Meghan Bush
UX Writer specializing in mobile and web customer-facing experiences
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Musings on UX content design, tech, privacy, and life

I curate collections of UX, content, interaction, design, and research articles—and other writing that strikes my fancy—then write delightful copy about them.

July 2019 | Designing your face

1

FOLLOW THE FACES

Facial recognition tech isn’t all that hard to implement, nor is it expensive to identify people fairly accurately based on publicly available video feeds and photos on the web. Our laws are not keeping pace with the rate of innovation.

The New York Times made their own, quite successful, facial recognition program on the cheap to show us all how easy (and legal) it is.

2

SAN FRAN BAN

In related news, San Francisco recently proposed a law banning facial recognition use by law enforcement.

3

IN DEFENSE OF FADING

People want to feel like they can fade into the background, though as facial recognition technology and databases continue to grow, as our online footprints get larger and more detailed, obscurity becomes a dream from the past.

My favorite line: “Obscurity protects us from being pressured to be conventional.”

Surprise! Design-led companies outperform regular ol’ (idea-driven?) companies. OK, this doesn’t feel surprising to me. We love things that are beautiful and work well, and isn’t that the goal of any designer—to create something compelling and useful?

4

WINNING DESIGN

5

DESIGN THINKING PRACTICE

Design thinking. It’s so hot right now. And lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon.

So you read a book. Or took a workshop. Or listened to a podcast. Design thinking principles resonated with you. What next? Practice. It’s not sexy, but to bring design thinking practices into your design work, you have to do it, and then try again and again and again.

Here are some tips to bring design thinking into your everyday approach to your work:

1.     Go deep in your user research sessions. Ask a question. Get an answer. Good. Don’t stop there! Ask a follow-up question. Dive in. (This one is my current favorite—ask questions to find out what problem you need to solve; don’t take a solution and manufacture a problem so you can implement that solution.)

2.     Avoid bias by looking for patterns in the data, rather than relying on your personal preferences.

3.     Generate oodles of ideas. Generate more ideas than you thought possible. Push until you’re all wrung out.

4.     Share design feedback from the perspective of your specialty. Drop personal preference—push the design forward by asking questions related to your discipline. Lean on subject matter experts from each field to improve the design together.

5.     Improve your product based on market feedback.

Meghan Bush