About This Episode
Welcome back to the podcast. In this episode, we’re joined by Michelle Keller. Michelle creates content that promotes trust, protects her clients’ agency and dignity, and is welcoming to all through inclusivity and accessibility, and hopes for the future.
She specializes in designing clear, compassionate, and trauma-informed content for difficult and sensitive situations. She’s led content development from initial concept through delivery and has experience with UX and WordPress development.
She’s also created systems and processes for auditing, managing, producing, and publishing digital content. And she says she excels at bringing order and structure to chaos.
This episode is perfect for you if you’re curious about what compassionate design is and how to integrate it into your digital marketing strategy.
I don’t know what a user is experiencing when they come to my content. Did they just come in from their dog getting hit by a car? Or did they just lose their job? If I design content in such a way as to be compassionate and to care about them as a human being, everyone benefits. ~ Michelle Keller
Episode Highlights
- What compassionate design is and how you can integrate it into your digital marketing strategy
- How compassionate design and inclusive efforts overlap.
- How can you convince your boss to take a compassionate design approach?
- What soft skills do digital marketers need to cultivate in order to embrace compassionate design?
- How can teams foster more compassion in the design and decision-making process?
- How does compassionate design help us avoid bias or harmful assumptions about users?
Connect With Michelle
- Michelle’s Content UX Design Portfolio
- Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn
- Find Michelle on Medium
- Follow Rachel Edwards
- Follow Rachael Dietkus
- Follow Megan Legawiec
Resources
- Who Can Use
- GTmetrics
- Plain Language Guide Series
- The Center for Plain Language
- Hemingway Editor
- How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article.
- How people read online: You might finish this article.
- (Book) Designed with Care: Creating trauma-informed content
- (Book) Design for Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog
- (Book) Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- (Book) Design for Cognitive Bias by David Dylan Thomas
- (Book) Just Enough Research: Second Edition by Erika Hall
- (Course) Trauma-Informed Design Online Class
Check out all of the resources mentioned in our other episodes.
Other episodes you’ll enjoy:
- How Empathy Can Make You More Successful
- How To Make Websites Accessible By Americans With Disability
- How To Grow Your Business With Content Marketing
- How To Optimize Videos In Your Marketing Strategy
Loved this episode?
Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Tweet and tag us @dmvictories!
Episode Transcript
➡️ [Download episode transcript]
[00:00:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories Podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the change makers in digital marketing. I’m personally obsessed with how digital marketers sell through and get their ideas executed. I’m your host, Katherine Watier Ong. I’m the owner of WO Strategies, LLC.
We focus on organic discovery for our enterprise clients with a training-centered approach. Today, we’re joined by Michelle Keller. Michelle creates content that promotes trust, protects her clients’ agency and dignity, and is welcoming to all through inclusivity and accessibility, and hopes for the future.
She specializes in designing clear, compassionate, and trauma-informed content for difficult and sensitive situations. She’s led content development from initial concept through delivery and has experience with UX and WordPress development.
She’s also created systems and processes for auditing, managing, producing, and publishing digital content. And she says she excels at bringing order and structure to chaos.
This episode is perfect for you if you’re curious about what compassionate design is and how to integrate it into your digital marketing strategy.
How compassionate design and inclusive ADA-type efforts overlap, how you convince your boss to take a compassionate design approach, what soft skills digital marketers need in order to cultivate and embrace a compassionate design format, how teams can foster more compassion in the design and decision-making process, and how compassionate design helps us avoid bias or harmful assumptions about users.
It’s going to be a great episode. Michelle, welcome to the show.
[00:01:48] Michelle Keller: Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here, Katherine.
[00:01:51] Katherine Watier Ong: Cool. So, just before the show started, we were talking about how you changed jobs. So, can you introduce yourself to the listeners and let them know where you’re at now?
[00:01:59] Michelle Keller: Yeah, sure. So I started my career initially in social work. And throughout various years, I’ve taken a number of different jobs, especially when my kids were little.
And I did some freelance design work. I started doing that about 11 years ago. And that was when I first got into design.
But two jobs ago, I started working as a content designer for Hospice, and that’s where I was introduced to trauma-informed design or compassionate design, as I’ve been calling it lately.
And from that job, I ended up with my current position with a government contractor. And at the moment, I’m supporting two contracts with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
And I was hired specifically because of my background in trauma-informed design.
[00:02:42] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s cool. So you’ve mentioned it a couple of times. Can you explain to the listeners what compassionate design is?
[00:02:49] Michelle Keller: Absolutely. So my quick elevator speech is actually what you just introduced me in, in terms of the kind of content that I design.
But I’ll unpack where that comes from. So compassionate design comes out of what’s usually called trauma-informed design. And that is a term that was started by SAMHSA, which is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration here in the U.S.
federal government. And they identified six areas that trauma-informed design needed to encompass. And that was safety, trustworthiness, and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment, voice and choice, and cultural, historical, and gender issues.
And so I’ve boiled that down for me personally into trust, agency, welcome, and hope. And basically, what compassionate design means for me is designing content in a way that cares about the people who are going to be accessing it.
And I use trauma-informed design as kind of what I do. That’s what I specialize in. But a lot of people are put off by that term and saying, oh, well, I don’t, I work for Amazon.
Nobody has trauma when they come to Amazon.
So I don’t need to worry about that. But compassionate design makes it feel a little bit more accessible. So I’m actually applying trauma-informed design to the term “compassionate design.”
[00:04:08] Katherine Watier Ong: Ah, yeah. It makes tons of sense to me. I mean, when I was working with the National Cancer Institute, it was one of the things that I had suggested.
Because there’s interesting research out there about how if you’re under stress, how that… It impacts how you can absorb online copy, like how fast you read things and whether or not you can see things.
And the summary is that if you’re in a stressful situation, you have less capacity to handle too much text and complicated navigation and that kind of thing.
[00:04:35] Michelle Keller: That is exactly correct.
[00:04:37] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, yeah.
And it was so obvious because, as you would expect, a government agency that’s never done any of this before, it sounded very dry for everybody.
And that just didn’t make a lot of sense. And it was also very obvious when you flip to one of their non-Fed competitors in the same topic space, and they are using compassion in their copy.
And it’s very clear.
[00:04:59] Michelle Keller: Very clear.
[00:05:01] Katherine Watier Ong: I wait, I bet there’s research.
