AutomationSTAR

Test Automation Conference Europe

Track Talk T8

Empathy for Real Life: Not Every Day Is a Good Day

Rachel Kibler

12:00-12:45 CET, Thursday 5th November

Does your software sometimes suck to use, especially if someone’s having a bad day? Make your software suck a little less by thinking of your users with empathy when you design, build, and test your software. Instead of building for the calm, steady, and peaceful user, let’s build for the person who is having a bad day.

Learn from examples of software gone wrong and software gone right, and learn how accessibility tools can make your software better for everyone, not just those who need assistance. We can make the bad less bad and the good better when we consider our users thoughtfully. If someone is frustrated and mis-clicks something, how bad is that mistake? If someone is exhausted, are they able to do what they need to do with your software without much additional mental effort? If the next step is obvious, does the user need to click through to get there?

As our systems become more automated and powered by AI, empathy becomes even more critical. Automation can codify care and prevent harm, or it can scale indifference. Explore how bias, rigid workflows, and context-free decisions can amplify harm at scale, and how teams can design guardrails that support users instead.

Empathy can be a design constraint, it can be a testing lens or a quality signal, it can be a risk reduction strategy, and it can be all of these at once. Designing for bad days becomes urgent when systems act without human intervention. Empathy for our users leads to fewer sharp edges and more forgiving workflows, which can lead to better reviews and usage statistics. Empathy often leads to better outcomes for teams and the business as well.

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What you will Learn

  1. We can make the bad less bad and the good even better in our software when we bring in the user's emotions while using our software.
  2. Accessibility and empathy overlap when we think about people having a bad day and trying to use our software.
  3. Automation remembers what we teach it. Make sure you teach it empathy.

Session Details

  • Introductory
  • 30 minutes
  • 15mins Q&A
  • Sustainability, Accessibility / Inclusivity
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Session Speaker

Rachel Kibler

Qase, USA

Rachel Kibler is an international keynote speaker about software testing and a self-styled "Discoverer of the Broken". She has been testing software since 2016, after pursuing careers in law and entrepreneurship. Her analytical thinking and creative spirit have been a good fit for testing. Rachel has been part of multiple agile transformations, diving in to improve processes by putting people first. She is tenacious in her constant pursuit of a better way. She enjoys the challenges of building new things, improving old things, and bettering herself as a tester and a human. Rachel currently works as a senior quality engineer at SeekWell, which sells contact lenses and glasses online. She is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she sings semi-professionally, knits for fun, and travels as much as she can.

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