think that complaint reflected a bigger problem and you spend time fixing that problem and it turns out it wasn’t really an issue and you may have to say, I’m I’m sorry I spent the time on that.

I didn’t research it enough. I should have talked to more users and you say you’re sorry to the business for that, but that’s not apologizing for listening to the user or taking their complaints seriously.

There’s always a baseline that you you need to hit. Certainly right. Uh, there’s a really great and this is related to nothing. But I just wanted to go out of my way to say it. There’s a there is actually a subreddit for hostile architecture. Like that is a subreddit and there there is a post called the opposite of hostile.

And I saw and it’s what made me think of like why we say kind design is the opposite of hostile design and what it is is somebody designed a waste basket, your average everyday park waste basket. But around the edge of it are cupholders and you may say, why would I ever want to use a trash can as a cup holder?

Uh, and the answer is, so that homeless people can take your cans and bottles and exchange them for money so that they don’t have to dig through the trash to get the cans and the bottles out.

Yeah, they could have done it all the way around. It could have been better, but maybe that’s the iteration, right? Maybe this was a quick like somebody thought of it at the last minute spot welded it on and said, you know what the next version of these though we’re coming out with all the way around baby.

here. I’ve realized now there was a whole vein of research I didn’t do for this episode that I should have done because I realized when I start thinking about architecture, if you want to understand the difference between kind and hostile design, there is, there are so many examples in architecture, especially when it comes to people who are currently looking for somewhere to stay.

Um, and so you think about things like new park benches with extra arm rests. Look, you now have arm rests on both sides and in the middle

And that’s also designed to make sure that people can’t sleep on them or the spikes. You know, that everybody has seen the pictures of the spikes that they put like in entryways to stop the quote unquote birds and it’s like, no, that’s not what those are there for. That is hostile design.

fold up benches or a thing so that like at night they’ll fold up the benches and lock them again. Some people can’t sleep on them. Um there there are a lot of examples of, in fact, as I I’m talking here and I pull up the subreddit and I realized, wow, there are a lot of benches. Like man, we are like obsessed with keeping people off of benches.

It is, yes, it absolutely is

I’m going to disagree

I would rephrase, I I know where you’re coming from and I don’t disagree where you’re coming from. The way I would rephrase that though, is we are a culture obsessed with sacrificing long term for short term like that, that’s what that is. Because there are, let’s let’s extend the homeless metaphor here.

There there is a Absoluteolute Treasure trove of research that says dealing with the homeless problem directly by doing things like giving them a home, you know, the tiny home movement and all of this. Yes, you’re going to spend, you know, $25,000 per home or whatever to put them up and there is research all over the place that says, yeah, and that’s money that saves you a ton over the long term because you aren’t spending money in all of these other areas.

Yeah, yeah, that and that’s why I got where you were kind of coming from there, like, like we only look at this like how do I make sure I stay in the green right now,

yeah, we’re yeah, we are not on a different page here. So this is kind designed, this is where we are coming from and something that has been very close to us and you’re going to hear a lot more. I I hope that this is not boring to you because This is something, this is a drumbeat, we are going to hit over and over, especially as we go into season five and there are other things that you’re going to see that will reinforce it.

I like that we have because we have

and it can be confusing when you think when you see all these other phrases, well, okay, wait, am I doing universal Design? Am I doing inclusive design? But I gotta do accessible design, but maybe I should be looking at this book on ethical design.

So I hope that that was fun for you. I hope that it was interesting. I hope that you practice it. I really hope you have questions if you don’t if after all of this, you don’t have a single question, take a few seconds, we’re all gonna take a breath, think about what you want to ask us. We’ll never Yeah,

are we not the first to this? Because I feel like there’s no possible way we are the first to think of the phrase kind design.

like to this

I disappoint you design is a thing. Can I tell you what it is? Yeah, it’s the original colorado clothing brand geared towards outdoor enthusiasts.

not not a sponsor. Yeah,

to close.

and folks, if you want to get in, there’s one uh there’s one source I didn’t mention um in terms of kind design that does exist out there that can help you get a kick start on it, get you ahead of the game and like really thinking about the best way to practice it. And that is to keep your personas close and your users closer. Bye bye.