Thread by @RohanIrvine

We are in the Q&A for #uxa2021 #uxaustralia

Answer from Steven W (about qualifications) Qualification are sometimes/often used to further marginalise people.

Steve B talkign about access to education can go back to early childhood, so qualifications can often reflect who's had the privilege of getting qualified, and not everyone's qualifications are earned in the same experience.

Steven W: The systems where credentials are handed out have systemic inequalities built into them, so when we question credentials we need to ask where do we start making the reparations to balance out the things that happened in the past.

Q: In the absence of credentials we make judgements based on impressions, how do we balance this?
Steven W: We need to work on our own internalised racism, ableism etc — what are the decisions we make that uphold these system before making decisions.

Steven is talking about starting with the media we consume, and how that influences how we characterise people around us, societal norms etc

Removing all identifiers as much as possible to remove biases, trying to reframe from judging people and what people might be. Judge on what you've seen and heard.

Q: On the flip side is it okay to exclude someone if they say things in the interview that might be discriminatory in the interview.

A: Steven W: You should be seeking people who bring a different perspective, discrimination and the paradox of tolerance won't make your team more inclusive. Recommend not writing "not a cultural fit"

Q: We want to attract queer talent, but don’t want this to look token. Any advice?
A: Steven W — always ask consent before getting people to be ambassadors, if it's you, don't worry about how it looks and focus on how you'll impact your community.

Q: When you go into poorer communities, do you moderate how you're dressed etc?
A: Kim — absolutely, i'm always aware of being an outsider and the bias and influence I'm bringing into the room. The more you can build a local team around you the better outcomes you'll get

Kim — read up as much as you can about the culture, basic politeness, dress appropriate for the community, there's a lot of your presence that's introduced, the less you talk the more empowering the research.

Q: How do we do accessibility work remotely?
A: Charlii — we also had to face this, all of our testing is online with Intopia connect. It's actually made it easier in a lot of respects (transport, location etc) but harder in terms of technology

The other issue that comes up is sharing the screenreader — not sharing the voice.

They get the participant to join on laptop and phone, get them to turn off phone speaker and audio. Get the screen reader slowed down.

Having a backup platform is really important, a lot of organisations have a single tool they use. Do some tech testing with your users.

Be willing to pivot!

Q: The spectrum of disability is so wide, how do you chose what types of disability need to be included?
A: Charlii — We usually pick the top four Vision, Hearing, Cognitive, Dexterity

Try and include someone out of these groups — as you bring in more diverse people you'll build up your knowledge library about the common issues these groups of people run into with your system.

Q: What prevents teams moving to more developed stages in Design Systems?
A: Josh — getting stakeholders onboard beyond the proof of concept, getting a dedicated team and time to work on it.

Make sure you actually need a design system and creating the processes to maintain it are really important.

To launch a public design system usually comes from massive companies with huge amounts of investment into their system.

Q: Regulatory review timescales from regulatory bodies, how doers that affect your work?
A: Aaron - there's no way around it. We don't directly deal with the regulatory stuff. There is a very robust procurement process and sometimes it just takes a long time.

We are trying to ensure that user experience is a requirement/consideration of the procurement process to ensure the clinical user experience is considered in the flows.

The prototyping centre (Aaron is building this to test quickly) is aimed at re-designing and iterating before it goes down the process improvement or innovation process.

Michelle: We're trying to move to a model of figuring out how something works for the system before contract

Q: How does your design team work with engineers?
A: Michelle — we work as a consultancy within health so we go into team with clinical and technical expertise. We have other directorate about program and service delivery we work closely with.

Aaron: if you look at ux maturity level across organisations we're at the early to mid level — dedicated team, resources and we are slowly infiltrating the rest of the organisation.

eventually we'll get to the stage when we're embedded within the other organisations.

Thanks to all the speakers and the audience for the questions!

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