Catherine Courage, Vice President, Product Design, Google
Joann Wu, Vice President, Head of Design, Uber 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Who Are We Designing For? 

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Brainstorm Design 2022 - Who Are We Designing For? 


we're going to move now to the world of tech here in the U. S. And globally. And the brutally competitive tech landscape companies are starting to place more emphasis on user research within their design practices and given the blows that the tech industry has taken in consumer perception, there's also an increasing focus on building trust and inclusivity as the central parts of the design process, helping forge long term bonds with their user and customer base. We're going to hear now from to design leaders at google and Uber about their human centered design processes and how user experience insights can catalyze growth and innovation. Please welcome to the stage, Catherine Courage, vice president of product design at google and Joanne wu Vice president and head of design at Uber guys welcome thanks for having us. So Joanne, I'd like to start with you because you're new, you're new in your job relatively new. You've just started at Uber in january after 10 years at linkedin. So moving from one exciting tech company to another. Um what did you see? I'm just curious like coming into Uber, what did you see if the challenge coming in as head of design from the outside and then what has it been like to get in there for a few months and you know, assess from the inside, You know what what the design uh operation is like there and you know where you want to take it. Yeah, thank you for the question. Really great question. You put me on the spot. Yeah, coming into Uber, I, you know, from outsider. I'm always fascinating about this company is there's a magic, right? You push the button, you get the right uh, part of the reason I want to come to the company to learn new things after getting into Uber for five months, there's definitely a lot of complicity in terms of parliament solving the dimension of the marketplace is really complex. You have writers, you have eaters, you have earners that we call them drivers and careers as well as the merchant, right? We have a both go and get. So for me to fully understand the business that take a while at the same time, I also um, observe the people there are so driven as a culture, you know, in terms of how they're focusing on one Uber and focusing on trip obsession, It's really amazing. So stop here for a second. Yeah. So I mean, you know, in the history of Uber, it grew so quickly, it went from being, you know, just this idea to being in almost every major city around the world, you know, in just a couple of years and it was just like all speed and you know, uh, and then in the pandemic, uh, you know, again, like there's this embrace of the Uber eats opportunity, but the, the challenge of, you know, providing this service. So it's just been like Sprint, Sprint, Sprint. So what, you know, how does, how does that marry with the culture of user research and in our topic today that user centered design. How do you step back from that kind of you know history of racing ahead and and think about the customer. Yeah, I think that will ever switch more about the trip obsession as a culture. Uh in the most year, not only we still have the spirit go and get it, but also now we learn more from our user and customer. So if you think about you XRs role right now, you know they moved from you think about the double diamond for design process. More away from just doing validated research at the very end of development but more upfront in the explorer phase so we can do informative and foundational research. The further influence the roadmap and priority. So that's the shift I see in the organization also part of my job to help the team continue that journey moving forward. Great and uh get your questions ready we'll have some time at the end to uh to call in a couple of people Catherine. Um I understand that you know, user research has been a big area of growth at google over the last seven several years. Um I believe you have 1000 people and user research 1313 100. Um what has driven that growth other than the overall growth of google but well you know what is really powered sort of, you know the growth of that capacity and uh and how does it work? And inside the company just take us inside sort of your operation for a second. Yeah it's uh it's a great question. I'll try and unpack it a little bit if we go back to google's roots. I think the company its origins have been very much an inside out company and that we've got these brilliant technologists who would design features and capabilities and it's like if you build it they will will come. We've had to transition over the years and moved to an outside in company. So really focusing on our users, what are their needs, what are the opportunities and how do we build towards that in order to do that. It means we've really needed to grow a research capability and uh not just the number of researchers, it's a different practice of research. We've moved from just You X. Rs which is a role and function to really thinking about insights which involves people who are data scientists which involves business analysts really having this holistic picture of our users um deeply understanding their environment. But understanding industry factors, trends that are emerging and using this to come together to understand where we need to to go. The additional thing I would say that's been hugely important over the last couple of years is moving from insights to activation because in our early days there were endless research reports and a research report that just sits on the shelf may as well have not have happened. And so how do you make sure that you take those early insights and activate teams, whether it's through prototyping or doing exercises around how might we so you can move the organization to where we need to head next. So it's been really cool to see that as part of the evolution of design having a a larger role in driving strategy that research has been absolutely core. So what are some examples I'd love to hear, you know, with with this 1300 person group and you're and you're talking about activation. But how do you work, how do you work side by side with product development you know and really implemented? So you're not just you know, getting insights and Yeah, yeah. It's a it's a great question. I think it goes back to again, a research are not real insights are not owned by researchers that you have to activate the whole organization and get the whole organization to really become more customer focused customer center. We may be the prompt or we may be the amplifiers, but how do you get that PM that end that program manager to care and to speak the language of the customer. And so it means in every single presentation in every forum that that is the base place in which you start all your conversations and it's definitely been a pivot and a transition for us within the company. But I think until you realize that everyone has got the responsibility for speaking the voice of the customer. Um it can become just the role of that team and