Trauma-Informed Design: Leveraging Usability Heuristics on a Social Services Website.

Trauma-informed design and technology have been an important topic of discussion in the last 5 years in user experience. However, little exists to offer practical direction for practitioners applying trauma-informed approaches to websites, apps, and other digital tools. This paper shares an example of applying trauma-informed (TI) principles to a social service agency website in the United States using wellknown usability heuristics, which are principles used in interaction design to ensure usability. There appears to be a significant overlap between usability heuristics and TI principles; practitioners can use usability heuristics as a familiar foundation to make any design more traumainformed. This paper describes specific ways TI principles can be operationalized using usability heuristics to develop more user-friendly and trauma-informed websites. A case study in design shows how user experience professionals can be more trauma-informed in their work to better serve the general public or users who have experienced trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]