Designing WITH, not for, vulnerable customers

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 SPEAKER: This is your clicker here. SPEAKER: Hello, everybody! SPEAKER: For those of you already on your phone, we do have a poll. If you go onto the second tab of our website, you'll see a list of definitions. We'd love you to go ahead and submit your answer. SPEAKER: If you go to the 'Slido' website, go to the polls tab. Come on in, everyone. Plenty of seats up the front where nobody likes to sit. Especially on this side, so I don't feel so lonely. Tash has all of this side. As everyone is coming in, we have a website, Slido.com. Sorry for those that heard it before, but for those just entering, you can go to Slido.com, we have a poll we are taking. Go to the second tab, which is the polls tab. Cool, I got the OK to begin. We have asked you guys to go ahead and define vulnerability. We as designers more often than not are designing for vulnerable customers, and know somebody that has experienced trauma in our lives, this is why it is so important. Do we understand the impacts that vulnerability has on people's lives? The definitions have been taken from a group of 50 diverse people, that's not only designers and product managers, and strategist, it is also people that are in the services like police or other service providers like support workers. We have combined that list with a group of best practice definitions, so you don't know if it's someone's own words all the best practice definition. What we understood is that there is more than one definition of vulnerability. These are all accurate descriptions. It is not limited to one person's experiences. I can also count how many people are in the room, let's say 61. I'm not the best at maths, I think there are more than 61. You can take a picture and go back to it, we will flip over to our slides and really start. I was hoping to get one laugh, which I have done. Michael in the back, the sound guy, said if necessary he has a laughing clip that he can play. I might use that. Don't be alarmed. When we began this journey to this talk, we started with a group of friendlies. Some of them are in the room. They are our colleagues. What they told us was some of the harshest critics we have received of anyone we spoke to. That's not surprising, they are friendlies. They said there was something wrong with our title. Can anyone guess what it is? SPEAKER: (inaudible) CHLOE HAMPTON: Who said that? It's customers. We are not just designing for customers. We are designing for
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 2 of 11 people. We are designing for beautiful, messy, complex people. This is a comment that was made yesterday in the other room, in the ethically designed discussion. It was, when will we replace customers and users and start calling them humans? That's what we all are, and that is who we are designing our products and services for. It's important that we remove that customer lens, and we understand people, where they are coming from and their contacts around it. Between Tash and I, we worked out we have 15 years of experience in this space. that's not just exclusively as designers, we want to share the stories we have and the knowledge we have gained along the way. We want to share with you our point of view. What we believe is that if we start at the definition of vulnerability, we can elevate everyone in the room, and beyond, then it makes it less scary to talk about vulnerability and designing for people that come from these circumstances. Introduction, now that I have bored you with 15 minutes of talking. I am Chloe. Hi! That is my beautiful family on… What side is that? My right, your left. I don't know if you have noticed, but I am a black woman. I wear my identity on my sleeve. Often times because I am a black woman, I am part of a marginalised community, that is often times taken advantage of. We will talk about these different groups of people and how marginalised community can become more vulnerable. I have experience with layers of vulnerability, Liz Jackson who I think is in the room, she talked yesterday about how important it is to not just design with empathy, but to design with lived experience. We believe the same thing. I worked with survivors of sexual assault, survivors of child sexual abuse, I have worked with veterans, and also people that are homeless, people that are unemployed and elderly. I am currently working with chronically and terminally ill patients. Or people, I should say. I am passionate about this, I come from a privileged place. I get to sit at a table with executives and people like yourself, and tell their stories. Not only my story, but their stories. To become a voice for the voiceless. NATASHA BALLANTYNE: I am Tash, I work with Chloe. Working for a big corporation comes with some bias, it also comes with an amazing opportunity for us to pool our resources and make a difference. It's not about what organisation we work for, it comes down to people. The people we work with and design with. It's us as individuals, we are people too. We have our own vulnerabilities we experience. It's about taking stories from different types of people and about sharing those stories to effect change. It's not just on us to share those stories, it's on us to bring them along and have those stories heard, and support them to tell their stories of vulnerability. Part of our role as designers is about challenging what projects we are working on, challenging whether or not we are designing to make a difference to people. Ultimately, what it comes down to, it is no longer angers is for us to say that we work for a big corporation, that has constraints.