Because I didn’t have that background. I was like, I bet there’s research on this. Wait, hold on.
[00:05:06] Michelle Keller: There is.
[00:05:07] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, because I’ve got a little bit of background in human-computer interaction. So I was like, I bet there’s some stuff out there about this.
So talk a little bit more about why you think everybody needs some sort of compassionate design, even if they’re not a place by the National Cancer Institute.
[00:05:21] Michelle Keller: Yeah, absolutely. I think the reality is that I don’t know what a user is experiencing when they access my content.
So when they get my email or when they log on to my website, I don’t know what has been happening in their day.
Did they just come in from their dog getting hit by a car? Or did they just lose their job, and now they get an email from someone asking, hey, how’s it going?
Do you want to buy our product? I don’t know what my users are experiencing when they come to my content.
So if I design content and visual design in such a way as to be compassionate and to care about them as a human being, everyone benefits from that.
Whether you’re accessing my content because you just had the worst day of your life or whether you just got a promotion and you’re going to Disney, you’re going to love compassionate content, too.
So in my opinion, nobody loses in that. Designing compassionately benefits everything. And because I can’t control the state of mind that the person is in when they come, just like you mentioned for the cancer thing, that apps, we think about it in situations like that, right?
Cancer, I work with veterans, so sure, that makes sense. But I mentioned Amazon earlier. You know, sometimes I’m on Amazon because I need to purchase something that’s causing me a great deal of stress.
And if I can’t find it quickly, it causes me more stress, and I’m liable to just walk away and do something else.
So if it’s designed in a compassionate way and communicates with me like I’m a human being, that makes all the difference in the world.
So we all need compassion.
[00:06:56] Katherine Watier Ong: You know, this makes me wonder whether software options like Desk.com have some of this built into it, because I was just thinking of support structures, right?
Because usually, once you hit a support page, you’re annoyed at the very least. If not, maybe other levels of emotion.
I don’t know if you know the answer, but you’re going to have to tell me via email after.
Because now I’m dying to know whether, you know, because there’s a bunch of them in that suite. It’s like, you have Salesforce and the Desk. coms and whatever.
And I just kind of wonder if they ever thought about it, though they should.
[00:07:31]Michelle Keller: They should. They absolutely should. Because we all need that, right? I’m looking through my notes because I don’t remember what question it was that I was thinking through, but I had an experience just like this earlier this week, right?
I got a notification that my free trial had been upgraded and my credit card had been charged. And I went, oh, crud.
[00:07:58] Katherine Watier Ong: You love those?
[00:080:00] Michelle Keller: Yeah, I love those. Usually, I put a ticker in my calendar to remind me to cancel before they automatically charge me.
Well, I’d forgotten probably because there was a lot going on. was a little stressed. And I didn’t want this product.
I literally had signed up for the free trial because I was annoyed at the pop-ups that kept coming up every time I was trying to use the site.
So I’m going to reach out for their help. And so I clicked the help button. It was a chatbot.
Immediately, I go into fight mode, right? Anticipating a terrible experience.
I’m not going to mention the company.
Because there weren’t any other options.
There was no phone number. There was no email.
I had to use a chatbot. So I type in my question to the chatbot.
And the chatbot responds, not a problem. I’ve already canceled your subscription and refunded your payment.
[00:08:50] Katherine Watier Ong: What?
[00:08:51] Michelle Keller: And I went, what? What’s my exact response? It was the most beautiful interaction I’ve ever had in my life with the chatbot.
[00:09:01] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s amazing.
[00:09:03] Michelle Keller: So do I wish they would have sent me a reminder email saying, hey, your thing’s about to expire. Or even better, that they didn’t ask for payment information for their free trial. Yes. But they did.
And then they recognized at some point along the line, someone said, hey, what if a user doesn’t want it and forgets to cancel before we re-up? Because the chatbot is already trained on that situation. So at least at that moment someone thought about compassion design.
[00:09:32] Katherine Watier Ong: So you’re making me think I’m going to head off the web for a second because I recently had a customer service experience that ticked me off. But does compassionate design also apply to phone trees?
[00:09:42] Michelle Keller: Yes, 100%. So one of the things, actually, when I was unemployed and looking for a job, I interviewed for a number of positions that involved writing the script for those phone calls that you make.
Because the customer service representative that you’re talking to, even when you get a human, has a script that they’re working off of, right?
And so if you have a situation that doesn’t follow their script, they oftentimes don’t know what to do. So there were some companies that were actually experimenting with a choose your own adventure, where the customer would call in, they would say what their problem is, the rep would type that into their in program.
And then it would pick up some options, and they would select an option, and then ask the customer a question, and select a different option.
And it was so much more interactive. And I was like, that’s the kind of script writing I would love to be part of, right?
Thinking through all the scenarios and stuff like that. So yes, compassionate design absolutely applies to those kinds of interactions.
I think it applies to print. I think you can use it. There’s even on LinkedIn, there’s a trauma-informed design society that’s actual for physical design.
So like the design of the spaces. Yes. How do you put it together, as you think of a doctor’s office, right?
People are really stressed to go to a doctor’s office. Or a hospital. How can we design our physical space in a way to be compassionate to the folks who are going to be there?
[00:11:06] Katherine Watier Ong: You’re reminding me. I also had an experience with a hospital that took me up. Anyway. No, because it was like, I was, my mother’s not very mobile, and I was taking her for, they were open on the weekend.
She was getting an X-ray, some sort of scan. But they didn’t tell me. And unfortunately, the front desk didn’t know either.
There’s usually a parking lot right next to the building.
And we can do handicap parking.
And it’s pretty short to go from there to where the scan is. But I booked on the weekend because I have a lot of medical appointments.
It was easier to take her on a Saturday. And that garage was closed. And it was raining.
And the only park, luckily, they let me drop her off in front. But the only parking lot was like Group C or whatever, which was like, very far away, you know, and I was like, what are you doing?
Like, I had a moment where I was, for instance, I was on a scooter for a while because I had operations on my ankles.
And you’d be surprised at how many places just don’t even have sidewalks and stuff.
[00:12:08] Michelle Keller: But once you encounter compassionate design, you see it everywhere. My dad told me just the other day on the phone, he’s like, I think about you every day.
I’m like, oh, Dad, that’s so sweet.
Well, because I encounter all this stuff.
That’s so messed up. And I think, man, Michelle would fix that.
