Why is trauma-informed technology important?
That’s a fair question. Why should you care about having trauma-informed technology? Here are a few reasons:
Technology, like it or not, is unavoidable in our society.
Trauma is also common in our world. Most humans have experienced trauma at least once or will experience it at some point in their lives.
If you want to help people, technology should support, not undermine, these efforts.
Yes, it’s true, you really can harm people with bad tech experiences and/or exacerbate their past harms.
All of the six trauma-informed principles are important to creating trauma-informed technology. Let’s consider the principle of trust and transparency.
Most people recognize that trust and transparency are important offline. Any personal or professional relationship is unlikely to succeed without trust and transparency. It will be an uneasy relationship that a person will exit – if they can.
Tech designers and researchers can build trust and transparency offline in their design process by how they:
act with each other
interact with people who participate in their research
include input from people they are serving
structure their research sessions
follow-up on research sessions and meet participant expectations
Let’s also think about developing trust and transparency online. Research tells us that websites, for example, can build trust by having or doing things like:
keeping people informed at all times about what’s going on with the website, app, etc.
being consistent in following best practices
prioritizing items that reduce cognitive load
using clear and relatable language
Trust and transparency are determined by the people served by the tech, not those who are designing or researching the services or products. This is an area where you can make major missteps by falling for the false idea that “you are your user.” Testing with real people who might use your services or product is critical. Do they think you are trustworthy and transparent?
The foundations of any relationship, professional and personal, begin and end with trust and transparency. Relationships between an organization and an individual must have trust and transparency to be positive for all.
If you want people to:
trust your organization
use your products and/or services
benefit from what you offer
then your technology needs to be trauma-informed.
Want help? Contact us to have a chat.
Tamara’s Father by Artist William Paul Thomas, used with permission. He asks:
”My question through those paintings is: what would it look like if that trauma or adversity was shown on the skin? Would it invite people to be kinder to each other?”