A Design Thinking Mindset for Data Science

Thinking from a human perspective for data scientists.

“Data science has received recent attention in the technical research and business strategy since; however, there is an opportunity for increased research and improvements on the data science research process itself. Through the research methods described in this paper, we believe there is potential for the application of design thinking to the data science process in an effort to formalize and improve the research project process. Thus, this paper will focus on three core areas of such theory. The first is a background of the data science research process and an identification of the common pitfalls data scientists face. The second is an explanation of how design thinking principles can be applied to data science. The third is a proposed new process for data science research projects based on the aforementioned findings. The paper will conclude with an analysis of implications for both data science individuals and teams and suggestions for future research to validate the proposed framework.”

Rachel Woods ~ Towards Data Science

Making the case for service design for start-ups and innovation

All manifestations of design are relevant for start-ups, scale-ups and f*ck-ups.

“Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings. In this article, I’ll look at hurdles to address and overcome in terms of mindset, and suggest some practical ways service designers can address this opportunity.”

Jesse Grimes a.k.a. /jessegrimes ~ Kolmiot Service Design

Designing for generations: A look at UX in healthcare

Designing a healthy experience.

“As UX researchers and designers working in healthcare, it’s our job to advocate for the user. Involving nurses in innovation and research is critical in advancing the digitization of healthcare. As you plan research and design, consider the varied ages and tech approaches of clinicians and beware of the complex ecosystem in which your designs will live. Given the growth of voice interfaces, telemedicine, AR/VR, etc, we are witnessing a wave of new technology in healthcare and with it comes an equally large learning curve.”

Eliana Stein and Barbara Gulten ~ UX Booth

The digital revolution will see you now: transforming patient experience in the digital era

Digital and experience transformations, in every domain you can imagine.

“Industry after industry has reinvented itself in response to upstart challengers and shifting consumer expectations that are the hallmarks of this new era. The same is true in healthcare, where we have weathered the introduction of the electronic medical records, patient portals and now interoperability. But to date our industry’s digital transformation has been guided largely by government regulation – leaving the design of the future of healthcare to be driven by policy makers and executed largely by IT departments. Meanwhile, most other industries have turned to a different guru for inspiration and guidance: the consumer. Northwell Health has undertaken a cultural transformation grounded in patient and family centered care. In this narrative, we explore our digital patient experience journey and lessons learned. Every person, every role, every moment matters.”

Emily Kagan Trenchard, Laura Semlies, and Sven Gierlinger ~ Patient Experience Journal

Simultaneous triangulation: Mixing user research & data science methods

Using DataSci (quant) to get meaning out of UsrRes (qual).

“Simultaneous triangulation is an incredibly powerful tool to generate comprehensive and verified findings. If you only use one method, you could end up with blindspots. If you employ methods sequentially rather than simultaneously, you could run into unexplainable contradictions, like we did at first. The solution is simultaneous triangulation. Next time you have a complex research question, consider using the three-step process to mitigate blindspots and turn discrepancies in learning opportunities.”

Colette Kolenda and Kristie Savage ~ Spotify Design

Universal Design principles improve accessibility in onboarding

Application onboarding versus organisation onboarding. Just a matter of principles.

“As a UX designer and marketer in the tech industry, I have been onboarded for a number of software and design projects. During these onboarding processes, I have noticed that software, apps, and user flows are not always conveyed in a simple, readily-comprehensible manner. As software and apps become more complex, the ability to define and explain technical concepts in simple terms has become an increasingly valuable skill for project leaders. In noticing this, an adherence to universal design principles would improve accessibility for all who take part in the onboarding process.”

Nicholas Farmen a.k.a. @FarmenNicholas ~ UXbooth

Understanding variables in UX research

Global and local vars, lots of them.

“UX research pulls many terms, methods, and conventions from other fields. Selecting a method is an important first choice in measuring the user experience. But an important next step is understanding the variables you’ll have to deal with when designing a study or drawing conclusions. Variables are things that change. Variables can be controlled and measured.”

Jeff Sauro a.k.a. /jeffsauro | @MeasuringU ~ MeasuringU

Writing as a design discipline: The Information Department of the Ulm School of Design and its impact on the school and beyond

Life is full of connections, to be made and to be found.