[00:12:23] Katherine Watier Ong: Thanks, Dad. I was hoping you were actually thinking about me every day. So, how do you get started with the compassionate design approach?
Is it similar to what you would do for like ADA stuff? Only because we have a lot of listeners with SE,O, and our stuff overlaps a lot with ADA.
[00:12:41] Michelle Keller: I think there is a lot of overlap with ADA or WCAG guidelines, or 508 compliance, or whatever you’re using at your company.
I think there’s a lot of overlap. I think that can be a good starting point because I’ll be honest, I’ve worked for companies who weren’t even on their radar.
And like this color contrast, like those, the print is too tiny. No one can read it. And you’ve got a gray background and white text, and no one can read that.
So I think that those are good places to start because, at a baseline level, if I can’t even access your content, it’s not compassionate.
If you have… So, haven’t set up your header tags in a way that my screen reader understands, your content is not compassionate.
It doesn’t make me feel welcome, right? It says to me, oh, you can’t actually read content. You have to listen to it.
This is not for you. Right. And that’s not what compassionate content is about.
[00:13:40] Katherine Watier Ong: Now, do you use that line when you’re trying to convince? I don’t know if you’ve been in a moment where you need to convince people to do compassionate design, because obviously, your current agency you work for wants it for various reasons.
But I kind of wonder, you just said, this content is not for me. So I wonder if you can pivot that in conversations to actually get people to do compassionate design.
[00:14:01] Michelle Keller: Yes, I have actually said that before. was when I worked at hospice, I was doing some designing, and I wanted to change. We had print mailers that we were required by the government to send out to people.
We had to send things in print. And I said, that’s fine. But our print options were they were horrific, right? We’re too much on the page, too tiny font, not bold enough for people to even read it on a colored background.
And so I said, can I redesign these? And they said, sure, whatever. So I redesigned them both in print and digital because I wanted to make them available digitally.
Because what we had for the download before was literally the print copy that we sent to the printer.
[00:14:44] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, okay. Yeah.
[00:14:46] Michelle Keller: And they were trifold brochures, which look great.
[00:14:49] Katherine Watier Ong: Fabulous. That’s really easy on your mobile phone.
[00:14:53] Michelle Keller: So I redesigned the digital one and the print version. And then I was showing it to my boss. And he said, convince me why I’m going to have to reprint all of these now so that they look like what this looks like.
And I said, okay, I want you to stand at the back of my office and read this. And he said, well, I can’t see it from there.
I said, exactly. Now imagine you’re an 85-year-old man who just lost his wife in hospice. Then this comes in your mail.
What are you going to do? He’s like, I’m going to throw it away.
[00:15:22] Katherine Watier Ong: You’re going to get angry, probably, and throw it away.
[00:15:23]Michelle Keller: And then you’re going to think, I hate these hospice people. And then I showed him a website that’s called Who Can Read This?
And it actually shows you color palettes and whether people with different visual problems can see them.
[00:15:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, that’s cool. I haven’t heard of that one before.
[00:15:42] Michelle Keller: Fabulous. It’s so fantastic because then you can isolate. Like, here’s what it looks like. Here’s what our website looks like. To someone who has cataracts. Or here’s what they look like to someone who has blurred vision.
And he looked at it, and he’s like, I bet half of our people can’t even read our websites. I said, yeah.
[00:16:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Wow. Yeah, I mean, that’s very similar to what I do in relation to page speed. If I see someone who’s on a particularly atrociously slow website, there’s a tool called GTmetrics, which is free.
I think they make you create a login now. But. But you could actually create a little video about how long it takes for things to load based on locations.
So, especially when I’m working with maybe international folks, I’m like, this is what it looks like in Peru.
And somebody has to sit there painfully waiting for the thing to load.
[00:16:33] Michelle Keller: And even that’s compassionate design, right? Because you’re saying, hey, person with slow internet, this website is also for you. So it’s not just for people with fast, high-speed internet who have great technological equipment that can download our things super fast.
It’s for everyone.
[00:16:53] Katherine Watier Ong: So, how much effort do you spend on text selection, like the actual language that you’re using?
[00:17:01] Michelle Keller: That, I think, is honestly the easiest place to start when you’re starting to say, how can I incorporate compassionate design?
You’re writing the text anyway, so just write better text. Use clean, plain language on the plainlanguage.gov website. This is really helpful.
Avoid euphemisms and inside jokes. If you’re writing content that’s going to be accessible to people who are not just white Americans, then make sure that you’re not using parts of speech that only that one slice of culture would understand.
Obviously, when I was writing content for hospice and death, every culture views death so differently. So you have to be really careful.
Generally, we say you want to use the same language that your customer is using. The exception to that is if your customer uses euphemisms and similes, and metaphors all the time, you probably want to dial that back.
[00:18:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Do you also pull down the reading level because half the U.S. does not read books anymore?
[00:18:10] Michelle Keller: Hemingway is great for that.
So I love to try and get it down, honestly, between a third or a fifth grade level.
[00:18:17] Katherine Watier Ong: Wow, that low?
[00:18:19] Michelle Keller: Yes. If it’s an academic publication, I will go up to a high school level.
[00:18:26] Katherine Watier Ong: You won’t even pull that into college? If it is an academic site?
[00:18:30] Michelle Keller: No.
[00:18:31] Katherine Watier Ong: Fascinating.
[00:18:32] Michelle Keller: Do you think your college students are reading at a college level? Hmm.
[00:18:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Not the current band of them. I mean.
[00:18:38] Michelle Keller: Where are people reading today? They’re reading on the web.
[00:18:41] Katherine Watier Ong: Right, right. Short-term.
[00:18:43] Michelle Keller: How many people are sitting down and reading a novel on a regular basis or reading a non-fiction book to find answers to their questions?
People aren’t doing that anymore.
[00:18:53] Katherine Watier Ong: I know. That’s my bias because I’m a big reader.
[00:18:55] Michelle Keller: Same. Absolutely.
[00:18:57] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Totally my bias.
[00:18:58] Michelle Keller: Sitting on my desk right now to help me just with this podcast interview.
[00:19:07] Katherine Watier Ong: People don’t read.
[00:19:08] Michelle Keller: Yep.
[00:19:09] Katherine Watier Ong: One of my training decks has this article that I absolutely love. It’s on Slate, and it’s called You’ll Never Finish This Article.
