g33klady

Diversifying Heuristics with Social Media part 2

by Hilary

Yesterday, I was finally able to give my talk “Socializing for Heuristics: How Social Media Made Me a Better Tester (and Human)” at Targeting Quality 2022 in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. I talked about it in my last post Diversifying Heuristics with Social Media and I’m so glad I was finally able to give the talk!

At the end of the talk I shared a link to the resources, including the Diversifying Heuristics Cheatsheet. This is a heuristics cheatsheet that I put together with all of the things covered in the talk. They’re a starting point for when you’re testing, or planning a feature. Things to keep in mind, and ways to approach your application, to help make it more inclusive all around. Not just accessibility, while that’s important, but inclusion.

There are more resources available in Github, including the slides: https://github.com/g33klady/DiversifyingHeuristics. One of the talks I reference is Combating Bias with Heuristics of Diversity by Ash Coleman. Ash really lays out how to approach your life using heuristics of diversity and it’s a great basis for my talk where I apply the same principles but to our testing and software that we build. I think seeing Ash’s talk at TestBash Brighton in 2019 planted the seeds for my talk. It’s not hard to be inspired by Ash!

I hope to be able to give the talk again, and evolve the talk as I get more examples of ways software can feel excluding (as well as inclusive).