UX-LX: Talks on Digital Harm and Understanding Searcher Behavior — Noreen Y. Whysel

Noreen Whysel
2 min readJul 31, 2023

In May, I was invited to speak at UX Lisbon, on Preventing Digital Harm in Online Spaces. At the main event, I presented the Internet Safety Lab’s framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and what we can do as designers to mitigate the digital harms and dark patterns that could potentially violate that relationship. You can download my presentation below.

On the first day of the event, I ran a half-day, pre-conference workshop titled “Designing Effective Search Strategies.” It was an intriguing experience for me. I introduced a new framework that I wanted to try out, using observation as a powerful tool to understand site search behavior. To explore this, we broke into seven groups and worked on creating empathy maps, search personas (including group personas) and mapping the user journey toward information discovery. As a takeaway, all participants received a toolkit for crafting these artifacts and a step-by-step process to enhance product search. We got to eat yummy Portuguese snacks, too!

Workshop Attendees, three smiling women with brown hair sitting at a table with paper and colorful post it notes. A  fourth woman whose hands are visible at the right of the image sits next to a closed laptop computer covered with stickers, a paper cup and a mobile phone. Pens and yellow sticky notepads are scattered on the table top.
Workshop Attendees discovering search behavior
A sample of a search behavior map and an empathy map, including yellow and dark pink sticky notes on a large sheet of paper.
A sample of a search behavior map and an empathy map
Empathy map for job search behavior showing a cartton face with the workds Who, Do, See, Say, Do and Hear surrounding the face.
Empathy map for job search behavior.
Portuguese sandwiches and pastries, including natas, the custard cream tartlet in the foreground.
Yummy Portuguese natas and sandwiches

“Noreen … made the interesting point that if we build an accessible design we’ll also be solving many search problems.”
— UX Lisbon staff writer,
https://uxlx.medium.com/uxlx-2023-wrap-up-c19e531d5eeb#4af1

What a wonderful event, interesting and welcoming people and an absolutely unforgettable time!

I am available to teach your team mitigating digital harm as a solo facilitator or how to understand user search behavior, solo or with my colleagues at the Information Architecture Gateway. Let me know if we can help.

Read the UXLX Write-ups at Medium:

UXLX 2023 Wrap Up: Workshops

Originally published at https://whysel.com on July 31, 2023.

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Noreen Whysel

Co-Founder @DecisionFish, Bizdev @DisruptiveTechnologists, Researcher @InternetSafetyLabs @AMPS_Research & @KantaraRIUP, Adjunct @CityTech, IA/Research/MSLIS