Design For Pattern

Michael Gough at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/IoGyq5KD13g

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.

Telling stories that come true

[00:00:00] When I was a child, my favorite television show was really boring to everybody else, but incredible to me. There was a chair like this, a stool, and a gentleman with no backdrop and no props, often with a book, would just tell a story. I think it was a pretty short show, maybe 20 minutes, and mine will be 30. But I was fascinated by just the act of telling stories, and figured out that that's what I wanted to do for a living. Fast forward 40 years, and I think that's exactly what I'm doing for a living.

[00:00:41] Designers are given skills, skills to visualize things, to tell collective stories. And what happens is, if they tell a story that resonates enough with the people who are responsible for building the thing they're designing, with the people that are responsible for funding the thing they're designing, and with the people who are responsible for enjoying the thing that they're designing, then that story can come true.

[00:01:11] So over the next 30 minutes, or now 28 because my introduction was so long, I'm going to tell a story about Uber that I think is true. We're certainly working on making it true. And we call it Design for Pattern.

Uber Design and the services it covers

[00:01:27] First of all, just really quickly, Uber Design. There are about 400 designers and researchers at Uber. I'm only directly responsible right now for about 250 of them, and then there's all this matrix, dotted-line stuff. We all try to come together as a community. But there are a lot of applications and services at Uber, and so there are a lot of designers.

[00:01:49] Some of the things you know: there's the Rider app, which many of you have probably used, and many more have probably cursed. There's the Driver app that all of the drivers use to get to wherever you are after you push your button. And of course, we deliver food; there are a number of apps in that ecosystem. We also, and I think we're just moving to Europe, power freight. It turns out the freight problem in a lot of respects is similar to the ride-sharing challenge. We're working on self-driving cars. We're also working on self-driving planes. I don't know how all that's going to turn out, but we'll worry about that in a few years. We have bikes, and we also have scooters in a number of different countries. That is one of our fastest-growing sectors.

[00:02:42] And then we have a bunch of other businesses, and I just listed a few here to give you a little idea of how we're growing. We're integrating transit. We don't own any trains or buses, but we believe in multimodal transportation; I'll talk about that a little bit more later. In many regions now you can get your bus ride or your train ride in the Uber app, and also connect between the services. We just launched Works. It's another gig work service, for other jobs besides driving. That will expand over time. Power Loop, I put it up there just because I love the name Power Loop, but we get truck drivers trailers for special uses, like air-conditioned trailers, things like that.

[00:03:32] And we're just moving into grocery, which is an exciting space for us, because one of the biggest goals of Eats is to provide healthy food. And a lot of the healthy food isn't in restaurants. Not a surprise. It's in the grocery stores.

A virtual infrastructure for the real world

[00:03:48] One of the best ways to think about Uber, if you think about all the different services and products we provide, is that we build an ecosystem, a digital ecosystem, that sits underneath these services. It could be location services, logistics, like for transit, and rider and driver. It can also be a marketplace, and the marketplace animates all of these things as well and tries to match price and need in a dynamic way. And there's a lot of work to do there. So think about it as a virtual infrastructure for the real world.

[00:04:27] When I started to understand this... I landed at Uber a little bit by accident. I don't know if I should talk about this, but my first Uber ride was to go interview at Uber. So I asked my driver a lot of questions on my way there. What the hell is this? How does it work? And a quick story, and I shouldn't do quick stories because I only have 25 minutes, but it was about six months in, I was riding to work one morning, and this gentleman said, "You don't remember me, do you?" I said no. He said, "I drove you across the Golden Gate Bridge for your first interview at Uber." So it was kind of exciting for me, and we got to catch up a bunch. It is a little bit of a community, and that's one of the aspects I like, which I will also talk about a little bit later.

[00:05:14] If we're going to conceptualize Uber as this virtual infrastructure that can animate a lot of different things in the real world, it turns out that the design skills that we normally use to build applications only work a little bit. Of those 400 designers and researchers, many of them were trained to make interfaces, and to make the best possible interface. They didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the real-world implications of the choices in that interface.

[00:05:53] When I came in, I realized... My background is architecture. I spent about 10 years building buildings. But I actually had something to contribute, which is good. You get a job, you want to be able to contribute something. A lot of it was that as an architect I spent all my time thinking about real stuff: real-world implications, the social, economic and political aspects of building. And I think that applies at Uber.

Design for pattern and Wendell Berry

[00:06:22] One of the things that Eames looked at is how all these are connected, and he used the Powers of Ten as an example. I found an even better example, and we call it design for pattern. There's a gentleman named Wendell Berry. He's a poet and a philosopher, and he has a ranch. Actually, I guess he calls it a farm. I had a ranch. And he spent a lot of time thinking about how little choices he made on his farm had huge implications out in the world.