So Slate partnered with an eye-tracking company, and they actually. I actually noticed when people stopped reading. So in the article, they’re like, whoa, I lost 20% of you.
Okay. And then they’ll go on to the next sentence. Whoa, I lost 15% more or whatever. It really drives home the point that, for the most part, people read the headlines of that.
[00:19:33] Michelle Keller: Yes, indeed.
[00:19:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Not much else.
[00:19:00] Michelle Keller: That is correct. So I focus on making those matter, right? Filler words are out. White space is in.
I just had a conversation with one of my clients earlier this week, because she has an abhorrence to white space.
And she said, I just hate white space. She grew up as a print journalist.
[00:19:57] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, okay.
[00:19:59] Michelle Keller: And white space is money lost, right? And so I said to her, I said, you know, that’s really interesting, because in the digital world, white space is high value, because my eyes get tired, and my brain is stressed out.
And walls of text scare me, and I leave. Bullet points, short sentences, we’re talking. Sentences should be five to seven words.
Paragraphs should be three to five sentences.
[00:20:30] Katherine Watier Ong: Or it can be literally one sentence, by the way.
[00:20:32] Michelle Keller: Yes. Absolutely. It can be. Bullets and lists are great. It’s easy to follow. Or tables. To remember.
[00:20:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Or tables. Google loves tables, too.
[00:20:41]Michelle Keller: Google loves tables. Just make sure they’re accessible to your screen reader.
[00:20:44] Katherine Watier Ong: Exactly right.
[00:20:46] Michelle Keller: Labels are a hot mess most of the time. So yeah, I think the words that you use is the easiest place to start because you’re to write the copy anyway.
So say what you mean and nothing else. And mean what you say.
[00:21:01] Katherine Watier Ong: Which also means if AI is helping you write, be careful. AI likes to be very wordy.
[00:21:10] Michelle Keller: AI is very wordy. AI is often biased.
[00:21:14] Katherine Watier Ong: Yes.
[00:21:15] Michelle Keller: So you need to really, like, look, I get it. AI can make your life easy. It can, but it can also make you look harder if you publish something out there that’s biased or just flat out wrong because you didn’t double-check it.
So use AI as your brainstorm guide, as your unpaid high school job shadow intern. But that content that comes out needs to be yours.
[00:21:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
[00:21:40] Michelle Keller: Cause you’re not designing for AI, you’re designing for a human.
And so it needs to be written by a human and sound like a human, and care about a human.
[00:21:50] Katherine Watier Ong: So, um, we talked a little bit about spaces and phones and digital and support websites, but can you also apply the same compassionate design principles to email and ad campaigns?
And do you do any of that?
[00:22:06] Michelle Keller: 100% you can apply it. I applied it to email. Certainly, I was working in a nonprofit, so we didn’t really have ad campaigns, but I did apply it to the emails that we wrote.
So I absolutely think that you can apply it to emails. I think you can apply it to ad campaigns, and I think you should.
So off the record, I know we’re still on the record, but I won’t use names. So I know someone who worked for a major credit card company as a data analyst, and this person was tasked with doing some research to decide whether they should offshore their email notifications that came out about customers’ accounts and things like that, and offshore their phone support for issues, because obviously that’s going to save money, right?
And so similar, this was years ago, before the AI range. So I’m sure there are people doing research now on whether we can just get AI to write all of these account emails for our people.
So this person I know, who is a data analyst, did the research on it by talking to actual customers, and they actually determined that they would lose more business by offshoring.
And the email writing and the customer support that might keep it in-house. And then several years later, this major, so they decided to do that and to keep it in-house.
And several years later, they actually designed an entire ad campaign around it.
[00:23:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, interesting. Talk to someone about their business differentiator. Yeah.
[00:23:42] Michelle Keller: You got it. I absolutely think that when, especially if you take financial services as a great field, right? Because everyone gets stressed over money.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get stressed over money. I get an email from my bank. I immediately think something’s wrong.
So in that email text, is it walls of text that you’re sending me? Or do you tell me up front, hey, everything’s okay.
We wanted to double-check one thing with you. Oh, already you’ve lowered my stress load. What’s the one thing you need to double-check?
So I think the language that you use in those emails is key. I think ad campaigns, for the most part, are not very compassionate.
And I get it, right? Your whole objective is to sell me this product. But treat me like a human when you do it.
Don’t talk down to me. Don’t demean me. Don’t make up stuff that’s not true about your product. Don’t spin it.
Don’t leave all the really important stuff to the fine print at the bottom of my email, where I can’t read it.
[00:24:48] Katherine Watier Ong: I think the Dove campaign might be the one example of the opposite of that, one where there are non-makeup and all sorts of bodies and that kind of jazz.
But yeah, I totally get that. So when you’re having a conversation about, and you’ve talked about this a little bit, but having a conversation about improving compassionate design in the marketing materials you’re creating, how do you balance the business goals with some of that?
Is part of it leading that example of like, this is how much money we’ll lose if we don’t do it?
[00:25:20] Michelle Keller: Yes, I think that’s, I think if you are able to put in the research and get the actual numbers, that’s the best way to do it.
Now, I know a lot of times folks are in places where they can’t, they can’t, like their company simply won’t pay to do the research and they’re like, just do it anyway.
So I think this is the hardest part about compassionate design because it can’t always be quantified. I think you can do A-B testing and say, look, here’s some copy that we wrote that’s the traditional sell, sell, sell, sell, sell content.
And here’s some content that we experimented with that’s compassionate and actually cares about the consumer as a human being.
You can do the A-B testing. It may not give you great results. I think that compassionate content design is a long-term process.
I think looking at things like net promoter scores can be helpful. And, and hearing from customers who contacted your company, actually talking to them, getting those call signs.
Because your company’s collecting them anyway. So ask for access to them. What are people saying? Right? That’s an easy way to get research that doesn’t take a ton of time and money.
Because you already have that. What are people actually saying? And use actual quotes when you’re communicating with your manager or with your stakeholders about why we should do compassionate design.
Here’s what our customers are actually saying. And here’s what we’re actually doing. And then being a model for yourself.
Be that person in the meeting who always says, why? Why are we doing it that way? Did we talk to customers?
Do we know what they really want or need? And if they say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. Then ask how.
How do we know that? Do we know that because you just think you know them? Or do we know that because we have this survey that we got back from our customers with their own voice?
