Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
Wednesday, February 5, 2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
Speakers: Carol Scott and Melissa Eggleston
Link:

Summary

Trauma is a pervasive, universal experience – no less than 75% of the world’s population and 90% of Americans report experiencing at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, with four or more being the norm. There are 11 types of trauma, including individual, interpersonal, collective, and historical experiences like cancer, abuse, racial discrimination, and war. It is also experienced second-hand when someone witnesses or hears about another’s traumatic experience. Without considering the context of trauma, UX professionals may be missing opportunities to gain more customers and allies. Instead, they may be accidentally harming others or pushing them away. This is especially true for researchers, designers, content moderators, customer support workers, and others directly interacting with users and their experiences. Is your work recreating the dynamics of abuse? And could you be harming not just your users but yourself and your team in the design process? Trauma-informed technology experts Carol Scott and Melissa Eggleston provide a high-level overview of trauma-informed research and design as well as harmful practices common in the design, product, and tech environments. They give a real-world example of how UX professionals may undermine their own goals by ignoring the context of trauma. Carol and Melissa also discuss how AI and emerging tech could be trauma-informed from conception. Gain a trauma-informed perspective to improve your work and receive resources for further learning. Takeaways Develop an initial understanding of trauma and trauma-informed approaches, including the theoretical, practical, and research-based underpinnings. Deep exploration of secondary trauma, why it’s relevant for UX professionals, and how to mitigate it for sustainable careers. Apply a trauma-informed approach to AI and emerging technologies research and design.

Key Insights

  • Trauma is a universal human experience with at least 70% of people globally and 90% in the US reporting at least one traumatic event.

  • Trauma varies widely; what is traumatic for one person may not be for another, making individualized approaches essential.

  • Retraumatization occurs when a trauma survivor is triggered into reliving past trauma, which trauma-informed design seeks to prevent.

  • SAMHSA's six principles—safety, trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural humility—form the core of trauma-informed approaches.

  • Secondary and vicarious trauma affect researchers and tech workers exposed to traumatic stories or content, requiring mitigation and self-care strategies.

  • Trauma-informed design is distinct from but complementary to design ethics, rooted in clinical research and social work principles.

  • Trauma impacts brain structure and function, rewiring decision-making and emotional centers, which changes sense-making and user experience.

  • Trauma-informed approaches in tech can reduce harm, improve user trust, enhance outcomes, and even increase business revenue.

  • Many common tech experiences inadvertently retraumatize users, such as poorly designed UI/UX that ignore context or sensitive content.

  • Teams should practice trauma-informed care internally, including open communication, adequate supervision, and self-care planning.

Notable Quotes

"Trauma is broad—it’s any event or circumstance resulting in physical harm, emotional harm, or life threatening."

"The whole point of trauma-informed work is you don’t have to tell me, so you don’t have to express it the same way I do."

"Trauma-informed approaches are like the seat belts and airbags of your tech."

"You cannot have one principle without the other; you need all six SAMHSA principles for it to work."

"When someone is retraumatized, they relive the trauma as if it’s happening right now; there’s nothing they can do to stop it."

"We often forget to care about ourselves and our teams when we’re doing research or clinical work."

"Trauma-informed design is good design plus a little more to really serve all users."

"Secondary trauma can happen from just hearing someone else’s story one or two times."

"Transparency builds trust; hiding details erodes it—for example, a link promising to take you somewhere but doesn’t."

"Trauma-informed care was first developed in social work, and UX can learn a lot by collaborating with clinical disciplines."

Ask the Rosenbot
Ren Pope
Building Experiences for Knowledge Systems
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Frances Yllana
The Big Question about Impact: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Carol Smith
Operationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Kim Lenox
Leading Distributed Global Teams (Videoconference)
2019 • Enterprise Community
Sean Dolan
A Practical Look at Creating More Usable Enterprise Customer Journeys (Videoconference)
2019 • Enterprise Community
Jemma Ahmed
Theme Three Intro
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Gretchen Anderson
Scaling the Human Center
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Rich Mironov
How Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Russ Unger
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Aditi Ruiz
Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Mark Interrante
AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars) (Videoconference)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Llewyn Paine
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
DesignOps and The Great Talent War of 2021 (Videoconference)
2021 • DesignOps Community
Jamie Beck Alexander
How can you find your role in climate? (Videoconference)
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group (Rosenfeld Community)
Alla Weinberg
Workers Are Sick of Change: The Cure is Psychological Safety
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Kate Towsey
The State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory (Videoconference)
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

"Users’ perception predicts attrition and paid referrals — design absolutely matters when people decide to buy or go."

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

June 15, 2018

Simon Wardley

"Very few people in business are familiar with situational awareness unless they served in the military."

Simon Wardley

Maps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)

January 31, 2019

Sandra Camacho

"The Twitter algorithm favored lighter skin tones when cropping images, reflecting racial bias in tech."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Darian Davis

"Reviewing decision points creates a source of truth and makes it harder to forget or scrap earlier agreements."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Fisayo Osilaja

"Timely engagement helps stakeholders make faster, more informed decisions that lead to better business and product outcomes."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Working with CEOs like Mark Templeton is like Dancing with the Stars — an interpretive dance of translating fuzzy ideas."

Uday Gajendar

The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX

May 13, 2015

Davis Neable

"We formed a small core task force empowered to make decisions to avoid delays from formal reviews."

Davis Neable Guy Segal

How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team

June 10, 2021

Eniola Oluwole

"We did a great cleanup of patterns from every decade and deleted anything off brand or untested."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Aurobinda Pradhan

"Design leaders want predictable roadmaps and healthy teams, measurable against timelines and goals."

Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank Deshpande

Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts

September 9, 2022