Design for Belonging

Lara Mendonça at UXDX Community: Barcelona. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ_ajTQUqm0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why belonging means so much to me

[00:00:00] Hi, guys. I'm so happy to be here today. I want to thank the folks at UXDX for inviting me, and you for listening to this talk. This is a super personal talk to me. It's not a collection of tips or just case studies, but rather stories that you will hopefully relate to and learn something from. To start, I want to tell you about my family and why belonging means so much to me.

[00:00:28] This is me at age six. I look very grumpy in this photo, but I was actually quite smiley when I was a kid. I grew up in Brazil, and we moved from place to place with my family to find jobs and more opportunities. So I spent a lot of my childhood without friends. I didn't really belong anywhere. I was constantly going to new places, and it's really shaped me as the person I am to this day: very attached to my family and very distant from everyone else. I don't have a lot of objects from childhood. About six years ago we took that to the extreme, sold all our things and moved from Brazil to London together. We had only a few suitcases and our dog. So it's been something that I've been very used to in my life, and it all culminated in us moving to a completely different country together.

[00:01:25] These are my parents, (inaudible) and Antonio. Before we moved here, my mom was a school teacher and my dad was a cab driver. They abandoned everything to come here. They abandoned their jobs, their friends, all their possessions and the things that they had in their house. They moved to a completely different culture, to a place where they didn't speak the language or know anyone. In the end it was all worth it, for me, for my sister, for them. We found new opportunities. We had a chance to enjoy things we never had access to before. But their experiences in London have been almost the opposite of mine.

[00:02:04] We started in the same place, as immigrants, and this already makes our experience in the UK different from British people's, but we started at the same level in terms of how much we could embrace the experience in the UK. Then, because I'm fluent in English, I was able to engage with people everywhere I went, and they had to ask for my help, or my sister's, even to go to the doctor. That put a blocker on any relationships, any friendships that they could create with people who are from the UK.

[00:02:45] I'm also young, so it's easier for me to embrace new habits, try new foods and, in general, assimilate to a new culture. My parents are older, and they have a harder time assimilating. They already have their personalities pretty set in stone: the music that they like, the movies that they like and, in general, the things that they like to do and what they enjoy as people. I was also able to build a career here and grow to be where I am now. Meanwhile, my parents couldn't really find steady jobs. Their qualifications are not valid here, so they mostly did odd jobs.

[00:03:24] So while I was feeling this great sense of belonging to British culture, its people, its way of life, they just felt othered, even though London wasn't outright rejecting them. They didn't feel like they belonged here. They have recently moved to Portugal because of that, and they're much happier there, because it's much closer to Brazilian culture. They speak the language, they know the people. Now I think I understand much better why they made that decision. What their journey showed me is that belonging is not as straightforward as I thought when I was a child. It's not about how long you live in a place or how many friends you have.

[00:04:07] It also made me really think about my job and the choices I was making for other people. If people from the same family can have such different experiences while living in the same house and moving to the same country together, what happens when you're affecting entire communities? So, hi, my name is Lara. I'm the Head of Product Design at Bumble. Today I want to tell you about designing through the lens of belonging, and I will hopefully leave you with ways to affect change, whatever your role or career.

Why designers should care about belonging

[00:04:40] So why should we care about belonging? Especially as designers, why should we care about it? Well, close your eyes and think about a moment in your life when you truly felt like a part of something: a family, a group of friends, a team, a community, or even society in general. When you felt listened to, appreciated, valued, what did that feel like? Bask in that feeling for a second. This is what belonging feels like, and this is what we should be designing for.

[00:05:12] In tech, we get to decide who gets this amazing feeling while using our products. We define who our users are and everyone else who's left out. We decide if belonging is a right or a privilege, and how much we should care about the needs of those at the margins. This is a lot of power, and with great power comes great responsibility.

[00:05:39] When we design a product, we take into consideration a lot of ways in which we're different, so we can define who our target audience is. These are some of the categories you might think of when you are trying to build the target audience that you should aim for with your product. But in society there's a default setting for each of these that we're conditioned to imagine. If you think about a person in the US, for example, you might imagine a white, cis male, straight, young, middle-class, able-bodied, neurotypical [?], Christian, Western, American English speaker.

[00:06:23] Of course this will vary from place to place and from audience to audience, but we are conditioned to imagine at least some of it every time. Most of the time people will fall outside of this default. They get neglected, or sometimes completely excluded. We imagine this average human being and that's who we design for, that's our target audience. But what happens when we design for that average and no one else? Well, let me tell you another story.

When your name is an error

[00:06:59] When I moved to the UK, I had to open a bank account. I went to the bank, and they told me they needed proof of address. So I gave them a bill with my name on it, and this is how it was written on the bill. The bank said no, because my surname didn't match the name on my ID. I was, of course, very confused. This is how my name was on my ID. Couldn't they just work out that it's the same name abbreviated? But I went home and called the company to sort it out.

