Taylor shared a link to the online book Design for Real Life – which addresses how to design digital experiences that work for stressful, sensitive and urgent situations.
I like their recommended questions to ask about form fields:
- Who within your organization uses the answer
- What they use them for
- Whether an answer is required or optional
- If an answer is required, what happens if a user enters any old thing just to get through the form
The book links to the article Don’t Poke the Bear: Creating Content for Sensitive Situations, that I like a lot because it plainly states that error messages are not the time to get funny.
Take a look at these 404 pages:
They’re getting cute and clever. But the context is that they fucked up. That’s not the time to joke around – it’s the time to be contrite and make it right.
Bonus links:
Eva PenzeyMoog
How stalkers and domestic abusers could use your digital products’ features to their benefit, and how to design to thwart them.
Her book: “Design for Safety“
Lots of resources & organizations related to design for safety (archive link)
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/08/smashing-podcast-episode-41/
Robert Heaton
How Bumble’s proximity indicators and Tinder’s proximity indicators were used to find a user’s exact coordinates. And how those companies eventually designed a solution.
Alex (mangopdf)
Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake, an unintended effect of a Facebook feature.
Finding all your Facebook friends’ Tinder profiles. A feature, not a 🐞.