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 3 of 11 We have had a real opportunity to do that at PWC. I worked with people with disability, people who are homeless, people who have experienced violence. It has made me realise that we need to be designing for vulnerability in the same way we design for accessibility. In the same way we think about sustainability. We worked on something called the Constellation Project. It's a cross sector initiative, working with Mission Australia, Australian Red Cross, and PwC as the founding members, to influence change across sectors. What does that actually mean? How can we end homelessness by 2035? How can we bring homelessness down to functional zero? Affordable, appropriate and secure housing for our growing population? We asked ourselves, how will we know if we have been successful? What we said, we will know because it will no longer exist. We are trying to design ourselves out of a job. We may have the unique opportunity to prevent that vulnerability happening at all. The Constellation Project is starting its next wave, I would encourage you to take a picture or go to the link, if you are interested, do find out, we are looking for more people to join us. theconciliationproject.com.au/join Daniela is tweeting it. SPEAKER: This is a bit of a disclaimer. We will be talking about some sensitive topics. What's important is that people take care of themselves first. If you are a group of people from vulnerable circumstances, which some of you may be, if at any point you feel are triggered, and you need to step out of the room, you need to take care of yourself first. With each of our sections, we will have a challenge question, and a key takeaway. How can we better understand and define vulnerability? That is where we started with the definition. I want everyone to do an exercise with me. This will be fun. Close your eyes. Imagine that you are in a foreign country. You don't speak the language, you don't recognise the characters that make up the letters of words. Your wallet and your phone are gone. You are alone, it's dark. You don't know how to get back to the place that you are staying. How do you feel? When you are ready, go ahead and come back to the room. How did you feel? Scared? Stressed? Isolated? Oftentimes, this is how people that come from vulnerable circumstances on a continued basis. We wanted to start with a definition, and that one that we like is not the only one. Vulnerability can be defined as a diminished capacity of an individual or group to resist or recover from a man-made or natural disaster. We like this one because it talks about anticipation and recovering, which we will talk about more. It is not just about has is that we experience but how we respond to them and build resilience. Some of us, that might be a little bit right brained or analytical like myself. We have an equation
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 4 of 11 on the next slide. That is, vulnerability = hazards - coping. What is a hazard? Hazards are when someone experiences danger or a risk of social, physical and, or, emotional harm. It is made up of a few key areas. The probability of experiencing this hazard, the primacy or shock value since the previous occurrence, the predictability or the warning that they have up until then. The prevalence and the extent or duration. And the pressure, the intensity of the impact. When we talk about coping, hoping is someone's ability to respond to a present or future hazard. Oftentimes, we think about resilience. It is a key factor in being able to cope. Coping comes from the personal, private and public action to avoid and mitigate these hazards. Ultimately, it is a person's ability to act and benefit from responding to these hazards that creates resilience. NATASHA BALLANTYNE: We do this by increasing their ability to cope with these hazards. It is not just about giving for access to the support services when they needed in a timely manner. We actually have the opportunity to prevent them from entering ability in the first place. The way that we do this is by starting with access to basic resources. This is not just resources that myself as an individual who may be experiencing vulnerability. It is providing those resources to people I might be dependent on people who are dependent on me. It is things like food, access to medicine, being able to go to the doctor. Shelter, clothing. Once we have that, we can start to build emotional resilience. We have talked a bit about resilience. Ultimately, more resilient people, they are able to adapt and respond to some of those hazards. Those that are less resilient, they can be subjected to the at a heightened level. Vulnerability over time. We need to connect this with social support. This is not just people in my support network, it is about social inclusion. Being connected to my local community and services and activities. It is also giving me the resources and opportunities that I need. I mentioned that as designers, we want to do more. We don't just want to support people and boost resilience. We want to shift people from being vulnerable to being empowered. We want to improve their quality of life and get them out of the vulnerable circumstances, where we can. We can do this by looking at things like literacy. Through literacy, people have the power to understand and negotiate the different services and products that may be able to alleviate their circumstances. It is not just about English literacy. It is also about financial literacy. We know this is one of the key factors of vulnerability. It's about giving people purpose. It is about giving people meaning. Then, we can help them become more empowered. If we can service people in this way, if we can help their ability to cope. If we can build their resilience, we can actually better designed for prevention over intervention. While people's circumstances of vulnerability... They may need different levels of support. We need to give them different levels of access. CHLOE HAMPTON:
