User experience expert Andrea Gannon (MS ’15) spends most days using her skills to improve payroll processes. She is a senior associate product manager at Workday, a California-based human capital management company.
For one week this past spring, however, Gannon was immersed in a totally different environment thousands of miles from home. She and a handful of other women from around the world gathered for a one-week digital security workshop, where they learned from each other and shared their expertise with clandestine journalists.
Organized by the nonprofit group Internews, the workshop was designed to teach digital security skills to female journalists in the Arab region. Participants were taught how to use tools that would allow them to safely continue their work in places where surveillance is prevalent and where their messages could potentially inspire retaliation against themselves or their families. They learned the basics of anti-virus software and techniques such as encrypting emails and mobile phones. They also learned how to think critically and creatively about the resources at their disposal.
Workshop leaders included women with expertise in application development, digital security, and user experience. Gannon’s particular role was to teach a design-thinking approach to digital security and facilitate the ability of each participant to add sophisticated tools to her repertoire. She also served as a consultant for the workshop organizers, assessing the needs of participants and making recommendations for content and logistical improvements for future workshops.
In addition, Gannon advised Internews developers on improvements for tools used by the organization, specifically personas. “My role was to observe and to help create personas so that when the developers make these tools in the future, they really understand the actual needs of the people that they’re making them for,” she said.
“The whole reason that they’re journalists, that they’re creating media content, is because they want to tell the stories of people displaced or targeted by ISIS, of Syrian refugees, and of other marginalized groups across the Arab region. It made sense to them why you’d want the actual people involved to help with development [of digital security tools], because that’s how you truly understand what the needs are, what the stories are. You don’t want someone else developing an app when they have no idea what the daily dangers are that these women face.”
Though they had gathered to address serious issues, Gannon found that the week together cultivated a strong sense of community and friendship. She returned to the US inspired by the courage of all the women she met.
“They were so brave and so courageous, and really eager to learn about these tools and help us design future tools . . . . I was honored to work with them and learn with them. Some of the security training was new even to me.”
Back on familiar ground, Gannon plans to share what she has learned with other user experience specialists.
“It reminded me that when designing experiences and getting to understand where other people are coming from . . . even the little things that you might not think matter can matter a lot to other people. Regardless of what I’m doing—whether I’m helping to pay people in a fun and new way or helping a woman contact a family member without giving away her location—it’s all tied together in user needs and how I can meet those needs.”