[00:07:24] They said that my name was too long to be written on the bill. There was nothing they could do, because that's how the system worked. It wouldn't allow them to put this many characters. I even remember one woman on the phone suggesting I change my name so things would be easier for me. I honestly felt awful. In the end I managed to get a bank account, but I had to do a lot more than other people, and I felt like I was being punished for being different.

[00:07:50] Then I started talking to other people about it, and I discovered that many immigrants had similar issues with their names. Names were too long like mine, or too short, or they meant a curse word in English. They maybe had a special character like a hyphen or an accent. They maybe had multiple small words that were just one surname, or they meant a command to a computer. There were countless stories of moving from a country where your name was just a name to a country where it was an error. We all felt excluded, like something was wrong with us, like we didn't really belong here.

[00:08:34] When we're dealing with a product or a system, we think it's perfect. We think it's not human, it's a machine, so it takes all of us into account. Well, most of the time it's designed for an imagined average person, and it's designed by people, so they make mistakes. That means it might leave a lot of us out in the end. So remember, to give others this feeling of belonging, you need to realize that there is no average. We're all unique, and especially in the products that we use, there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

The Palm Beach ballot

[00:09:08] So imagine that now you're designing for the non-average user. Great. But what happens if you try to solve their problems based on assumptions about them? Well, this is Theresa LePore during the 2000 US elections. She was a government worker in Palm Beach County in Florida, and she had a job to do. She needed to create the ballots where people would vote, including choosing between George Bush and Al Gore for president. You probably know a lot about elections now, following the latest election like we all have been.

[00:09:43] You understand that each county has its own way of doing things, and Palm Beach County had more candidates than other counties. Florida's a very important state, so everyone was paying attention to this county and everything that they were doing. The biggest problem she had is that, because they had too many candidates, the usual ballot that other places in Florida were following didn't fit her requirements. So she needed to change the design.

[00:10:10] The easiest solution would be to make the names smaller so they would take less space on the page. But Theresa wanted to make sure elderly voters, who are most of the electorate in Palm Beach, could read the names easily. She wanted to make sure that they felt included and empowered to fulfill their civic duty. It was a very noble goal. So she chose this design, which seems fine at first glance, but it had some issues. Each candidate would occupy either one side or the other side of the page, and they would alternate names.

[00:10:46] What she didn't know at the time is that this would have a huge impact on the election, because there were two ways to read it. The intended way was from top to bottom. You would read Bush as number one, then this guy named Pat Buchanan on the right as number two, then Al Gore as number three, and so forth. If you wanted to vote for Al Gore, you would punch hole number three. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, no, because you could also read it left to right: all the candidates on the left side and then all the candidates on the right side. If you wanted to vote for Al Gore, you would count one for Bush, two for Al Gore, so you'd vote on the second hole.

[00:11:30] Well, over 2,000 Democrats in that county meant to vote for Al Gore but voted for Pat Buchanan due to the design. Bush ended up winning the state by 537 votes, which means that those 2,000 votes might well have changed the outcome in that county. Because the election was so close in Florida, it could actually have changed the entire state, which, as you might know, is a very important state if you want to win the election, and it was a deciding factor for Bush to win. Would it have been different? We don't know, and we're never going to find out.

[00:12:07] At the time Louis Franco [?], who was the House Democratic leader in Florida, said, "Not many people can say they changed the history of the world." But Theresa LePore can say that. Her design possibly changed who would become president of the United States. Talk about impact, right? The lesson here is that to solve your users' problems, you can't just assume you know what they need. You need to involve them in the process and test the solutions, to make sure you're not affecting their experience and everyone else's in an unintended way, maybe changing the world by accident.

Designing for belonging at Bumble

[00:12:50] Now we know all these lessons, how do we design for belonging? If you know that belonging is really important and has real consequences in people's lives, you need to know how to take that and transform it into actual solutions and use it in your everyday job. A year ago I joined a mission-driven company called Bumble. If you don't know Bumble, Bumble is the parent company of two of the largest dating and connection apps in the world, with millions of users in many, many countries. Our mission is to provide the most inclusive and empowering way to connect.

[00:13:30] The company operates two apps, Badoo and Bumble, and I lead the product design team for the Bumble app. That's me there. The Bumble app is a social networking app that connects people across dating, friendship and professional networking. No matter the type of relationship, at Bumble our staple, our unique selling point, is that women make the first move. Connecting with other people makes us very vulnerable, even more so if you're part of a group that is not seen as the target audience most of the time, so it can easily leave you feeling rejected and different. Because of our mission of inclusivity and empowerment, and because we're women-first by design, we could never really settle for designing for the average. It's part of our everyday ethos to help people belong in their journey to build relationships.