[00:06:58] Choices like insecticides are obvious ones, in that it might solve a local problem but cause problems in the area, or even problems in the food sources. But also who you choose to distribute your food, who you choose to sell to, what crops you decide to grow. All of these have implications that go way beyond your farm.

[00:07:22] So if Uber's a little farm, and mostly what we do is farm little applications, we have to start figuring out how to think about all those broader implications. How does this impact the world? For better or worse, and sometimes it's been better and sometimes it's been worse, we are impacting the globe, and we have to figure out how to better take responsibility for that.

[00:07:48] There are three areas that I want to talk about where we're having an impact. I'll use primarily positive examples, because I'm representing my company. The previous speaker was able to come up with one of the negative examples, and I'll talk about that a little bit. And there are others. It's a huge challenge when you decide that you will have a global impact on very complex systems. There are the really exciting things that you enable, and then the challenging things that you have to try to mitigate.

Social impact: deaf drivers and women in Saudi Arabia

[00:08:26] For social, for instance. Cute animation. It turns out that 70% of deaf people, at least in the United States, can't get jobs. But there are many deaf people, and I wish I had the number with me, but I don't, who drive for Uber. When we realized that that was interesting to them, we extended the application to make sure that the rider knows that the driver can't easily communicate with them.

[00:09:05] I've had this experience. This is an old version of the interface, but it's improved. And it's actually pretty delightful, because you look down, it notifies you that your driver won't be able to speak with you, and then you look for alternative ways to communicate. We added a feature where you can learn sign language. I think this is a little flaky, because on a 10-minute ride, learning sign language and then communicating with drivers seems like a bit of a stretch. But I think it's conceptually a good idea. In my case, once you make eye contact with a deaf person, they do a pretty good job of expressing themselves and understanding what you're talking about.

[00:09:50] In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, women have had challenges getting access to opportunity, because they can't get safely from one place to another. And we introduced Uber at almost the exact same time that the women's rights movement there established women's right to drive. And just to be clear, because this came up in a talk, I've given this talk before. You're not the first, but you're not very deep in this; I think you're like third or something. It's about the number of girlfriends I've had. But we are not responsible for that revolution. The way I gave the talk, I think this person thought that I had said that. But we were there and we were able to help.

[00:10:41] As a result, 80% of all rides in Uber there right now are by women. And this number may be even better, because in Saudi Arabia men still order the vast majority of the rides. So that happened. And then also, this happened. I think there are many more now, but when I first gave this talk, this was female Uber driver number one in Saudi Arabia, which I just thought was awesome. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, take that.

Economic impact: Paris and drivers' many jobs

[00:11:27] Another story. Now we're going to focus on economic. This map right here looks like a bunch of random spots, but it's the challenged economic zones throughout Paris. Paris is interesting in that it has this amazing network of transportation. It's quite strong. For those that have done the Paris Metro, it's not just really cool Art Nouveau stations; it's actually a great transportation system. But if you look, the most challenged neighborhoods don't necessarily have access to the Metro. And there's a challenge there, because if you can't get to jobs, you can't get jobs.

[00:12:14] One of the things that we noticed: we looked at the Uber rides, and you'll see that even here we're not touching those economically depressed areas as much as we are other areas. But the good news is you can get in there and out of there. The real magic is this one. These are where Uber rides start. Look at all of the clusters around the areas that are economically challenged. So we're giving people the opportunity to get in and out of those neighborhoods, but we're also giving people in those neighborhoods jobs. And I think that's a good thing. But I told you I was just going to talk about good things.

[00:13:00] (Video) "Dos, I'm a chicken farmer. Tres, mechanic and paint shop. Cuatro, I'm a pig farmer. Cinco, I'm a flight attendant. Seis, auxiliary police officer. The moves for me are: how can I acquire time? You can have all the money, all the material things in the world; they don't mean anything if you don't have time."

[00:13:23] I haven't met this Uber driver, but I'm kind of blown away. This was a promotion that we did, and he really was just explaining all of his jobs. He's unusual in the number of jobs he has. He's not unusual at all in having more than Uber driving as a job. Our drivers value their flexibility, their ability to be entrepreneurs, over just about everything else. We do survey after survey, and they just keep telling us: don't mess with my decision about when I'm going to work and how I'm going to work. So there is this entrepreneurial bent, and we're hoping we'll do more and more to support it over time.

Congestion and becoming part of the solution

[00:14:06] This is what the previous speaker talked about. We had this idea: push a button, get a ride. And unfortunately, one of the consequences of our success is that a lot of people pushed that button and a lot of people got rides. Instead of being a solution to decrease congestion in cities, it actually increased it.

