CONCLUSION

“The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats.”

—PAUL FORD, “10 Timeframes” (http://bkaprt.com/dfrl/09-01/)

THE HEARTBEATS OUR WORK affects belong to people—people who have painful experiences and imperfections and subjects they’d rather not have dredged up every time they use the web.

But that’s life. Stress, trauma, alienation, crisis, pain: each of these states is part of the human experience. Not fringe. Not weird. Just as typical, and expected, as anything else. The more we embrace this, the better we’ll become at supporting real people as they interact with our sites and products.

We hope this book has given you the tools to get started—because you’re now as prepared as anyone to advocate for more empathetic and inclusive design in your organization.

Compassion helps everyone

Designing with compassion helps every one of us, even when we’re not facing trauma or crisis. When we build content and designs that stand up against stress, we stop filling our pages with clever-but-meaningless fluff; we stop foisting features on users who haven’t asked for them; we stop attempting to tell users how they ought to feel.

Sure, we might lose a bit of plucky copy and upbeat imagery along the way. But what we gain is so much richer: a compass that will guide us in a humane, sensible direction as we continue to sort out the role digital products play in our lives. We gain the space in our processes and designs for the things that truly matter: being clear, specific, and helpful.

Be courageous

As we’ve said, this takes courage—because no matter how great our intentions, we’ll still make mistakes. As ThinkUp, the service we met at the start of this book, says in its mission statement:

We’re going to screw up. We’re going to learn from it. It’s only unforgivable if we don’t share what we learned.

It’s easy to be kind when a person is standing in front of us, and when we know precisely what they’re going through. It’s much harder to foster compassion for unknowns—for all the ways our work could hurt someone, or increase their stress and anxiety, that we’ll never hear about.

We owe it to our users to try anyway, and to own up to it when we get it wrong.

That process starts with listening. Listening to those millions and trillions of heartbeats—the heartbeats of people we’ll never know, but whose lives we affect every day.