[00:14:24] When I joined the company, my main focus was to grow a diverse and collaborative team and to mature practices, so we could bring that mission to life. We had one designer dedicated to the Bumble app at the time, and although he was great, a solo designer brings only one perspective. So we had to grow the right way. This meant evolving our hiring processes and seeking diverse perspectives. It also meant giving them the psychological safety to question themselves and their peers and to bring their full identities to work, to ultimately foster an environment that focuses on helping the most vulnerable users belong.

[00:15:02] This is our team right now. We have five designers and one UX writer, and we're hiring a lot more people. We have some people starting at the end of this month, and we're hiring even more people by the end of 2020. We're not where we want to be in terms of diverse voices yet, but the progress we made shows that it's possible to grow fast and bring the right people with you. This team impresses me daily with their empathy and their stories, and that's because we didn't hire for the average. We focused on people with the experiences and potential to help us truly affect change, people who bring unique voices.

[00:15:37] So my advice is this: find a team that shares a passion for belonging. Then use your own voice and learn from your peers. This will enable crucial discussions that will ultimately lead you to innovate as a team, and hopefully, unlike my bank, you'll also cover some non-average users in the process.

Finding your blind spots

[00:15:58] Having the team in place, although really important, is not everything. Everyone has blind spots, and even a diverse team won't understand all the experiences people have when using your product. So we make an effort to recognize exclusion and constantly change the way we work to solve for those users. We introduced a lot more discussions around risk and misuse during our discovery process. We also work with the research team constantly to fundamentally reframe how we plan a roadmap and to focus more on user outcomes. Without finding those gaps and evolving your process as a team, you will end up designing on assumptions, and like Theresa LePore with the US elections, you could end up having a huge unintended impact on your users, even with the best of intentions.

[00:16:49] Start by asking yourself this: what points of view have I not yet considered? What are the layers of exclusion that I find in my product or my feature? How can I change that? Then we focused on figuring out what we can't see, our blind spots. That means working with research to evaluate possible solutions. It also means doing the foundational research to get to know our most underserved users better, so we can identify their fears, hopes and dreams. This helps us design with data and knowledge, so we know the impact before we commit to a solution. It also helps make a business case for why this is an opportunity to innovate and tap into audiences we have been neglecting.

[00:17:29] So here's what you do. You can start by challenging your very own assumptions, and make a case for changing a process or feature based on real insights from the very groups of people you want to help belong. Forget the word edge case. Frame discussions around belonging and the business and humanitarian risks of not solving them.

The unmatch example

[00:17:52] At the moment we're working on a lot of features and projects that we can't share yet. But here's an example of something we recently released. Originally, when either side of a match opted to unmatch the other, the conversation would disappear forever. You would say, "I don't want to talk to this person anymore, I want to unmatch," and then their name and their chat would just disappear from your chat screens. We did this to protect our most vulnerable users, women, especially women of color, making sure that their personal information was not visible once they decided they were not interested in a person anymore. That guaranteed that no one could take that personal information and try to find them in other places like Instagram.

[00:18:35] When we spoke to these users, however, these women, especially women of color, who we wanted to make sure felt safe on the platform, we also learned that although this was a great feature, it could also be used by a bad actor to leave a conversation before the other person had a chance to report them. If they harassed you for any reason, they would just unmatch you, and you wouldn't be able to find them again to report them to Bumble. That made victims of harassment feel less safe on the platform, and that was the last thing we wanted to happen.

[00:19:08] So we made a change to eliminate that possibility altogether. Now, when a user unmatches the other, the match and the chat will disappear for the person who unmatched, but they will stay for the person who got unmatched. The conversation just becomes greyed out, as you can see on the screen, but it stays there. You cannot see any of their personal details: the photo disappears, all the information. The only thing you have is the first name. That guarantees that we keep the protection around personal information, but we make sure that they can still take action.

[00:19:42] In that chat screen you see a message that informs you that you have been unmatched. If everything's fine, you can just delete the chat, remove it from your inbox and move on. But if you want to get support from Bumble and report the other user, you can do so easily and anonymously. That was only possible because we spoke to vulnerable users regularly, and because we as a company decided to prioritize their safety. All the things that I spoke about before, changing the process, hiring the right people, all of those actions culminated in us being able to see this problem fast and work really quickly to solve it.

Make belonging your goal

[00:20:25] After you do all of that, in the long term what you need to do is make belonging your goal as a designer. We're still discovering what that looks like, but one thing we did recently was redefine our design principles in a very collaborative way, reframing them around how they align with our values and around belonging, versus just experience principles. Our team, any team, is a work in progress. We're never done trying to help other people belong.

[00:20:53] There's no magic recipe or checklist. You need to start where you are. As long as you're learning from different perspectives, changing the way you work together and making belonging your goal, you will affect change. I leave you with these inspiring words from Audre Lorde: "Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." Thank you.