Inclusive Design at Google Developer Days Europe

Post date: Sep 08, 2017 1:40:15 PM

This week I attended the Google Developer Days in Krakow, Poland. It was a great event, where I had the chance to talk with many interesting people. For the Closing Keynote, Sowmya Subramanian, Engineering Director at YouTube, talked about Inclusive Design, a way to "engineer products for all your target users across all demographics".

She noted that we all have unconscious stereotypes, unconscious biases and they influence how me make products, how me make decisions. I'm a white occidental man and the products I design are, without realizing, without wanting it, maybe biased. She finished her speech with a request to the audience, to do a little step in the right direction:

“So now it comes to you.

I hope I've shown you today the value of inclusive design and how you can drive growth using inclusive design.[...]

Now, you, when you leave this room, go back to your offices, can follow the same, similar approach that Google is doing. [...] it would be great if you can identify demographic gaps that you have and the magnitude of these gaps and, if you were to bridge them, what kind of impact they could be driving.

Once you have that, prioritize which gap, the one gap, that you want to fill.

Because we all are resource constrained and can't solve everything.

So pick one or two gaps that drives the biggest impact for you.”

Frankly, I wasn't that moved by the speech and I think I would have simply forgotten about it. But today, we received the following email:

“I recently took advantage of setting up the unsubscribe link. Whilst testing the process to check I had it right I noticed that the ‘Your unsubscribe was successful’ page is only designed for a man! Not very cool :/

It currently says: We have informed the sender of this email that you don’t want to receive more emails from him.

As my lists are generally personal contacts within my extended network, all of whom know I am a woman, this user journey does not make sense.

Please can you let me know how to change it? If it’s not possible to exchange the word ‘him’ for the word ‘her’, then at least you could opt for a unisex option by default e.g.:

We have informed the sender of this email that you don’t want to receive more emails from them.

Thanks in advance for your help in resolving this.”

Many thanks to this user. It was the perfect message to remember Sowmya's speech and do a little step in the right direction :)

Sowmya Subramanian speech was recorded and is available on YouTube:

Click here to watch the full Closing Keynote or here for Sowmya's closing words.