Compassionate Design by Eric Meyer—An Event Apart video

Designers are skilled at creating an ideal experience for idealized users. But what happens when our idealized experience collides with messy human reality? Designs can frustrate, alienate, or even offend; form options can exclude; on-boarding processes can turn away; interactions can reject or even endanger.

The more we build websites and digital products that touch every aspect of our lives, the more critical it becomes for us to start designing for imperfect, distressed, and vulnerable situations—designing interfaces that don't attempt to make everything seamless, but instead embrace and accommodate the rough edges of the human experience.

In this riveting 60-minute presentation, captured live at An Event Apart Orlando: Special Edition, Eric Meyer (co-author, Design for Real Life and co-founder of An Event Apart) explores a wide variety of failure modes, from the small to the life-changing, and shows how reorienting your perspective and making simple additions to your process can help anticipate and avoid these failures, leading to more humane, and ultimately more compassionate, outcomes. This video is close-captioned.

Enjoy all the videos in An Event Apart's library. There are over 30 hours of them—all absolutely free! For more Eric Meyer, come to An Event Apart, the design and front-end conference, this year. And for your free monthly guide to all things web, design, and developer-y, subscribe to The AEA Digest. Subscribers get exclusive access to our latest videos weeks before anyone else!