[00:27:10] Katherine Watier Ong: This is a critical thing. And I probably told you this story already on our prep call. But like digging into—“where did you get the data from?” —sometimes has the most unique answer.
Like when I was at Ketchum, they had a persona of Susan. This is for, I think it was Conag or one of those big brands.
And they kept talking about Susan in the third person. I joined a phone call without much background. And I literally muted the phone.
Asked my boss, who’s Susan? And he explains, oh, it’s their persona. And then I got very excited. I was like, oh, they’ve got a persona because a lot of folks working with this PR agency did not have personas.
Anyway, so then I asked him, I was like, where’d they get the data from?
And he’s like, oh, they just made it up. So then I went to Yahoo, because at the time, Yahoo would let you put a keyword in and find the demographic.
No, wait, this was the Chef Boyardee. The brand’s important. Anyway, you put the Chef Boyardee into the Yahoo tool, and it told me it was college dudes.
It was not this middle-aged woman with kids named Susan.
[00:28:04] Michelle Keller: Yep.
[00:28:05] Katherine Watier Ong: So anyway, dig into where they got the data.
[00:28:07] Michelle Keller:
Where the data’s coming from. Yeah. I think by asking questions, you can learn so very much in meetings. I right? Ask questions. Where’d you get that data?
How do we know that information?
[00:28:17] Katherine Watier Ong: How often do you run focus groups, or are you always?
[00:28:21] Michelle Keller: I do interviews almost every day.
[00:28:22] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, wow.
[00:28:23] Michelle Keller: Yeah, I’m really fortunate.
I had one earlier today. have three scheduled for tomorrow. So yeah, it’s a big part of what I do, which is actually talking to our users and asking them, tell me what works about this website for you.
Tell me what doesn’t work about this website. Are there things on it that used to be there and aren’t there anymore that you’re like, what the heck happened?
Why are they gone? Yeah. We do a lot of co-designing sessions with our clients where we’ll get on a virtual call with them, and we’ll just talk through what’s working and what’s not working for you here.
And they’ll be like, well, I wonder, like, even things like, could this box for text be a little bit longer?
Yeah, absolutely. So we talk about designing with people, not for them. That if I’m just assuming what you want and designing something, and then I find out later that I made something that you don’t like, now I have to go and undo it all.
Right? And that’s money and time. Whereas if I talk with you, and you show me what you want, and tell me what you want, then I just have to build it the way you want it.
[00:29:32] Katherine Watier Ong: As long as you’re talking to the end users, I was thinking about one of my Fed clients who, before I came on board, were like, “Hey, developer, why do all these meta descriptions look the same?”
And the developer was like, wait, I can fix it. I’m going to create a whole bunch of hidden tabs.
[00:29:49] Michelle Keller: Oh, no, hidden tabs are bad.
[00:29:50] Katherine Watier Ong: That’ll fix it.
And then I come in, and I was like, why didn’t you just write unique copy and meta descriptions for every page?
Now I have to undo your tab thing that Google can’t read.
[00:30:00] Michelle Keller: Right?
[00:30:01] Katherine Watier Ong: Anyway, that also happens.
[00:30:02] Michelle Keller: Exactly. So you need to talk to the people who are actually using the thing.
[00:30:07] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Do you do user testing type stuff where it’s like anonymous, but it’s your target demo?
[00:30:11] Michelle Keller: I don’t in my current position, but I have in the past. Yes. So, and I’m, I kind of do it a little on the sly right now.
I will sit in on meetings where they’re actually using the tech, and I take notes in the background of what I see on the screen.
There are ways to get the information you need, even if you don’t have a multi-million dollar research budget. Just say, hey, can I be in that meeting?
I just want to be like a fly on the wall in that meeting. And so you sit in the room, right?
It’s virtual for me. I sit in a room, I got my fig jam open, and I’m taking all kinds of notes on little Post-it notes.
And then I’m clustering them to, oh, I see six people mentioned this issue that came up all the time.
Yet when I talked with people, nobody thought about that. But as they were in there doing it, they’re all like, oh, shoot, yeah, this always happens when we do that.
And I’m like, take note of that. So the joke now around my company is that I’m the person who wants to be in all the meetings.
So everyone thinks I just love meetings, which is so not true. I love productive meetings. But meetings are a great place to learn what’s going on with the people who are using you.
[00:31:28] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we’ve talked a little bit, and I think most of the stuff we talked to has actually been U.S.-focused. But what other tips do have for people that are working on international websites or other languages? I mean, for instance, with my client, and mind you, they have decided to go with automatic translation, but Google’s translation, which, okay.
But my initial approach was, you don’t rank very well in Portuguese. Maybe a dial should actually written by your Portuguese staff.
[00:31:57] Michelle Keller: Yes. AI translation is notoriously bad. I don’t care who you use. If you’re writing for Portuguese humans, a Portuguese human needs to be writing it.
When I worked in hospice, we did translate our newsletters into Spanish, but we had a Spanish-speaking employee who did that for us.
And just for fun, I did an AI translation of the same content, and then I showed it to my Spanish-speaking co-worker, and he said, it’s really terrible.
[00:32:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Now, have you played around with Google, like literally, like I think last week, rolled out translation, which is also powering the, they have a function where, I think it’s an app on your phone, where you can actually hear live translations as you’re talking to somebody in a different language.
So I wonder, mind you, it’s just like a week ago, but I wonder if it’s better.
[00:32:57] Michelle Keller: It might be. The thing about AI is that it can’t capture nuance, and it can’t. AI does not have empathy. It can’t feel what your user is feeling.
It can’t feel what you want your user to feel. It’s not capable of doing that, because it’s not human.
So I get it, it’s expensive to have a human do your translation. Have your AI do it and have a human double-check it at least.
[00:33:26] Katherine Watier Ong: I literally looked at a client’s website that was for a different client that was in Chinese.
And I was like, yeah, all those headers are English. Okay. I feel like it’s so common. I don’t know how many times it’s always China, too, for some reason.
They’re like, oh yeah, we’re going to try to do a website in China. And I was like, why is it not all Chinese?
[00:33:48] Michelle Keller: Yeah. It’s Chinese. Also, you have different languages, right? Some languages. Some are read from right to left. Some languages are read vertically.
And all of that matters for your layout. Like you can’t just take your English-designed and written website and hit the translate button and expect it to be intelligible to someone in another language.
It doesn’t work that way. Does that mean it’s expensive and you have to design multiple versions of your website?
