Futureproofing the Tech Behind a Snapchat Experience

Tammarrian Rogers at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQOlogbqwU0

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.

Inclusion engineering at Snap

[00:00:00] Congratulations on your first UXDX USA conference. I am delighted to be here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name again is Tammarrian, and my pronouns are she/her/hers, and I'm really excited to share with you some of the things that we do at Snap. I joined Snap about three and a half years ago as an engineering director overseeing several teams, from QE, localization, release management, and our test platform and IT teams. Last October I had the honor of stepping into our first inclusion engineering director role at Snap.

[00:00:38] What that means is that I get to focus 100% of my time on building a sustainable, inclusive development life cycle so that we can continuously create inclusive product experiences. When you think about going from ideation to prototyping to coding and localizing the product, testing and releasing it and listening, how do we create a way for us to support inclusivity throughout the process itself, in how we work together and what we produce? I also work on several inclusive engineering projects, like how do we tackle algorithm bias and ensure that we're building inclusive lenses, and how do we make the camera experience better, especially for people with darker skin tones. I'm honored to be in this role because I think it's really going to shift how we work in engineering, not only at Snap but across our industry.

[00:01:43] I'm going to talk a lot about inclusion, inclusive product design, inclusive product, inclusive teams, so I think it would be good for us to get on the same page about what I mean when I talk about inclusion. Inclusion to me means we bring people together from all walks of life, acknowledging who they are and how they operate in the world, and we make sure that we engage everyone at the table. It's not enough to have people at the table and say that that's inclusive. It's really about how we engage with them, and how we practice empathic listening.

[00:02:22] And when we think about inclusive engineering itself, it is about the practice of ensuring that the products and services that we are building are really accessible and made for every single person who experiences them. That's the framework of how I think about inclusion.

Three goals and the inclusive camera

[00:02:38] Today I want us to have three goals. I'd love for you to take away the four key ingredients that we use at Snap to systematically promote and produce inclusive product experiences. I also want you to listen in a way that you learn more about the approach we took to arrive at these ingredients, because this is, I think, the model that will help you create a framework that is most applicable to you and your teams and your company. And finally, I'm going to invite us to shift the way that we think about future tech, future-proofing technology.

[00:03:22] At Snap we are invested in this project called Inclusive Camera, and it is something the entire company has rallied behind. It looks at how people with different skin tones experience the camera, and how we can do a better job making sure that everyone feels like they were thought of when we created these experiences. I'll share more about this with an engineer who sparked the invitation and the challenge.

[00:03:58] I think people of color assume that their skin tones are difficult to photograph because they've seen themselves in lights that are not complementary to how they look, and that's absolutely not the case. When you look at the camera technology, when you look at the history of it, when you look at how image making has evolved throughout the years, there are some actual technological limitations when it comes to how we show up on screen.

[00:04:25] My name is Bertrand Sampua [?], the lead for the Inclusive Camera. I've experienced situations where my skin has been lightened by the camera taking photos of myself, and it just doesn't work, especially in low-light settings. You don't see me. So I really want to improve that experience for myself and for the community. My mom picking up a phone is assuming that this phone has the best interest for her skin tone and who she is and the photos she wants to take. There's that assumption that it should be figured out already, but it really isn't.

[00:04:57] A lot of times camera companies are registering our skin colors as shadows instead of as skin, so it just becomes muddy. The inclusive camera is just a camera that allows any person to be seen by the camera the way that they want to be seen, the way that they are. I love having a balance of, this was made with everybody in mind, because that opens up a whole other path of what creativity could look like when it's actually being made with good purpose. You see that saturation that comes in; it lifts it a lot. It feels like there's a filter on it.

[00:05:30] We want every time that you open the Snapchat camera to be a moment that you feel as though you can express yourself any way that you want to. It's not going to be an easy journey, and rebuilding our camera is just the first phase: improving low-light flash capture and exposure correction so that we can account for all people's skin tones and their undertones, so that any person, whatever phone they're picking up, is able to take a good selfie. And this is just the beginning.

[00:06:00] Every single team member at Snap knows about and is committed to making sure Inclusive Camera is successful. You cannot find one single person at the company who does not know the challenge we have and the opportunity we are going after to make this an outstanding experience for everyone. So how do we create this environment? How do we create the space for Inclusive Camera and other projects like it to manifest?

Four key ingredients

[00:06:38] Well, there are four key ingredients. One is our values and how we work together at the company, because we know that the way that we operate as a team is what manifests through the product that we bring to our community. We also have principles, which are derived from our values, and this all depends on where you sit at the company. It's about applying the values in a way that makes sense for your line of business, whether design or engineering or marketing or communications. Principles are derived from our values and applied to your domain.

[00:07:21] Then we have mechanisms that help us stay true to those principles that guide us, especially as we grow as a company and bring new team members in. And finally, the best way to know we're getting it right is through empathic listening: listening to our community and making sure that we are making adjustments to our mechanisms as needed, to make sure our community still has trust in what we're building. We also know that we have to stay true to our principles, and that they too will evolve as our community evolves.

