In November 2021 I had the pleasure of chatting with Kat Jayne, Abby Bajuniemi, PhD, and Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill, MA, Ed.M about Trust, Ethics, and Accessibility at World Usability Day 2021 with UXPA Minnesota.

My Top Three Take-aways #

Authentic Language is extremely important in building trust #

Abby shared many examples of how inauthentic language can erode the trust with our customers, partners and the public. She shared an example and a story regarding the tú and usted dichotomy. "Tú is usually reserved for informal situations like your close family, friends, your family best friend and usted is typically used n a more formal situation like the strangers, elders or doctors or people who you're supposed to show respect to."

She then shared an example of one of her professors who was from Argentia and how in Argentina advertising typically used more formal registers so the advertisements were speaking to you 'with respect'. When he traveled to Spain to be a guest lecture he kept seeing commercials and advertisments that would address everyone in tú language. He was 'pissed off' because how dare the advertisers talk to him like they were friends.

Creating Welcome, Safe and Transparent spaces are foundational #

Nii Ato shared those three worlds. He also shared his experience using forms online. His first name is "Nii Ato", and there is a space between it because it's a compound first name. His last name is Bentsi-Enchill which has a hyphen. Often times when he is filling out forms he is presented with an error straight away.
How does that make someone feel? Do they feel space? Do they feel welcome?
This was something that we struggled with a lot within the Federal space. If we were creating systems that could be used for all, a developer copying and pasting some quick regex could create a hostile experience for our users.

Paying back the communities that work with research with more than gift cards #

Kat shared about how we can create more safe and ethical research practices. Instead of just giving someone a $75 target gift card we have to pay back to the community either directly or indirectly and be transparent about our findings and how they are going to be used.
We often use the adage in tech that we should move fast and break things, and often us tech workers aren't retrospective enough to go back and fix the things we break.