Your seemingly innocuous product design could be repelling or alienating underrepresented users. Make it better by adopting a more inclusive and welcoming design. Here’s why it’s important, and how to get there. Good product design attracts, bad product design repels. Yet not everyone experiences bad design in the same way. Too often, marginalized and underrepresented users experience unintended product outcomes like anguish, anxiety, and a feeling of alienation. This can happen when a product’s entire userbase isn’t fully considered in its design…

“Induce anguish” and “increase anxiety” are usually not on a list of outcomes for any digital product. Even so, many social media products of the past and present have done just that. Joanne McNeil’s Lurking follows the digitally connected user of the internet and pre-internet. It’s a great book for anyone designing or building social apps and services. Those who forget the social internet’s past errors are doomed to repeat them.

Confirmation bias leads us to hold false belief with a confidence greater than evidence can justify. Curbing it when making decisions requires patience and rigor. It’s a battle that’s worth the effort. A while back I volunteered to contribute to a book on the behaviours and history of political, legal, and socio-economic systems. It was to be a primer for people creating products with the potential to disrupt those systems. My contribution was a chapter on confirmation bias, detailing its effects, its…

Our brains do a pretty bad job of reasoning, and a great job of maintaining and strengthening false belief. A while back I volunteered to contribute to a book on the behaviours and history of political, legal, and socio-economic systems. It was to be a primer for people creating products with the potential to disrupt those systems. My contribution was a chapter on confirmation bias, detailing its effects, its…

How our brain’s tendency to selectively gather, interpret, and recall information makes us behave irrationally. A while back I volunteered to contribute to a book on the behaviours and history of political, legal, and socio-economic systems. It was to be a primer for people creating products with the potential to disrupt those systems. My contribution was a chapter on confirmation bias, detailing its effects, its…

I love finding the intent behind a rule, a concept, or even a mysterious part on a physical product. With that all-important question — Why? — answered, I’m free to dream up simpler ways that intent could have been satisfied. Getting to that kernel of truth can be very satisfying…