In an ideal world, yes, that’s what it means. I recognize. I think that’s not always going to be possible, but you need to at least be thinking about it.
Some, like, I don’t speak Thai, right? But I know that Thai words tend to be really long. And so I may have an English sentence that takes up an inch on the page, and in Thai it might take up three inches. Is my design flexible enough to allow for that?
[00:34:39] Katherine Watier Ong: Right.
[00:34:40] Michelle Keller: Or is it going to look like a hot mess when somebody hits that translation button?
[00:34:44] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, and the other thing is, if you really want to have an international plan, every single language needs its own promotion plan.
So you are doubling your SEO work every time you add another country or language. That’s just, and by the way, China is probably the hardest to tackle because it’s got all sorts of extra rules.
[00:35:03] Michelle Keller: So many different dialects.
[00:35:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, all the different dialects.
[00:35:06] Michelle Keller: And it’s a character-based language, which is harder.
[00:35:09] Katherine Watier Ong: And you need to have somebody on the ground registered with the Chinese government and all that kind of jazz.
[00:35:13] Michelle Keller: So think wisely when you’re thinking about that.
[00:35:18] Katherine Watier Ong: You have the manpower on your staff.
[00:35:19] Michelle Keller: Yeah, bring people on your staff.
Yeah. From that culture, who can help you not just with the language, but with the visual look, right? Colors mean different things in different cultures.
[00:35:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Yes.
[00:35:39] Michelle Keller: But if you’re designing, you’re like, look, I don’t have the budget for that. Our website is going to be in English, but I would like other cultures to be able to access it and use it.
Okay. Then you can do things like your images. Are your images multicultural? Are your images multi-age? That was a real issue for us in hospice.
They’re like, well, most of our clients are old. And I’m like, actually, like almost half of our clients are not.
So I don’t just want old people on our website. So thinking through the visuals of your site, and this is why, right, clean lines, easy design is super helpful because that translates across cultures.
[00:36:09] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. One of the easiest audits I did was actually like a venture capital firm wanted me to like look in on what another agency was doing.
They were running Facebook ads targeted to Latinos. And the images were of white people.
[00:36:22] Michelle Keller: And there you go.
[00:36:24] Katherine Watier Ong: I mean, I realize there are white Latinos.
I get it. But like, literally, they weren’t A-B testing any images except for white.
[00:36:30] Michelle Keller: Yeah.
[00:36:31] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah.
It was like, I don’t know.
So, do you have any examples of situations where the compassionate design has resulted in a negative experience for users?
[00:36:45] Michelle Keller: Where lack of compassionate design?
[00:36:48] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Sorry. A lack of compassionate design.
[00:36:50] Michelle Keller: I do actually, I pulled a bunch out. Eva Penzeymoog has written a book called Design for Safety. And she has a number of examples in her book.
But I’m just going to pull out a couple that were really horrifying to me. So let’s talk ring cameras for a minute.
Okay. I have one. I imagine a number of our users do. Well, in 2019, The Guardian wrote an article with multiple reports.
Sorry, my computer is asking me to log in on my other side. The Guardian wrote an article in 2019 detailing multiple reports.
Of people describing instances where other folks hacked into their Ring cameras because their passwords were not secure enough. And so you had folks who were actually talking directly to children through the Ring camera.
You had an example of someone demanding a $350,000 Bitcoin ransom because Ring was not asking folks to create complicated passwords or use two-factor identification.
And they got sued for it. Now, they’ve made changes, but nobody thought about that. In 2016, Wired published an article from some hackers who had hacked into a 2014 Jeep Cherokee because it was internet-connected.
And they were able to cut the transmission of the Jeep Cherokee while their friend was driving it. Their friend was in on it, knew about it. And Chrysler actually had to recall vehicles to put safety features on them.
[00:38:17] Katherine Watier Ong:
Wow. I have an example of that, but related to AI, just because I noticed the article, I thought it was hysterical. So first of all, AI hallucinates 60% of the time.
It also goes off the rails. It’s also traded on the entire bloody internet, which includes stuff you don’t want your kids to see.
So I’ll just put that as a baseline. Somebody decided to stick AI inside a talking teddy bear.
And it encouraged the kids to start fires and go find the knives in the house.
Like, who didn’t think this through?
[00:38:49] Michelle Keller: So there’s a, sometimes those cases are called, well, that’s an edge case, Michelle. No one actually would do that.
Here’s the thing. Yeah, they would. Never underestimate the ability of human beings to do terrible things. So, those edge cases, there’s another book that I read called Designing for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sarah Wachter-Bechter.
And they’d say, they said, stop calling them edge cases. Let’s call them stress cases. And you need to design for these stress cases. So one in three women and one in four men have been victims of domestic violence.
That’s my stress case. So if I’m designing software that is home security software, my initial thought is that it’s going to make those people feel so much safer.
Unless, is it a shared account? What if I share this account of my surveillance camera, and now my partner is abusive, and I kick him out, but he still has access?
Now he’s spying on me through our cameras. Nest thermostat got in trouble for this because they didn’t split accounts.
And so the partner who got kicked out was able to control the thermostat remotely. Right? These are things we don’t think about, but we need to think about them when we’re designing products.
And when we’re writing copy, we have to think about those stress cases, and it’s not just my job to not do the right thing.
It’s also my job not to do harm whenever I can avoid it. And so we need to be asking those questions.
How could someone use this in a bad way? And can I design safeguards to prevent that from happening?
[00:40:37] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, no, that’s a great idea. I was thinking about that, because my daughter was occasionally like, bringing up like, why does this have this weird warning?
And I’m like, well, you know, there was a lawsuit.
That’s why, you know, McDonald’s cups say it’s hot coffee. And now it’s like obvious.
[00:40:53] Michelle Keller: But it’s not obvious.
[00:40:57] Katherine Watier Ong: It’s not obvious sometimes. Yeah. So let’s see. Let’s talk about, I think you’ve convinced people that they should be doing compassionate design effectively.
You’ve definitely convinced me, but I was already halfway there. But what small, impactful changes could people start doing to like, start this process?
[00:41:15] Michelle Keller: I would say, get educated yourself on it so that you know some of these. Examples. Read some books. Follow some folks on LinkedIn.
There actually is a free LinkedIn learning course. Hang on. I got the name of it written down. It’s called Trauma-Informed Design.
[00:41:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, there you go.
