Thread by @RohanIrvine

Our next speaker is @NancyDouyon presenting — Navigating UX Design Across Cultural Boundaries.

#uxaustralia #uxaustralia2020

Nancy is from Okai in Haiti — a farming town.

Seeing how her parents navigate the world and how US people navigate the world has opened given her a huge amount of context

Nancy realised that the design process was going from define to being shelved.

Privilege informs design.

She saw was disaster occurred and what wins occurred.

We're told we need empathy — but does it go far enough?

Instead of leading with empathy, we should lead with perspective.

Nobility Complex —

When you're in a position of privilege you create solutions without considering the explicit and implicit bias, patting ourselves on the back and aren't necessarily helpful for the world.

When Nancy returned from Haiti a day after the Earthquake her friends were calling her asking where they could send clothes.

While buildings were still down.

It's when help becomes charity, and not help.

We have to ask questions instead of overing harmful solutions.

Encourage people to be the most curious versions of themselves.

Our designs end up informing others.

Nancy is showing a picture of a father changing his babies nappies on the floor of a bathroom, because the design of bathrooms has not considered the perspective.

Nancy is showing the example of Tay the microsoft AI.

In about 6 hours the AI Tay started tweeting anti-semtic tweets, targeting women on twitter and took them 16 hours to take it down.

How could they not find this problem in testing?

The app was testing in China and moving it from another cultural testing location obviously didn't account for use in the real world.

We have to stop designing for western stereotypes.

At Uber, one design release lost 30% of users in one country because it was designed and testing in silicon valley.

We have to design with the world in mind

Nancy created the Global Scalable Research team.

In the US, India, Europe, Latin America

This lead to the change in process, looking at where the power for products existed in the organisation.

Nancy wanted a global checkpoint to get some insights globally before launching products.

She started with an optional place in just two teams in the PRD.

Nancy put a submit form at the PRD stage to ask a question of the research team.

It triggered a lot of questions from the teams.

Most of it was for validating the ideas they already had, and requested for testing.

In order to proceed in the GSR platform they needed to:

Ask a question
Participate in a debrief
Incorporate some of these questions into research that already was scheduled in the locations.

Nancy conducted the research, and all she needed them to do was show up for the findings.

In a week it was raw high level results

The following week they filled out the final report and provided them with suggestions and decided if they needed to test again.

Nancy created a prioritisation Protocol Checklist:

Submission request form
15 minute office hours debrief
HQ prioritised product
Regional priority
Commitment to impact product
Readiness (research plan, localised prototype)
Strategic Long Term Relationships
Feedback provided

They found a lot of questions were able to be answered or extra context provided just by having a conversation with the localised team.

There was a commitment from people working with Nancy's team that they would act on the insights even if different from the answer they wanted

The first few projects ended up creating some fundamental guidelines.

If you were going to test in America you needed to test in at least 2 other locations.

How they did the different methods.

Using this process Nancy was able to show that in the first quarter they saved millions of dollars!

Articulate a vision and encourage people to find that vision.

When Nancy did an uber eats study where all participants were immigrants and her colleagues were like 'how are we going to speak with them, we don't speak spanish?' and Nancy was like "Who do you think is delivering your food?"

They found out that the language they used for free education "tuition" had an apple next to it, and driver thought it meant free food.

Nancy is showing examples of learnings from design with underrepresented folks and the impact it had.

Four tips to create better cultures for your design teams.

1. Design a platform or participation ladder that provides 2+ underrepresented group checkpoints

2. Test your learning for marginalised communities in your immediate or primary markets.

3. Turn your assumptions into question.

The folks who asked what was needed after the Haiti earthquake Nancy and her friends built 200+ wells for water.

4. Hire, retain & be accountable for diverse talent.

Q: How do you design and maintain a global brand experience if every location has a customised user flow.
A: Sometimes we've had to build out teams that are different in these places. You need to identify where there is something unique enough to work on

We have to work with localised teams to make sure things work for them. It doesn't make sense for Americans to build for Australians when you can build teams in the location and local folks to run through studies are.

Surveys are god when you have different places, there are some limitations but there are ways you can get different insights for projects especially if they're unique to a location.

Q: What is a regional priority?
A: It's hard when you start at a company to make the case for how much earning potential a location has. You can show the scale of influence through a small study to build your case.

Great way to get the PM's and engineering teams onside

"We can't design for the world there's so many different people, my product is not designing for the whole world"

is what Nancy heard a lot!

If you take insights from an underrepresented group you are creating opportunity to get more customers than you think.

The same issues happen through out locations — take into account other voice, other access points in order to create more opportunity.

Can you incorporate a different culture, community in your research studies. There is amazing things that happen!

Thanks so much @NancyDouyon!

#uxaustralia #uxaustralia2020

@threadreaderapp unroll please!

Nancy opened with a story about the perceptions of the home she grew up in in Haiti, I wasn't able to capture it but it really set the context for her talk, I'd encourage everyone to watch the whole presentation when it comes out!