Building for Billions
Google’s head of product inclusion offers ENG students lessons on designing with all consumers in mind
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Black people have been stymied trying to use automatic faucets and soap dispensers as well as fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors, all because their skin tones weren’t factored into the optic sensor technology that such products rely on. Were these inert objects trying to be discriminatory? No, they were just designed that way. Annie Jean-Baptiste says product designers can do better.
Jean-Baptiste is Google’s head of product inclusion and the author of Building for Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google’s Product Inclusion Team. On March 4, the Boston-born daughter of Haitian immigrants delivered a virtual presentation to an audience of more than 65 members of the ENG community, including alumni engineers.
ENG Assistant Dean of Outreach and Diversity Wynter Duncanson hosted the webinar, which was co-sponsored by the Office of Outreach and Diversity and the NSF Engineering Research Center in Cellular Materials.
“When I read Annie’s book, I was struck by the phrase ‘building for everyone with everyone,’” said Duncanson in explaining why she invited Jean-Baptiste to speak. “Just like the Societal Engineer, who includes society to impact society. Annie’s book had clear tips and strategies for being inclusive in our engineering.”
“Everyone wants to feel seen,” said Jean-Baptiste in her talk. “This is a core human need. When people don’t feel seen, they feel unintentionally alienated.” That’s a problem that has fueled Jean-Baptiste’s passion: “Making sure that anyone who is building something for someone else asks, ‘Who else? Who else needs to be in the room? Whose voices do we need to bring to the table?’”
The blind spots in product design don’t only affect Blacks. Jean-Baptiste identified multiple categories of identity—from race and ethnicity to geography and religion to age and socioeconomic status—and she stressed that they often overlap. “It’s not like I’m Black on Monday, left-handed on Tuesday, and a woman on Wednesday,” she pointed out. “I am all of those things all of the time. It affects how I move through the world. . . . And it definitely affects how I interact with products and services.”
Catering to people across all those identities is not just the right thing to do, Jean-Baptistes emphasized. It also opens up tremendous business opportunities.
“There is a misconception that underrepresented groups don’t have power,” Jean-Baptiste said. “That’s simply not true.” She pointed to some striking statistics. Blacks in the U.S. wield $1.3 trillion in purchasing power. The Latinx community boasts $1.7 trillion. Around the globe, women’s income total $18 trillion. One billion people worldwide have a disability. And for those building tech products, there’s this mind-blowing number: 700 million users are expected to gain internet access in the next few years.
Moreover, surveys provide plenty of evidence for Jean-Baptiste’s contention that people want to be seen. For example, 71 percent of LGBTQ consumers are more likely to trust a brand with advertising that authentically represents a variety of sexual orientations.
But building for inclusion is not just about marketing. Jean-Baptiste discussed how diversity should be a goal throughout the end-to-end process of product development. Engineers and product builders need to be thinking about inclusion during ideation, user research, testing, and other steps (yes, including marketing).
Jean-Baptiste delineated four principles for product inclusion. First, “There is no they, there is only we,” she said. “You cannot build something for someone else without talking to them about it. We can’t make assumptions that we know what people need without speaking to them.”
Second, “Holistic is majestic,” she said. “When we think in silos, we’re going to build in silos. So when you are thinking about a target user or consumer, it’s really important to understand there isn’t one thing that makes them who they are. . . . It’s all the dimensions coming together. That’s going to affect how they interact with technology.”
Third, “Diversity is the core of innovation for everyone.” Jean-Baptiste held up the example of curb cuts. Urban planners began building ramps from street to sidewalk level in the 1970s to accommodate people in wheelchairs, but the curb cuts turned out to be helpful for a variety of pedestrians.
“People with strollers, shopping carts, suitcases,” said Jean-Baptiste. “It was something that was created for a certain population, but you can see the benefits cascade to everyone. So I think it’s important to have a cognitive shift around [diversity and inclusion]. It isn’t only serving certain underrepresented groups. When we have them at the table, it leads to better outcomes for everyone.”
Finally, “profit and people are not mutually exclusive,” said Jean-Baptiste, alluding again to the business case for product inclusion. After all, why leave out potential customers?
Jean-Baptiste also answered questions from the online audience on the challenges that small companies face in building for inclusion, the more globalized approach of today’s young engineers, and the fine line between genuine and inauthentic inclusivity.
“The Societal Engineer includes people from many backgrounds to impact all of society,” said Duncanson after the webinar. “From racist facial recognition to sexist crash test dummies, we have historically been engineering for a world of white men. But the world is made up of so many different people. If we use an inclusive lens to engineer, then maybe we can positively impact society.”