Values

[00:07:57] Let's dive in to values. Snap has three key pillars for our values, kind, smart and creative, and we have nine sub-values within those three. Everything we do hinges on our behavior being aligned to these values, and we spend a lot of time on these. In fact, our performance reviews and our promo discussions all hinge on not only what we deliver but how we deliver those results.

[00:08:31] When we think about inclusive product development, the two that we double-click on under kind are empathy and instills trust. Empathy means that we communicate openly and that we're comfortable with diverse perspectives, and that we also seek to understand different points of view while suspending our own judgment or opinions. And the best way to instill trust is to always act with integrity and honesty.

Ethical design principles

[00:09:00] We have a set of ethical design principles that help us think, when we're building our products, about what principles we want to make sure we're aligned by. Those principles are really bridged on three key pillars: safety by design, privacy by design and inclusion by design. Safety by design: we are very committed to the well-being of our community, and we strive to make sure that our Snapchatters are safe and informed.

[00:09:33] Privacy by design is a model that is the heartbeat of how we operate at the company. Data minimization and data usage drive all of our decision making, and every single feature, functionality or service goes through a rigorous privacy review. I'm going to talk a lot about this, because everything we do going forward is really tied to the ways that we've been successful driving privacy by design as a cultural norm.

[00:10:03] Inclusion by design is, of course, looking at and acknowledging people however they identify and making sure we take those into consideration as we're building our products. A lot of what we're doing right now with Inclusive Camera is driving our inclusion by design principles. We know that the success of the Inclusive Camera really hinges on the data sets, the training data sets that we use to test the product as we iterate and make it a better experience.

[00:10:42] Our first set of inclusion by design principles are anchored in machine learning fairness, and there are four key areas that we focus on: inclusivity, accountability, balance and transparency. We are radically responsible for the machine learning algorithms we create, and we won't hide behind the complexity of those algorithms. We know that our training data sets are capable of introducing imbalances in how we make our decisions, like creating silos or information bubbles. We want to be aware of those and counterbalance that.

[00:11:23] We have over 270 million Snapchatters around the globe, and it's a younger generation, and they are very, very committed to making sure that we act responsibly, that we're always accountable, that we're transparent and we're empathetic. That's why transparency is one of our key pillars: making sure that our Snapchatters understand what preferences are being applied to them and that they have the ability to make changes when they want to.

Mechanisms: how privacy by design took hold

[00:11:53] Now, principles and values alone are not enough to drive behavior. They absolutely anchor us in the conversation that's most important, but we need mechanisms to help us stay true to those principles, and part of this is making sure that those mechanisms are successful in driving those principles. Our privacy by design principles are simple. We communicate openly and honestly, and we are committed to designing with privacy in mind. We also want you as our Snapchatter to choose how you want to express yourself, and you get to control your information, and deletion is our default.

[00:12:43] Now I want to step back a little bit and tell you how we arrived at these principles. Back in 2014 we had about 40 engineers, and they all could get in a room and talk about every single feature we were developing and ask those critical questions, guided by our privacy engineers: what data do you really need, why do you need it, how will you use it, how long will you keep it? These conversations were very critical for every single feature we introduced into the app.

[00:13:16] After a time of this being a conversation, and we also saw behavior following that with a fairly manual process, we decided it was good to write it down and make sure we stayed aligned with these core principles. So these were born from behavior and from language that was already happening at the company. We solidified those and formalized them so that as we grew, team members would know exactly what was most important, and they already had guardrails in place to help us stay aligned with that.

[00:13:48] Our process is simple. Every single feature goes through a rigorous review. We ask the question up front, as soon as a feature is introduced in Jira: what are the privacy implications? Is it user facing? Do you need data? Once we determine that there are privacy implications, you're immediately pushed into our privacy design process, and then we ask many more questions in the Quip automatically to assess how much risk is involved, and we pull together a risk score.

[00:14:27] If that risk score is high, you're going into the next comprehensive stage of reviews with the privacy engineers, the designers, the UX design team. You're going into these conversations collaboratively, because we know no one person can get it right. We all have to think critically and make sure that we're keeping our Snapchatters', our community's, privacy at the forefront of every decision we're making. And of course if the risk score is low, you bypass that rigor and you go into our legal review.

[00:15:01] This model has been extremely successful, in that every single person at the company knows about privacy by design and we're all anchored by it. There's a behavior that was born from within the team that is driven and maintained throughout. It is a part of our DNA. There is no question: privacy by design rolls off our tongues on a day-to-day basis, and we're thinking about it every single day. That's how we want inclusion by design to be, and that's where we're headed. This is how we're deriving these principles today. Projects like Inclusive Camera are offering us real principles to anchor to, and like I said, we're starting with ML fairness as a key part of those inclusion principles.

Empathic listening and the empathy imperative

[00:15:51] So when do you know, and how do you know, you're getting it right? Well, empathic listening, and this is a key piece of what we anchor everything on. How are we doing? Feedback is so important at Snap. Our VP of product recently gave a great talk about our empathy imperative that drives our product team and everything they do. I want to talk a little bit about these today. They are: don't be a slot machine, do it like Disney, hug the copycats, and use a quilt, not a blanket.

