Jonathan Shariat is the coauthor of the book Tragic Design and co-host of the Design Review Podcast. He's currently a Sr. Interaction Designer & Accessibility Program Lead at Google.This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.Topics covered:
How poor design kills in medical environments
Causing harm with features meant to bring joy
Considerations during the product development cycle
Industry specific checklists and testing requirements
Creating guiding principles for a team
Why medical software often has poor UX
Designing for crisis situations
Why dark patterns can be bad in the long term
Related Links
@designuxui
Tragic Design
How Bad UX Killed Jenny
Design Review podcast
Deceptive Design
TranscriptYou can help edit this transcript on GitHub.[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Jonathan Shariat, he's the co-author of Tragic design. The host of the design review podcast. And he's currently a senior interaction designer and accessibility program lead at Google. Jonathan, welcome to software engineering radio.[00:00:15] Jonathan: Hi, Jeremy, thank you So much for having me on.[00:00:18] Jeremy: the title of your book is tragic design. And I think that people can take a lot of different meanings from that. So I wonder if you could start by explaining what tragic design means to you.[00:00:33] Jonathan: Hmm. For me, it really started with this story that we have in the beginning of the book. It's also online. Uh, I originally wrote it as a medium article and th that's really what opened my eyes to, Hey, you know, design has, is, is this kind of invisible world all around us that we actually depend on very critically in some cases.And So this story was about a girl, you know, a nameless girl, but we named her Jenny for the story. And in short, she came for treatment of cancer at the hospital, uh, was given the medication and the nurses that were taking care of her were so distracted with the software they were using to chart, make orders, things like that, that they miss the fact that she needed hydration and that she wasn't getting it.And then because of that, she passed away. And I still remember that feeling of just kind of outrage. And, you know, when we hear a lot of news stories, A lot of them are outraging. they, they touch us, but some of them, some of those feelings stay and they stick with you.And for me, that stuck with me, I just couldn't let it go because I think a lot of your listeners will relate to this. Like we get into technology because we really care about the potential of technology. What could it do? What are all the awesome things that could do, but we come at a problem and we think of all the ways it could be solved with technology and here it was doing the exact opposite.It was causing problems. It was causing harm and the design of that, or, you know, the way that was built or whatever it was failing Jenny, it was failing the nurses too, right? Like a lot of times we blame that end user and, and it caused it. So to me, that story was so tragic. Something that deeply saddened me and was regrettable and cut short someone's uh, you know, life and that's the definition of tragic, and there's a lot of other examples with varying degrees of tragic, but, um, you know, as we look at the impact technology has, and then the impact we have in creating those technologies that have such large impacts, we have a responsibility to, to really look into that and make sure we're doing as best of job as we can and avoid those as much as possible.Because the biggest thing I learned in researching all these stories was, Hey, these aren't bad people. These aren't, you know, people who are clueless and making these, you know, terrible mistakes. They're me, they're you, they're they're people. Um, just like you and I, that could make the same mistakes.[00:03:14] Jeremy: I think it's pretty clear to our audience where there was a loss of life, someone, someone died and that's, that's clearly tragic. Right? So I