Aaron Gustafson
As would be expected from a former manager of the Web Standards Project, Aaron Gustafson is passionate about web standards and accessibility. He’s been working on the Web for over two decades now and is a web standards advocate at Microsoft. In addition to working closely with the Edge team, Aaron works with partners on Progressive Web Apps, with a focus on cross-platform compatibility. He penned the seminal book on progressive enhancement, Adaptive Web Design, and has been known to have some opinions, many of which you can read at aaron-gustafson.com.
Talk: Designing with Empathy
Every decision we make affects the way real people experience our products. We’ve all heard the rallying cry for user-centered design, but even those of us who ascribe to that ideal often fall back on our own biases and instincts when it comes to making decisions about how people experience our content and our services. Sadly, this often means we make decisions we think will be good for our "users"—that anonymous, faceless crowd—rather than actually trying to understand the perspectives, surroundings, capabilities, and disadvantages of the actual people who we are here to serve.
In this session, Aaron Gustafson will explore why empathy is a good thing, how empathy empowers creativity, and how we, as a community, can inject more empathy into our work.
