As you know, building great software depends on a deep knowledge of users. If you're working on a project targeted at people who operate in high-risk situations, such as activists and journalists, it can be hard to get the quality insight you need to design features and experiences that will work for them. If you're based in the San Francisco Bay area, there's an exciting event happening in July that focuses especially on user experiences for this population.
Great user experiences are born through the hard work of professionals with a variety of skills. As illustrated by the UX unicorn we've seen before, there's a lot that goes into what we call "design" or "usability.
A screener is a questionnaire that helps researchers recruit the most appropriate participants for their user study research. Here is an example we used for our mobile messaging study in NYC. Blue Ridge Labs handled the recruiting. Most of this screener's questions are a standard part of how they work with potential participants. Our questions, in red, focus on messaging and attitudes towards privacy. Additional questions about VPN use, email, and getting online were for our Fellow Gus Andrews's research.
Building great software requires understanding what users want and need. If you’re building privacy-preserving software, this includes understanding the privacy threats that your users face. One of the participants in Ame’s NYC study. When Ame set out to talk to people in the New York City neighborhoods of Brownsville and Harlem about their experiences with mobile messaging, she wanted to amplify voices that are frequently underrepresented in the software community. (Many thanks again to Blue Ridge Labs for helping her connect with study participants.
Naming software is hard because the name needs to convey a lot of meaning about what the program does to an unfamiliar audience, and do it all using only a word or short phrase. You want something memorable and easy to say – which becomes more complex when designing with a global audience in mind. Android's recently-announced competition to name the latest operating system has been met with skepticism. The accompanying parody video pokes fun at naming as an unskilled and silly exercise.