60 min.

Frank’s notes for this discussion as a checklist:

✅ Stress Cases Are the Real Cases

• ☐ Are you designing for users under mental/emotional strain?
   → Husband with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI): every interaction = stress case
   → Sexual violence survivors: mental state matters when filling forms or navigating systems- CTA: We need to appreciate the state of mind users approach a task with!!

• ☐ Do your personas reflect real pain points?
   → Brenda Laurel: “If your personas don’t have pain—they’re not real” CTA: We need to put a Stress Case First! lens over all our work (not casually sneak it into our work)

• ☐ Have you visualized context beyond static flows?
   → Use eg circle diagrams to show changing emotional states (from day to night, or from day to week or week to year or year to ten years)— CTA: Show persona context under duress and across timeframes.

• ☐ Are you embedding “Stress Cases First” as a design principles (values and vision)?
   → Home improvement store example: urgent fixes prioritized- they categorized requests as “Upgrades or Urgent”. Designed for Urgent as default so everyone benefited from constrained attention spans. >> Session on Vision and Values coming up in UXIC starts September 2025.

✅ Contextual Crisis & AI

• ☐ Is your service or AI ready for contextual crisis moments?
   → Missed job interview due to calendar bug
   → Customer in distress + broken policy + poor automation = total failure

• ☐ Can your AI detect and adapt to emotional state/context?
   → Use AI to repair, not just route or automate

• ☐ Are you reading edge cases as systemic signals?
   → AI should sense when “things aren’t going perfectly”

🔗 Inspo: Designing AI for When Things Go Wrong
 → “It’s not better automation… it’s empathy + responsiveness.”

✅ Positive Examples: Real-World Design for Crisis

☎️ Phone boxes in UK now house defibrillators

📞 Comcast offers disability-specific support line

🏫 Schools creating calm rooms for high-stress meetings

🐾 Vet used lighting, tone, and space during pet loss moment

🏃 Runner had “Type 1 Diabetes” tattoo to prepare for emergencies

+ one bad one: 💳 Apple Credit Card (Goldman Sachs) sexism case reported by Steve Wozniak: same household, his credit limit was huge, his wife’s tiny (gender bias). CTA: Watch for stress caused by the role of societal discrimination ?

✅ Spaces + Copy Matter in Stress

• ☐ Does the environment help users feel in control?
   → eg physical service: Dim lights, respectful tone, physical space = emotional support

• ☐ Is your copy clear, short, (stress-case sensitive) and mobile-friendly?
   → Smart Brevity, not form-filler overload. See: Design for Accessibility First  and Designing for Neurodiverse Users

• ☐ Are you asking users for info you’ll actually use?
   → HR example: long apps, never-used fields = wasteful & hostile

• ☐ Is your system ready for mobile-only users?
   → Daughter applying for jobs only on phone: scroll = stress if we default to long ‘standard’ job application forms. IF your forms are chunked or non-linear to complete, make sure you reinforce that in marketing/ emails etc. 

• → Audit flows, copy, and systems with real-life strain in mind
   → Ask: “Where would this break for someone under pressure?”
   → Use personas to embody crisis (stress case) modes (MCI, bereavement, ADHD, PTSD)= trauma-informed personas

✅ Workshop suggestion: Stress Cases as a Lens

• We’ll run a session called “Design for Stress Cases First”

✅ Final Reflections

• ☐ Are you assuming the user is calm, focused, resourced, and patient?

• ☐ What happens when they’re not?

• ☐ How might you use AI to triage, de-escalate, or simplify?

• ☐ What emotional consequences does the loss of control create in your flow?

—

Reading Circle- Design for Real Life

Join us for Design for Real Life (now a Free book)

Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a must-read if you want to move beyond generic “user-centered” design and build products that truly support people— especially in moments of stress, trauma, or exclusion. The book challenges the notion of edge cases, demonstrating how often these are genuine, yet frequently overlooked, user experiences. It provides practical, actionable guidance for creating more inclusive and compassionate digital experiences. If you work in UX, content, or service design, this short, clear book will shift how you think about responsibility and care in design. It’s a quick read with a lasting impact.

Why this matters: For our book club, this discussion matters because it pushes us to reflect on our own work. How can we better connect the dots between research, design, and real-world impact? How do we close the loop in our own processes to ensure we’re designing responsibly? Let’s explore together

Feel free to join as many Reading Circles as possible (you don’t have to attend all of them to participate).

Reading schedule