“At the Ulm School of Design (1953-1968), there was a promising approach to teaching visual as well as verbal communication. Although it took place in separate departments, this pioneering approach attempted to integrate form and content, theory and practice. From the school’s inception, the Information Department was established alongside the Departments of Visual Communication, Product Design and Building: writing was considered a discipline on a par with two- and three-dimensional design. While the Department of Visual Communication flourished, however, the Information Department languished, not least as a result of the school’s policy and staff conflicts. A closer look at the HfG’s history nevertheless reveals the Information Department’s overall importance to the school’s self-conception and attitude. Beyond its relevance for design history, this might also contribute to the discussion of a greater emphasis on verbal and writing competence in present day design education.”

David Oswald and Christiane Wachsmann ~ A/I/S/Design

Rise of the meta-designer

Abstraction going meta.

“Meta-designing in this sense could be the next grand frontier of design practice, imbued with a strategic sense for humanism and intellectualism, which are necessary elements if we are to make design thinking + customer experience + user experience into more than a checklist of ingredients for a successful business. What will you do to advance this approach? It’s admittedly aspirational and fuzzy to tackle, but that doesn’t mean it’s not feasible or valuable.”

Uday Gajendar ~ ACM Interactions Volume XXVI.4 courtesy of @riander

UX writing and content strategy: What is the difference?

Just a matter of abstraction and focus.

“In this article, we explore how UX writing compares to content strategy. Since many are confused a bit about how UX writing fits in with content strategy, we compare the two fields and see how your business can use both of them to build an online presence and improve customer experience with digital products.”

Bridgette Hernandez ~ UXPA Magazine

A unified framework of five principles for AI in society

Always keep your principles.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a major impact on society. As a result, many organizations have launched a wide range of initiatives to establish ethical principles for the adoption of socially beneficial AI. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of proposed principles threatens to overwhelm and confuse. How might this problem of ‘principle proliferation’ be solved? In this paper, we report the results of a fine-grained analysis of several of the highest-profile sets of ethical principles for AI. We assess whether these principles converge upon a set of agreed-upon principles, or diverge, with significant disagreement over what constitutes ‘ethical AI.’ Our analysis finds a high degree of overlap among the sets of principles we analyze. We then identify an overarching framework consisting of five core principles for ethical AI. Four of them are core principles commonly used in bioethics: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. On the basis of our comparative analysis, we argue that a new principle is needed in addition: explicability, understood as incorporating both the epistemological sense of intelligibility (as an answer to the question ‘how does it work?’) and in the ethical sense of accountability (as an answer to the question: ‘who is responsible for the way it works?’). In the ensuing discussion, we note the limitations and assess the implications of this ethical framework for future efforts to create laws, rules, technical standards, and best practices for ethical AI in a wide range of contexts.”

Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls ~ Harvard Data Science Review Issue 1

An interdiscipline emerges: Pathways to Systemic Design

From system design, to systematic design and systemic design.

“In this theme issue of She Ji, we present work from the Sixth Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium (RSD6) in Oslo. The emerging field of systemic design has expanded to engage with increasingly important societal issues ranging from housing and quality of life in cities, to foreign policy, immigration, and cultural development, as well as our environments and ecologies. (…) The guest-editors have co-edited a number of works in the past. We normally agree enough to co-create a shared vision for the overall thrust of the publication. But this time, we found ourselves in fruitful argument about the issues of interest or concern posed by nearly every article, which demonstrates the compelling discursive value of the ideas. The viewpoint articles in particular raised a number of micro-arguments between us. Our discussion follows, revealing the distinctions arising from each of these thoughtful essays.”

Birger Sevaldson and Peter Jones ~ She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 5, Issue 2

Startups and UX: Relating success to good UX practices

Like we believed for years and years: UX is the success factor of products, services, and organisations.

“Incorporating UX allows startups to spot failures fast, scrap bad ideas, and stay lean. In the startup world, time is of the essence and correctly implementing UX practices allows startups to save a lot of time. User experience is a cyclical process; it always needs refinement and feedback to get better and better. Startups that are incorporating UX from the beginning have a clear understanding of where the field sits in relation to their build process, thus making them more efficient. They iterate faster, have higher adoption rates, and have happy, diverse customers.”