[00:41:36] Michelle Keller: On LinkedIn. It’s a free course. Take that to learn about it. There are always examples in those.
Get familiar enough with examples so that you can share them with other people on your team. Just like you and I have done in this very call, we’ve come up with examples from our own lives, right?
You don’t have to look far. Has anybody ever tried to cancel their Amazon Prime account?
[00:42:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Exactly.
[00:42:01] Michelle Keller: I mean, right.
[00:42:02] Katherine Watier Ong: I can’t see the look on her face, but we got a head tilt there.
[00:42:06] Michelle Keller:
I mean, there’s like six screens, and how threatening can they be? You’re going to lose all your benefits.
That is not compassionate.
Like maybe I can’t see my Prime account because I love my job at Amazon. Don’t make me feel bad.
Just say, oh, we’re sorry to see you go. We’d be happy to extend your benefits for the low, low price of $1.99 for 30 more days, or whatever.
But there are nice ways to say things. I had someone tell me one time, it doesn’t take any more time to be nice.
And I think that’s true, right? So if I’m writing an ad copy, I ask myself, if I were super stressed and I got this flyer or this email, how would it make me feel?
[00:42:55] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah.
[00:42:57] Michelle Keller: How would it make me feel?
And if the answer is that it would make me feel gross, then maybe you should rewrite it.
[00:43:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, and a side note, because all of us currently are living through, especially here in the US, I’m not going to say too much about politics, but it’s hitting the fan, y’all, right?
And I’m not the only one who is stressed about the overall things, the measles and the-
Things and the trumps and the things.
[00:43:21] Michelle Keller: And the things.
[00:43:23] Katherine Watier Ong: And the things.
So I would assume that this would be a good time to do compassionate design because parents are out with their sick kids all the time.
And people have stuff that is stressing them out right now.
[00:43:35] Michelle Keller: Yes. So much stuff. And if you are the company that is able to speak into that chaos with a voice of calm, people will take notice.
[00:43:45] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah.
[00:43:46] Michelle Keller: People will take notice. Now, I do not advocate, oh, I’m going to do compassionate design because I’ll make more money.
That is not what this is about. At the end of the day, this is about being a good human.
And at the end of the day, humans use my products. And humans read my emails. And humans access my website.
And so I want to demonstrate that I care about those humans. Because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.
It’s the kind of person I want to be. It’s the kind of company I want to work for. And I think most of us would say that.
Nobody says, I want to work for. The guy who’s like Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life, who hates everybody and is mean and underhanded and lies and steals.
[00:44:27]Katherine Watier Ong: I don’t know. You just mentioned a brand that I know is kind of challenging to work for is all I’m saying.
But yes, most of us want to be nice humans and work for brands that are nice. Yes.
[00:44:38] Michelle Keller: Right. We certainly want to shop at places that make us feel nice.
[00:44:42] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. Yeah.
[00:44:44] Michelle Keller: So and if I have a choice between two equal products and one is from a company that has always provided me with stellar communication and one is with a company that’s been a hot mess to work with, who am I going to pick?
[00:44:57] Katherine Watier Ong: See, this is why I know I grew up in Maine. So like I’m going to default to L.O. Bean anyway.
But like there, you could return forever for your entire lifetime. And I know they pulled back on it, but they still don’t give you crap about returning ever.
[00:45:10] Michelle Keller: Yep. And so it makes you want to shop there.
[00:45:13] Katherine Watier Ong: It does. It does.
And I’ve never, you know, actually, that’s huge. I have never had increased stress walking into L.O. I to return anything. Right. Whereas I’ve definitely had increased stress walking into everywhere else.
[00:45:26] Michelle Keller: I keep things that I don’t want sometimes because the stress of having to return it is just more than I want to deal with.
[00:45:32] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Exactly.
[00:45:33] Michelle Keller: And I’m like opportunity cost on that and keeping it.
[00:45:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, especially in the instance of walking into an LL Bean store, where you then get lost because there’s a lot of stuff to look at.
[00:45:40] Michelle Keller: And then I spend more money. It’s great.
[00:45:41] Katherine Watier Ong: Exactly. It’s all that. Look at the fish at the main headquarters location, and get in the bubble and see the fish.
[00:45:49] Michelle Keller: At the main headquarters location.
[00:45:50] Katherine Watier Ong: Did you get in the bubble and see the fish flying around your head?
[00:45:53] Michelle Keller: I don’t remember.
[00:45:54] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, you missed that.
[00:45:56] Michelle Keller: That was a long time ago.
[00:45:57] Katherine Watier Ong:
Over by where they sell the guns for everybody listening.
There’s a huge aquarium with the main fish in it, including trout and salmon. they, mind you, you can get in there as an adult.
But it’s really for the kids. But you can like scoot under, and they have like a bubble where your head pops up into the aquarium, and the fish fly around your head.
[00:46:13] Michelle Keller: That’s really cool.
[00:46:15] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, there you go. If you ever end up in Freeport, I’ve given you a tourist tip.
So where do you see Compassionate Design going in the next one to three to five years?
[00:46:24] Michelle Keller: I hope it becomes the norm, honestly, for the reasons that you just said.
We are living in crazy and chaotic times. It’s everywhere. You can’t escape it. I’m on LinkedIn to look for business stuff, and people are still talking about personal stuff.
And it’s everywhere. You cannot escape it. And so my hope is that it becomes the normal way of how we design.
But honestly, I don’t know. So when we wrote our book, I wrote a book with a bunch of other people called Designed with Care, Creating Trauma-Informed Content.
And when we wrote it, it was the only book on the market about trauma-informed design. It isn’t any longer.
And so I’m thrilled with that. There are more courses available. Almost every tech conference that I’ve seen a report come out lately, anything that’s content or design-related has a module on trauma-informed content design.
It’s becoming more well-known. There are tons of people on LinkedIn who are talking about it and writing about I think it will become more mainstream.
I do also think there’s been a little bit of backlash because some folks are saying that they’re doing trauma-informed content design and they’re not.
And so there’s been some backlash about that, that, oh, now it’s the hip-in thing. And so everybody’s doing it.
I don’t want everybody to be doing it like that. I want everybody to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
And if some people are doing it just because they think it will make them rich, fine, they’re still doing it.
I’ll take that. So I think that it is going to become more the norm because I think people are going to expect it.
As companies begin to be more compassionate in their content, it’s going to be very obvious which companies aren’t.