[00:14:30] A quick side story. My neighborhood in San Francisco is called the Mission. They've had to put a moratorium on the creation of new restaurants and bars. It used to be that on Mission, at 16th and 24th, there were a whole bunch of really nice restaurants and really cool, mostly divey, but really cool bars. And then it expanded. It went down the entire corridor almost overnight. That's because we didn't have to rely on just the transportation, we call it BART there, to get to those bars and restaurants. Now you can just take an Uber. So the whole neighborhood has just exploded. Really positive economic development, really amazing street energy, but also the streets are packed. So what do we do about it? If we cause a problem, we could just say, well... I know. Okay, you get the idea.

[00:16:31] With more and more people moving to cities, cities getting more and more crowded, I think we'd like to be part of the solution instead of just part of the problem. Convenience is important, but the health of cities is also incredibly important. Some of the work we're doing is to try to get higher and higher capacity in the vehicles, and that includes moving from just one person in a car to multiple people in a car. Our recent work in transit, we're just starting out, but the deals we're doing with transit authorities are helping. We're moving into high-capacity vehicles, so more and more there will essentially be Uber buses, especially in areas where the bus systems are not very sophisticated, where we would essentially have to bring in public transportation. And we're also bringing in a lot of bikes and scooters.

[00:17:27] And there's more. We will be looking at the advantages of self-driving over time. There is a lot of belief and a lot of momentum behind how different it is when all of the vehicles, whatever kind of vehicles they are, are highly coordinated, and when all of those vehicles can just leave; they don't need to take up parking spaces. It will transform cities in ways that I don't think we can imagine yet, but I'm hoping our company will help imagine.

[00:17:58] And then, yeah, there'll be flying robot cars everywhere, which should really help something. I'm not sure what. I love the Elevate people, but every time I ask them to just please explain to me how this works, I get more confused. But by the way, we are piloting it. We're using helicopters right now in a couple of cities, mostly to pilot how the multimodal systems all come together.

Data for cities

[00:18:24] One of the things we're doing is amassing ridiculous amounts of data. It's anonymized, it's not creepy, I hope, but all of the sensor data on your phones and the drivers' phones is sending back information that we can collect and act on, so that we can try to make improvements. We give this information to cities that want to participate, in an application that we call Uber Movement. And they're developing many, many different novel uses for this, to look at and predict traffic patterns and changes, to see where there's increased energy or development.

[00:19:04] One of my favorite ones is that it turns out some cities are now using this to figure out where potholes are, so they can go patch them. I didn't realize it was that accurate, but it is. Total tangent: we also use that for safety. If you get in an accident now, we get hold of you right away and say, "Hey, everything okay? Can we help?" So that sensor data is rich and will become more and more valuable over time.

Principles for designing differently

[00:19:31] I told you that I'm telling a story that I want to be true. Basically the story is that we will take more and more responsibility. We'll get better and better at predicting the outcomes of our technology, of our products and services, and try to understand and make things better out there in the world. And to do that, we've been thinking about what the principles are. How would you design differently? And again, I stole this all from Wendell Berry. So if you meet the guy, tell him that you met a guy in Ireland who stole all his ideas and then presented them.

[00:20:10] The first one is pretty straightforward. If we're going to do really good work, it has to be focused. You will have seen that our applications have accreted more and more features and have gotten more and more complex. Our services have gotten more and more complex. Now we're making a really concerted effort to boil it back down, to get more simple again, both within the application experience and out there in the real world.

[00:20:36] Figure out what's enough. When do you stop? By the way, not an easy thing for a technology company to do. We always like more, we always like different.

[00:20:45] Respect your limits. This is another hard one. We have some incredibly smart people working at Uber, and they can convince you of just about anything. But if it sounds complicated, it probably is. If it sounds kind of wacky, like, I don't know, robot flying cars, maybe it is kind of wacky.

[00:21:05] The next one is one of the most important ones to me. When you're in problem-solving mode, when you're designing something, and you're focused too narrowly on a single problem, you're not really thinking about how that cascades out. If it doesn't solve multiple problems, then it's probably not a good solution. So it's a mental exercise for thinking about how things are connected.

[00:21:32] And then the last one is the most esoteric one, but someday I hope I'll write a book about this. If you conceptualize everything we do as designers, as technologists, as business people, as creating these patterns, and understand that every pattern is embedded in another pattern, then you can start to think about the relationships, not just of the local patterns, but of the patterns that radiate out until you get to global scale. If we can think more like this as a company, I think there will be many more stories of what we've done that's helped the world than otherwise.

[00:22:15] With that, I'd like you to try to think of our company less as a transportation company and more as an opportunity company. We hope we're bringing opportunities to people all over the world. Thank you very much.