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 5 of 11 We think it is important to share a story. This is Robin, who shares her story of becoming homeless. When you listen to her, what do you think about? What resonates with you and how is it make you feel? ROBIN: I do not really realise I was homeless until I was talking to a woman about finding an affordable housing for myself. She said, you are homeless. And I said no, no, I have a bed every night. My daughters put me up, and my sister is helping me and she has a room for me. She said no, you do not have a house of your own. It came as a big shock that I was homeless. My husband was a journalist and he was moving around the world. We had four children and wherever we went, we were renting. It wasn't worth buying as we never knew how long we were there. When we got back to Australia after 20 years, long after that, my husband died, unfortunately. Well, I just... That was the beginning of being homeless, I guess. I did not know it. Everyone was helping me. It was just a matter of money and that I had not saved enough or put money away. I think we need to learn more about prevention of homelessness particularly with women. CHLOE HAMPTON: What is powerful about her story is that often people do not realise they are invulnerable circumstances. Robin did not even know she was homeless until her friend pointed out to her. Tash and I have had the opportunity and privilege to meet her. Sadly, her story is not uncommon. Increasing numbers of older Australian women are at risk of experiencing homelessness. That has risen 30% over just last five years. Two thirds of single women on age pensions who do not own their homes have less than $50,000 in assets. We going to turn to the different types of vulnerability. One of those are structural or physical. We are seeing this a lot in Sydney. The second one is economic, people's access to finances. What I have done some research on and what I am trying to help with currently is loss of jobs that can lead to enter into financial hardship. That is rising for some populations. We also have environmental types of vulnerability. Right now, it is cold and raining. For someone that is homeless or sleeping on the street, where to go when all of the centres are for? How do they stay safe? Lastly, it is social. An example of this is slavery. Not having the existence of peace or the fulfilment of human rights. Slavery is an example of that. In the picture on the right hand side, that is actually my big mama's grandfather. He was a slave in Virginia. At this point, this picture was taken when he was a free man, thankfully. We will not have time to go into other types of vulnerability. One of those is transgenerational vulnerability. That is continued and persistent vulnerability for people based upon what their ancestors went through. For me, it is four generations removed. For my daughter, who is in the top right there, it is five generations removed. Some cohorts herds have increased likelihood. What are we going to do
6. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 6 of 11 about it? NATASHA BALLANTYNE: And we think about vulnerability, we can use this not just to identify but to predict if people will fall into the circumstances so we can provide proactive support. Pretty powerful. We can do this with scary accuracy. We have a problem, as designers, around, when do we ethically intervene? When do we ethically deaf services when we know that people might be at a heightened risk vulnerability? It is ultimately, we may be able to predict it before anyone else. She did not know she was homeless before she had a conversation with friends, Robin. As designers, we need to get the attention right, between designing for what is right for customers who do not know or may not know yet they are in a vulnerable circumstances. If you wanted a photo, this is probably the slide to take a photo. I promise their own no more slides with this many words on it! What we did want to show is that there are some key hazards, but there are also some key populations that are in increased risk of vulnerability. When we see an increased risk, data has shown us that these populations are three times more likely to experience vulnerable circumstances. For these particular populations, if they experience some of these hazards, they are more likely to entities on ability experiences. Expanses of homelessness, financial hardship. When we think about vulnerability as designers, we carry our own biases. The biggest example is when we think about homelessness. If I got you to picture homelessness, most of you right now would be picturing the man you walk past this morning asking for money in a coffee cup. He is rough sleeping. It is not what homelessness is. That is homelessness in a state of crisis. Homelessness is actually about those people living in temporary accommodation, the people who are couch surfing, like in Robin's case. If we think about financial hardship, it is not just about bankruptcy. It's about financial dependency and when that person we are dependent on passes away all we separate. When we think about experience is of abuse, it is not just what we can physically see or notice but also about the controlling behaviour. When we design for vulnerability, we need to think bigger. I think between all of us, we know someone in one of the circumstances. As humans, we all experience times of vulnerability. For me, this became apparent three weeks ago. I spent the last 11 months coming through a de facto divorce, something I didn't even know was a thing. It has been challenging for me to get through. I was quite proud because in this moment, I was going to retain my house and keep my mortgage without the support of my ex-partner. Actually, my legal fees ended up being triple what I was quoted. I had to pay him three times the amount that he actually put in for the house. To be honest, this was my house. He just made some improvements. All of a sudden, I was in a vulnerable circumstance. I needed to seek help and get a personal loan in order to negate some of these unexpected circumstances. I got this response. We have assessed your application and you have been unsuccessful. I could not understand. I was confused. I just a pay raise and I had all my finances in check. I had been paying my bills. What had gone wrong? What had gone wrong with a broken API. The credit reporting company had reported I was eight months overdue on my mortgage. When he went around and credit check to see if they could service before a personal one, they came
7. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 7 of 11 back saying I was one stage off bankrupt. That is a really scary thought. It took one month to resolve and for me, I was lucky. It was because I had the experience of an amazing bank manager he went above and beyond. She contacted my mortgage provider. She contacted the credit reporting company. She tried to see what was going on behind the scenes and we identified the broken API. This actually affected 1000 customers. I was one of the lucky ones. I had my family that I could lean on in times of financial support. I was able to cope with the hazard that came up in my way. It happened to those people that needed access to urgent financial support? What happened to people who were in a greater vulnerable circumstance and I was? I was one of your viewers. CHLOE HAMPTON: The key takeaway here is that we need to take proactive measures to support people in vulnerable circumstances. In understanding vulnerability, we can use this framework to think proactively. We need to think about different hunter vulnerability and what occurs when people are exposed to multiple hazards. That is our next section. Are we designing holistic services that take vulnerability into account? When you think about vulnerability over time, there are two key areas and that is proximate, people change in situations, or structural, a steady and chronic state. Ultimately, it is a combination of somebody who has these factors are determined one ability. Alongside people's ability to respond to the hazard and adapt to the change. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 1 in 2 Australians... When we think back to the group of vulnerable people... Circumstances can compound. We know that. Anticipating future hazards becomes more difficult. Entering crises becomes more difficult and it is easy to become more stuck in a vulnerability cycle. Going between hardship and coping without the ability to get a breath. This can create a crisis situation. We need to intervene before vulnerability compounds, making sure we are treating all layers of vulnerability and looking at people holistically. So we can help people cope. NATASHA BALLANTYNE: We want to show you some examples. Ask Izzy is a tactical sign response where we see how we can increase awareness of people with vulnerability so they can get access to these services. They can log on, whether they are about to experience a hazard or they are in that time of need and need access to that immediate support, they can find out where these services are available to them. We have the Safe Haven Cafe. When people would present in the emergency department with thoughts of suicide, they would put them into what they called a safe room. They would go into this room up to three hours before they were seen by someone for their mental health. There were a number of appearances every day, there was no place these people could go. The Safe Haven café, they could talk to a social worker, they could be warm and have tea or coffee, they could have a conversation. Where becomes really powerful is when these two services come together, those social workers who were servicing those people, who had come
8. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 8 of 11 to the café, they would use the Ask Izzy to direct them to services. When we designed the people in the circumstances, we need to think politically. We need to think about the different types of vulnerability. CHLOE HAMPTON: It is the combination of these factors that determines vulnerability. It is ever present and we need to factor in in all aspects of design. The next section we want to talk about, can we designed specifically for vulnerability? For the benefit of everyone? NATASHA BALLANTYNE: There are instances when we need to designed specifically for vulnerability, like life insurance and income protection. When someone takes out life insurance or in competition, they may not necessarily be in a state of vulnerability, but if they need to make a claim that is when they are the most vulnerable. How do we design for that? I worked for an insurance provider to work out why customers were taking up their services, and why they were turning after three months of using the service. They found that people purchasing these services, 20% of them would drop off in the first two months. We asked them upfront, why they had made the decision to purchase it today. What we found, the first, they may have had a change in financial situation, meaning they needed to reassess their finances, or they needed to review their tax offset. The second, it was important to understand. people would purchase these services after experiencing a traumatic event. Then we ask, are you OK? We embedded that into our services. We enable the service provider to have a check-in, all of a sudden that turn rate dropped by half. I mention that if someone is to make a claim, that is when they are most vulnerable. This particular provider was enabling people to have processing at their initial purchase. That sounds great, but what that meant in reality was that when people actually experience the vulnerability and need to make a claim, they needed to go through a medical assessment, because they did not do that upfront. They are at their most vulnerable and they need to go through a full medical assessment when they may not be able to drive. They may have to travel over half an hour. We needed to flip that framing and make sure that we educated customers on the reason why we needed them to take that up front. The reason we made some of those decisions, so that we were designing physically for them when they were vulnerable. Us as designers need to make sure we continually ask ourselves, are we designing in the best interest of the people we are designing for? One good example of this, I was reading an article yesterday, a blog post, someone was talking about they are a slave to Candy Crush micro purchasing. This is where you are designing specifically for vulnerable to, but this is bad design.
9. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 9 of 11 Designing for that small percentage of customers who are addicted, who are vulnerable. That is not why we exist. We need to advocate for the people we are designing for. As designers, as the people in this room, we other voice to drive action, but it doesn't just come down to stories, it comes down to facts. We need to take the story of Robin and elevate that. One of those figures, if we focus on the most vulnerable and we talk about homelessness, that was only a small instance, we would save 250 million a year. We take those facts and figures, take those stories, in order to make sure we are designing holistic services for people in the circumstances. CHLOE HAMPTON: I might talk faster. I apologise, I have an American mumble, do try to keep up. We use accessibility design and it benefits everyone, she talked about closed captions, which I just watched 'The Castle' and I had to watch it with closed captions, if I'm honest! If you see the blue lights to the right, it was originally designed to identify where there is disability parking available. It is in a lot of shopping centres for everyone to know where there is parking available. Great! The question becomes, the key takeaway, just like we design for accessibility, we need to design for vulnerability. Three key learnings. Proactive responsability for identifying people in viable circumstances. Design holistic services based on vulnerability layering. We need to design for vulnerability. The people from the other talker coming in, they did a better job on time management. We need to make sure we have lived experience involved. It's also lived expertise. Brené Brown gives a great quote, we communicate these to the people who can effect change in each organisation. It's not enough to be a storyteller. We have to involve those with lived experience to be part of the design process, the products they will use. If you look at empathy versus lived experience, there are benefits as well as some risks. Go ahead and take a picture of this. I won't go into details, what I will say, you need accommodation of empathy and lived experience because of these risks, they need to work together. Someone with lived experience, to people, within my lab team, were at odds, it's something called the empathy gap. You have less empathy for people because you have been through it before. Talk about how it is difficult to accurately recall how painful and stressful past adverse experience was. What you tend to remember is that it can be conquered, and therefore you are less empathetic towards other people that are still struggling. That's why lived expertise is important. People who have gone through it and are now advocates. Because they have a broader
10. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 10 of 11 experience of people still struggling through it. NATASHA BALLANTYNE: It's not just about involving them in our design, it's about embedding them in our team, to develop that authentic two-way relationship. This was a framework developed in partnership with Mission Australia. Us as designers, need to elevate those with lived experience to master their vulnerability. To learn with and from each other. We need to make sure that us as designers, when we go back to what our role is, ultimately, what we're doing is trying to design ourselves out of a job. We want to make sure that we don't need to design for vulnerability because it is integrated in the design, and people with lived experience are the ones driving the design. We are just the facilitators of change. CHLOE HAMPTON: The second to last key takeaway, don't kill me. We are designing for vulnerable people, always include people with both lived experience and lived expertise. The last one, practice self-care. Need to do this as part of our practice to ensure our well-being. I was working with survivors of child sexual abuse, and I fell pregnant myself. This is my daughter, in my womb, no longer, she is out. I realise that it is important to do this, you can't go it alone. You have to ensure there are escalation points, when you are engaging with people in our viable circumstance, if they get triggered and need help, it should fall on your shoulders. 1800 RESPECT, Lifeline, Beyond Blue, this is where you can refer people. Self-care is a was a good thing to go back to, meditation, a well-being framework. Self-care practices are essential for us to remain empathetic, build resilience and protect ourselves. NATASHA BALLANTYNE: We want you to think about how you can do the smallest thing to make the biggest difference. How you can make a change tomorrow. How can make a change in your next project by designing for vulnerability. Share it with us. We will share those results from Slido. CHLOE HAMPTON: I am happily married. I have a beautiful one year old daughter and a nine year old stepson. Four years ago my world was shattered, my partner at the time died tragically, and suddenly forced I had a miscarriage, and a dear friend of mine who served in the US Marine Corps committed suicide. This all happened within the space of a month. I was rocked to my core, I was hurt, I was vulnerable. I was still in the community, engaging in services and products that I would engage with every day. Probably even more so. It was at that time that I need to be connected to something bigger than myself. It was then that I realised that the experiences that were designed with me in mind, I mean me, not just a number or a dollar sign, me as a human. The people, the employees that managed to smile at me, not out of obligation but out of care. It stayed with me.
11. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU3008D) Main Room, Day 2 – 30th August, 2019 Page 11 of 11 These moments that we create, create moments of healing. At our most vulnerable, we are all still human. This is why Natasha and I design for vulnerable people, not customers. Thank you. (Applause)