Ayesha Saleem a.k.a. @ayeshabydesign~ The Magazine of the User Experience Professionals Association

Who Makes a Good UX Person? Results of a Survey Using the Five Factor Personality Model

Focus on talent versus development of design competencies.

“What makes UXers tick? How are they different from other people? What do they have in common among themselves? We surveyed a group of UXers to see. First, we surveyed them using the Five Factor Model, a standard typology widely recognized in personality research.”

Cliff Anderson and Joe Grant ~ The Magazine of the User Experience Professionals Association

Teach Slower to Teach Better

But what’s the speed of learning and how to speed it up?

“Over the last decade, as a rejection to a tired model of higher education, new educational programs and structures have emerged. Many of these are in the fields of design, digital product development, and programming. The new models of education take many forms. Some are short day-long or week-long workshops. Some are meetups and brownbags. Some are online, some offline, and some hybrid. What connects many of these models is their immediate vocational emphasis. The majority intend to train practitioners, not academics. The focus is on preparing people to do design and get jobs. (…) We need educational innovation, but not at the expense of quality. Students need the space to develop problem solving strategies. Speed is not in our favor here. Let’s all slow down.”

Jon Kolko a.k.a /jkolko | @jkolko ~ modernist studio

Building an Ethics Framework for UX Design (2/2)

On the ethics, morals and norms of digital designers.

“This is the second of a two-part article. The first part of this article was devoted to exploring existential values and ethical issues where ill or misdirected intent occur. In this article, we will identify and examine ethical issues (with special reference to the healthcare industry) where the intent, though benevolent, results in latent ethical problems.”

Chris Kiess a.k.a. /chriskiess | @chris_kiess ~ UXPA Magazine

Creative next: AI, automation, and the practice of user experience design

Become more strategic, ‘creative’ and human, as we always should have been.

“The word automation conjures an image of a factory full of robots, a modern marvel symbolizing both technological progress and the regression of working-class opportunities and lifestyles. But our notion of automation generally remains ossified in this physical, machine-replaces-labor frame. We don’t think of automation in the realm of knowledge work beyond the most mundane and mindlessly repeatable tasks. But automation, powered by machine-learning advances in artificial intelligence (AI), is coming. It’s actually already been here for decades, going back to relatively primitive software innovations that eluded our ability to connect the dots back to industrial robotics before it. Perhaps surprisingly, modern AI automation has been making original art for years and has collaborated with a human team on an original painting that sold at Christie’s for $432,500. Beyond art making, AI automation can also write procedural content such as stock blurbs and minor league sports stories.”

Dirk Knemeyer a.k.a. /knemeyer | @dknemeyer and Jonathan Follett a.k.a. /jonfollett | @jonfollett ~ ACM Interactions (XXVI.3)

Ethics of identity in the time of big data

Never could have preducted that ethics was so closely connected to technology. I’m not a futurist.

“Compartmentalizing our distinct personal identities is increasingly difficult in big data reality. Pictures of the person we were on past vacations resurface in employers’ Google searches; LinkedIn which exhibits our income level is increasingly used as a dating web site. Whether on vacation, at work, or seeking romance, our digital selves stream together. One result is that a perennial ethical question about personal identity has spilled out of philosophy departments and into the real world. Ought we possess one, unified identity that coherently integrates the various aspects of our lives, or, incarnate deeply distinct selves suited to different occasions and contexts? At bottom, are we one, or many? The question is not only palpable today, but also urgent because if a decision is not made by us, the forces of big data and surveillance capitalism will make it for us by compelling unity. Speaking in favor of the big data tendency, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promotes the ethics of an integrated identity, a single version of selfhood maintained across diverse contexts and human relationships. This essay goes in the other direction by sketching two ethical frameworks arranged to defend our compartmentalized identities, which amounts to promoting the dis-integration of our selves. One framework connects with natural law, the other with language, and both aim to create a sense of selfhood that breaks away from its own past, and from the unifying powers of big data technology.”

James Brusseau ~ First Monday (Volume 24 Issue 5)