[00:16:29] I'm going to talk briefly about the first three. When you think about a slot machine, especially in a casino, it can be so attractive and it can be so engaging, and yet it can yield suboptimal results. In fact, some would say that it doesn't really offer value. It may be a temporary excitement, but it doesn't really offer long-term value. So at Snap, when we're looking at engagement and ways that people use Snapchat, we think: are we not only driving engagement but are we offering value? We make decisions based on that balance.

[00:17:12] Disney has created the happiest place on earth through their Disneyland theme parks throughout the world. Many people know about the happiest place on earth, and they've done such an exceptional job that they've decided to share some of the principles that have guided them in creating and sustaining this. They have four key pillars that drive how they stay the happiest place on earth. Number one, safety first. Number two, courtesy: do everything you can to delight your guests. Number three is show: always stay in character and keep the storytelling going. And number four, efficiency: avoid making things inconvenient, make it easy for your guests.

[00:18:00] For Snap, our number one is trust, because those four pillars are intentionally in hierarchical order, meaning safety first is the most important pillar at Disney, and for Snap, trust is our number one.

[00:18:24] Hug the copycats. When we improve the experience for how people communicate, we know we're doing a good job when we have copycats, and we celebrate them, because they're a testament to success. We also have a model that's innovate generously, and that means when we have something good that we think people find highly valuable, we think of ways to give it away, like our Bitmoji Kit and our Login Kit. These offer some of the core principles that we have promised and abided by for our Snapchatter community. Bitmoji Kit allows developers to integrate a great experience that offers people a way to express themselves that's most customized for them, and Login Kit offers the security and privacy that we promise onboarding into your Snapchat experience, and this too is leveraged by many developers in our community.

[00:19:25] When Snap was first born, it was in Los Angeles, California, in the United States, and a small group of people were really building this for the people nearby. When we saw that this was successful, we decided to start growing the business beyond the USA and applying the same experiences in those different markets, and we quickly learned that that was not successful. One example of this was when we were creating an experience that would offer people the opportunity to address an issue with their network connectivity.

[00:20:10] In the US, in nearby neighborhoods, we would see that when you were disconnected you wanted to know, so that you could get reconnected by resetting your router or moving to a better place or turning off airplane mode. But we heard from our Snapchatters in India that these alerts were actually quite jarring. They weren't helpful, they weren't valuable, because it was quite normal and expected to not always be connected. In fact, in Nigeria 55% of snaps taken are offline. So we really had to think about who's at the table when we're making these decisions, and that is how we thought about using a quilt, not a blanket, as we applied the Snapchat experience around the world.

[00:21:02] When we think about who's at the table, it's not only about having our designers and our data scientists and our researchers at the table. We have to expand that to include our local talent, domain experts, sociologists, and of course the community's voice. And it's not enough to have folks at the table. We really have to be mindful of creating the space for an equitable, inclusive dialogue, and practice empathic listening at all times.

Conclusion and an invitation

[00:21:39] In conclusion, we have four key ingredients. Values, driven by our company and expected behavior throughout how we work together. Principles that are derived from those values that apply to the space that you're in. Mechanisms that help you stay true to those principles, especially as you grow, making sure that people know what's most important. And empathic listening: knowing exactly how you're doing, continuously getting feedback from your community.

[00:22:15] In the case of Inclusive Camera, they're the same values and principles and mechanisms. Our values for Inclusive Camera are rooted in trust and empathy. This is how the space was created for Bertrand, a junior engineer in our camera team, to come forward and invite the company to join him in attacking this challenge. Inclusion by design is evolving from projects like Inclusive Camera, starting with our commitment to ML fairness. Our privacy by design model has proven to be extremely effective, driving a cultural shift and adoption. It's in the DNA of how we operate, and that's how inclusion by design will be.

[00:23:00] And finally, on who's at the table, we're doubling down on our internal Snapchatter community to help us iterate in a way that improves the process and improves the experience itself, and of course our domain experts, like Joshua in the video, our directors of photography. We're super excited about what's to come with Inclusive Camera and many more projects like it.

[00:23:31] My invitation to you is to think about, based on your company values, what inclusion principles you have, and what are some of the successful mechanisms you have in place that have helped you stay true to your principles. How might you leverage those most successful mechanisms to drive inclusive product ideation and development in your day-to-day work? I think this is a model that can be applied anywhere. It makes you go back and think about what are our values, what are we saying and what's actually happening, what are the principles from those values that we operate under, and what's already successful that we're using at our company. Because you do have those. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

[00:24:27] Finally, I want to leave you with this invitation as well. Future-proofing is not a destination. Think of it as an invitation to continuously think critically about the impact you have on the next several generations with your product experiences, and to build mechanisms that facilitate and always offer a warm welcome to the change that is imminent.

[00:24:52] We want every time that you open the Snapchat camera to be a moment that you feel as though you can express yourself any way that you want to, so that any person, whatever phone they're picking up, is able to take a good selfie. And this is just the beginning. Thank you.