We watch TV with subtitles a lot these days. It’s like reading television.[rustling leaves]

Actually, we watch a lot of closed captioned (CC) TV. In addition to the already-subtitled productions (translating non-English films) we started by turning on closed-captioning for those highly-accented British period pieces or procedurals (where you know it’s English but just can’t get in the rhythm).[footsteps approaching]

Intended for the hearing challenged (which, increasingly, we are becoming!) the optional closed captions (as opposed to open captions, which are automatically visible) add audio track descriptions in addition to dialog; they classify soundtrack music (which are not even close to running out of adjectives, see [dramatic musical sting]* below) and pick up distance noise, or off screen sounds, turning it all into words. In italics. …

My favorite thing about UX design is that it’s not some open-ended creative exercise performed in a vacuum. It’s a mechanical dance: the synchronized push-pull tension of time, constraints, budget, technical limits, and opportunities. A lot of what we study in design school assumes some idealized version of design heuristics when the reality of our workplace experience requires us to navigate the everyday compromises of these tensions.

I work primarily with enterprise cloud security and data products; my users are a highly-skilled niche, their requirements are complex, and mistakes are costly (figuratively and literally). And because design teams don’t work in an idealized vacuum either, ideas and features are sometimes shoehorned in at the last minute if we can make them work. In one recent case, I had a request come in for one extra feature late in the design process. I wanted to say no because there wouldn’t be an elegant solution that could fit our design and development timeline. The solution that we had time to implement would be clunky and not easy to discover, but ultimately it would solve the customer’s need if they invested the extra effort to find it. …

As designers and engineers, we have to be aware that the risk of users suffering psychological trauma will steadily increase as V.R. technology advances. The deconstruction of VR through philosophical, technological, ethical, and cognitive lenses.

Table of Contents:

1. Philosophical Lens. A set of important theories about why and how art affects us.2. Technological Lens. What does it have to do with Virtual Reality?3. Ethical Lens. Why we need Code of Ethics for VR?4. Cognitive Lens. How VR especially its apotheosis in virtual embodiment intensifies as it draws us more into the medium with which we’re playing?

Virtual reality as a technology simply intensifies a set of debates about art — whether it is contagious and bad for society, whether it is imitative and good for society — we’ve been having for a long time.

Philosophical Lens. A set of important theories about why and how art affects us

TL;DR. Humans are imitative. Art imitates life, including emotions. Humans imitate art. For Plato, this is bad because art also represents negative and foolish emotions and these are contagious, and art is emotional manipulation. For Aristotle, this is good because when we feel art’s emotions, we experience catharsis: we relieve ourselves, and art is emotional ventilation. For George Eliot, this is good because this is how we can experience sympathy with others, in their pain and joy, and at is emotional extension. …

How do we measure design quality? This question has been asked at every company where I’ve led design, and it comes not only from designers but from stakeholders and executives as well. Solutions range from “we’ll know it when we see it”, to principle-based evaluation, to detailed and rigorous product and design reviews. Other suggested solutions have included surveys like NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), or custom user surveys like “How delightful do you find our product?”

Each of these solutions is problematic. Internally-led evaluations may be biased by internal motivations or blindspots. …