Caring for Your Audience: Ask What Choices They Have

Reacting to Responsibility: the Uh-oh List

When were you when you realized you were the person most responsible in the place? Maybe you've been or are a caretaker or sitter for someone. Your choices have an extra significant impact on those around you, especially when you're responsible for taking care of others. When you notice this do you feel any of these as a result of the responsibility:

• Rush of power and desire to deal out the power? Note: that's an uh-oh.
• Desire to run a way? Also an uh-oh.
• Ah-so-what apathy? Another uh-oh.
• Crushing feeling that you must be a perfect provider of every possible need and desire? That's also an uh-oh.
• None of the above? That's probably not an uh-oh.

The Uh-oh List in a Product Context

Each case of uh-oh is a mismatch of responsibility, needs, and motivations. Instead of being a caretaker in a small group of humans, what if you think of your product as something that shows your care, concern, and service to your audience?

• Power hoarding: making decisions without including others.
• Dodging, hiding: actively avoiding learning from the connection between your company, product, and audiences.
• Apathy: whether through lack of trust or other disconnects, taking action to learn and evolve the product is less appealing than doing nothing.
• Perfectionism: Looks like diligence but brings same outcomes as apathy, dodging, and hoarding power.

Are any of these approaches to caring about a product and audience familiar? Making products and services is an amazing capability whether you come from a background of creative arts, business and finance, engineering, or design. Each of those backgrounds is capable of bringing so much value to others. And along with the value comes risks in different forms of harm we can bring to our audiences.

In each case if we meet the uh-oh with a safe context we can change to a different model of expectations and behaviors. The constructive inclusive caretaker is a model of concerns and behaviors to add to the UX Mindset.

If you're in an environment that's willing to learn and be affected by what you're learning from the five audiences of audience, organization, team, world, and you then you have a great opportunity. Start with a useful reframing question:

What choices do they have?

We can notice this power of bringing new things into the world, changing products, how we present them, how we serve them over time. It's also useful to notice how we, our audiences, and the world connect in different systemic ways.

If we understand just enough of the context to consider where our audiences meet what we make we can ask: "What choices do they have?"

This leads to learning more about our role as constructive inclusive caretaker to serve them well, meet them where they are. We can be confident of making things that are accessible, usable, useful, even fun and desirable when that's appropriate.

Making things and changing things we've made. That's seriously cool power. Literally changing the world one creative, business, engineered and design solution at a time.

We need to be able to ask and learn. Then we need to be able to apply what we learn. To do all that you need to be prepared individually and in your team to be constructive inclusive caretakers of your product and audience.

So our next question: are you setup to do that?

Are you setup to be and are you being a constructive inclusive caretaker kind of product maker?

Are you in a position to ask questions? And do your questions come from any of the uh-oh factors of power hoarding, dodging, apathy, or perfectionism? If either answer is no, you're probably not in a place to benefit from making

A constructive inclusive caretaker of what you make and how it connects and affects audiences needs to ask questions that let us see and understand best we can, as inclusively, ethically as possible how they meet what we make.

How teams and businesses work to improve requires being a place where learning is encouraged. You aren't going to learn much without asking questions.

If you're solo, it may take practice, if you're part of a bigger organization it may take a lot more.

Practicing how you meet a situation is almost always an option as an individual. It's a great tool in design to find out the intentionality behind a product. You're funded and asked to make something and no matter your focus in engineering, design, art, or business, how you choose to meet the situation is a tool.

Your response to a request is a tool that can help open the possibility of learning more and including your audience.

Where do you find yourself in the whole flow of decisions, strategy, and tactics for making things? Do you have clear ways to learn from your audience, to include and represent them well in decisions?

• If your team provides collaborative ways to give and receive feedback, you have obvious options to learn and request to include your audiences.
• Or you might be slowed or blocked by current practices and habits of yours, your team, or organization.

Now you're looking at the situation it might be a good time to ask: what choices do you have to make a difference including your audience? Answering that can help make sense of possible ways forward in your organization or elsewhere.

Let's say you are in a situation open to learning from your audience. And now you're comfortable with questions, learning, and using what you learn. How about one more question to be sure: what exactly is a constructive inclusive caretaker kind of product maker?

Constructive Inclusive Caretaker

Constructive: you take action to build knowledge, relationships, and products that help others.

Inclusive: means you are collaborating with and learning from your audiences of users, organization, team, the world, and yourself.

Caretaker: means you consider your products effect on others and the world beyond a single transaction into a lifecycle to learn from and work to make sustainable.

You as an individual, team, and organization can show those traits. It helps if you have principles and goals that harmonize being constructive, inclusive, and caretaking.

Seems Obvious, Why is This Necessary?

Not all models for business and organizations have those traits.

Some are quite extractive and make use of the uh-oh list on purpose. I'm not sure if those businesses could benefit from the model of being constructive, inclusive, and caretaking.

I worked in the mortgage investment industry early in my career during the time of predatory lending. This is when I was learning and testing so many of my core skills. It wasn't until the crash of that industry in 2008 when I re-examined the business model of where I worked for 9 years. I recalled jargon that painted over what the reality was of the loans and investments. I remembered projects that were very complex kinds of accounting. Why didn't I see this earlier?

I share that because I know it's easy to find yourself somewhere that has a plausible enough story about it where you're employed, learning, growing, yet something can be off about it. Even if you realize it sooner than later, you have responsibilities and bills to pay.

The realities of applying systemic minded human centered design in an inclusive collaborative way build on principles and ethics where every single building block fits... is complicated.

What I hope this does for you is to amplify your powers of making a difference where you can when you can. Just because we can't build perfect systems right now doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Do what you can to avoid the Uh-oh list. That's a start.