And so I think that they will shift. Like this company that I had the phenomenal chatbot experience with, it was not Amazon.
And I had a problem with Amazon, and it did not go as well. But I think that’s going to be changing as companies see that there are different ways to do things.
So I hope more people are practicing it. I hope more people are talking about it. I think making the shift to trauma-informed marketing is another step forward because I don’t know that there’s been a lot of inroads into that.
Because I think we kind of reflexively look at marketing as not compassionate, right? And I don’t think it has to be that way.
[00:48:57] Katherine Watier Ong: So we’ve been dancing around the idea of empathy because obviously, in a passion form, you need to have empathy.
For people who feel like they need to, I work with Decade and nonprofits, I don’t know. And I volunteer every week now.
We’re filling local little food pantries because the DC market got hit by unemployment and stuff. So anyway, and particularly we’re filling them in front of schools.
So we’re feeding kids. It’s great. So I don’t know that I need to flex my empathy muscle too much, but for people who are like, Hey, maybe I need a little bit more help.
Do you have any sense of whether they will get it from some of these classes you’ve mentioned?
[00:49:31] Michelle Keller: They will. They’ll get some of that from those classes. I would say the best way to kind of build your empathy muscles is to hang out with people.
Volunteer, just like what you’re doing. And if that feels too overwhelming for you, go to a public place and just people-watch for a little while.
And ask yourself, what do I see? What do I see as these people walk by me? Um, or when someone cuts you off in traffic, and your first response is not very compassionate or empathic, ask yourself, what kind of day is that person having?
And I don’t know what kind of day they’re having. Well, maybe I could be a little bit more gracious.
Or something as easy as I’m in the checkout line at the grocery store. And I just want.
Because it’s been a long day. Well, look at the clerk who is ringing up your groceries and taking your money.
They have a name tag. Use their name tag, their name, and ask them how their day has been, right?
Because they’re always going to ask you something. Hey, did you find everything you needed?
Have a good day! Whatever.
So look at them and say, Hey, Crystal, I hope you’re having a good day. Or Crystal, you look like you’ve been on shift for a long time.
I hope you get to go home soon.
[00:50:45] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s funny, because that is what my husband does a lot.
[00:50:48] Michelle Keller: Really?
[00:50:49] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, because honestly, my empathy muscle got better being married to this man, because he always, even before kids and the pets, he had that like, I bet that person’s having a stressful day.
That was his default.
[00:51:02] Michelle Keller: I love that.
[00:51:03] Katherine Watier Ong: I know. I know.
Mine was not, unfortunately, getting better. But he was. I would grump about it. And he’d be like, Wait, I bet that person had a stressful day.
Did you ask them? And then he will ask people and be like, Wow, man, that’s a long shift. I’m glad you’re almost getting off.
And anyway. That is part of his DNA.
[00:51:22] Michelle Keller: I think that’s a great way to just build your own empathy muscles.
And because what it boils down to at the end of the day is understanding people, right? And I can’t understand people if I’m not with them.
And I think that’s so key in our world today, where so much of our contact is online and on screens, right?
And we text people living in our own home, right? While they’re in the next room.
[00:51:49] Katherine Watier Ong: It’s true. I do that.
[00:51:50] Michelle Keller: It’s so true.
I tell myself it’s because we don’t have an intercom system in our home, and it’s easier than yelling. But I think recognizing that there are real live human beings out there living in real-world situations.
And though I can’t see them when I’m writing my email text, they are there. And so the more I get to be around live humans and watch how they interact with one another and think about the kind of days they might be having.
That will naturally inform the way that I write.
[00:52:23] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, yeah. So this has been great. You have a bunch of resources.
You’ve mentioned a couple. Do you have any others that you want to share?
[00:52:31] Michelle Keller: Yeah, so I mentioned, so a couple of people that I would say follow online.
Well, first, you should buy my book, Designed with Cairnard.
[00:52:39] Katherine Watier Ong: Go ahead. Yes.
[00:52:41] Michelle Keller: I’m going to plug that. Just do it.
Eva, Eva Penzi Moog’s book. Now, these are book-apart books, so I hope that you can still get them. But Design for Safety, Design for Real Life is also good.
There’s one, David Dylan Thomas has written one called Design for Cognitive Bias. That’s also excellent.
If you’re trying to figure out how to talk to more customers and clients without a research budget, Erica Hall wrote a book called Just Enough Research that gives you some creative ideas on how to incorporate research into that.
Rachel Edwards, who’s out of the UK, actually just posted last week on LinkedIn. A ton of resources for trauma-informed design.
So she’s a great person. Rachel Dietkus, it’s D-I-E-T-K-U-S, is in the U.S., and she does a ton of stuff with trauma-informed design, as does Megan, and I’m going to butcher her last name, Legawiec.
It’s L-E-G-A-W-I-E-C. She writes a lot about trauma-informed design as well. So those are some places that I would start.
And folks that I would say follow, read some books, Google it, because I’ve done some talks on it that I know are available on YouTube that you could look up.
So there are a lot of resources out there, and there wasn’t even just three years ago. There were not many resources out there. But there are tons now.
[00:54:10] Katherine Watier Ong: We’ll make sure to put all those in the show notes.
That’ll be great. And how can more people learn about you?
[00:54:15] Michelle Keller: You can follow me on LinkedIn. Reach out and connect with me. And tell me, like, don’t just send me. A connection, because if I don’t know you or not sharing connections, I probably won’t accept it.
It’ll probably just die in my box. So let me know that you heard me on this podcast. And then that gives me a frame of reference.
So I’m Michelle Decker Keller on LinkedIn. You can find me there. I do write on Medium. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been super consistent since I got a new job last year.
But I have a ton of articles on trauma-informed design on my Medium. And so it’s also Michelle Decker Keller on Medium as well.
[00:54:48] Katherine Watier Ong: Awesome. This has been so much fun. I’m so glad that we were able to reschedule this and make it happen. Thanks for being on the show.
[00:54:55] Michelle Keller: Thank you for asking me. I really enjoyed it. And I hope your users found it helpful.
And if they have questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to talk about it.
[00:55:03] Katherine Watier Ong:
Great. Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we’re up to, go to digitalmarketingvictories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Please rate us, comment, and share the podcast. I’m always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests. Email us at digitalmarketingvictories@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter at DM victories. Thanks for listening.
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