going to that team like coin operated insights as opposed to really deeply understanding our users. Is there an example you can share of how that process translated into the evolution of a product or a new product? Yeah, um lots of examples. So um let me give one of one that was actually announced a couple of weeks ago. So we were doing a lot of deep research around inclusive design which is such an important topic on these days and we're putting increased emphasis on it and realizing it was really important for people to see themselves in google's results. And one of the areas that we were seeing this through deep research uh is in the area of beauty and it just, it would not have occurred to the people who work at Google who represent a certain uh, you know, categorization of people in society that if you look at the global base that we um serve, whether it is looking at users in India or Japan or looking at age group or looking at race uh that when people were searching for products in the area of beauty, they were seeing this generic in many cases whitewashed representation. And so one of the examples that we just launched was a skin tone that you know, people want to be able to see if they're searching for beauty products. They don't want to just see fair skin tones uh results, they want to see skin tones that reflect their skin tone. And so giving people capabilities, adding new dimensions to the algorithm where people could start to see themselves. And if it wasn't for deep research to help people understand that the experience I have is not the experience that other users have. I don't think we would have made this realization so obvious, but not too not internally, it's really interesting. But just picking up on part of what you said, do you does the algorithm make a judgment about what their skin tone is based on everything you know about them then you're kind of putting yourself out there a little bit to guess or do you just present to them more options so that they can find the right option for them. So it's giving control of people who are posting content so they can state what skin tones are there. They can tag for people who are presenting content and as a user that I have control and I can filter and choose what I want to to see. So a little bit of both sides of the the content providers as well as users being able to curate, interesting. Um you know, it kind of gets to uh topic that I want to talk about um broadly, which is trust. I mean I think inclusiveness is related to to trust and I want to probe both um because the more the user feels comfortable like the product is designed for me theoretically the more they'll trust there's another aspect to trust, but I'm wondering Joanne if you have similar examples of of evolving the product or or ways you see that you can evolve it to to bring that same kind of or you know, your own version of inclusiveness to your user base. Yeah, I think trust is the core for you know uh uber company value uh similar you know to Catherine was said that we learned from a user how my way made the platform more safe and inclusive. One example I would like to share is a woman um right for reference. It's a feature for women and non binary drivers to set a reference. They may want to pick a woman writer only. So we learned through our reserve user research when we survey with women, they all have the intended to drive on this platform, but 74% would perform to drive women only. So for safety reasons as well as being inclusive. So we launched this feature in Saudi Arabia short after that country gave a woman's access or the right to drive, we learned that unique, you know, aspect or challenges from that country that woman facing and also broadly thinking about how many we give women equal access for flexible work as well, access to a greater economic independence. So this feature really hope, you know, not only South Arabian, we also launched across part of latin America, uh South africa and Middle East, most recently we launched actually this month we launched in Australia. So overall it's including trust, safety and also inclusive. Right? So that's an example. We see how my way of the platform to help the products become more accessible, safe and inclusive. So it goes both ways women drivers can request only to pick up women and women or other people who want to request only a woman driver can right now, it's the one way like a driver for reference. Got it. Okay, and how did you, how did you roll that out and communicate that and make that clear. You know what the option was and and make it easy for people to use? Yeah, in the driver app we have that reference. It's like I said, it's not global yet because they were based on the culture needs and specific location. So you could go to your preference and turned on or off based on your preference, right? You may want to turn on during the night or during the weekend. So it's really based on your choice. Uh if you have questions, stick your hand up and we'll get you and mike Catherine, I wanted to ask you about something we were chatting about like which is um you know what google is learning about. Um speaking of how people use the product around the world about how people use the fundamental search product differently in different parts of the world. Um and you know, sometimes they're searching with audio rather than typing and so they searched differently and uh tell us about that challenge and then you know how you change your your offering to respond to that. Yeah, it's another, I love the classic example from design of OXO of OXO designing, you know, these grips devices for people with arthritis, but then realizing they had huge benefit for all kinds of users. And I think we've had the same when we look at different modalities of searching that it's one thing to type and tap, but that doesn't work for for everyone. And you may think of it as an accessibility use case for example, perhaps someone is not able to type, they could use voice well using voice can also be really high advantage for someone who doesn't have english as a language or for someone who has literacy issues. So these use cases have become huge value and then additionally we've added imagery being able to search with images and so I think this is the future. Um it's also we've seen that having these modalities, it's not just for these specific targeted use cases when we look at youth as a population. These are the ways that they naturally tend to search and look for for information. And again, a lot of these research, these insights have come from deep research that we've done with different populations. Tell us just a little bit more about the searching with images function and then how you translate just that. The technology of that, the cool technology of that to what you do to bring that user research and how can we make this a product that really works for people. It's not just like, you know, cool Gizmo. Yeah. You know one of the things that I will say that we are working on at google as technologists is better storytelling. You know, we have this dream of incredible technology but we don't do the justice of telling the story and the amazing use cases around it. And google lens is one of these technologies that is just amazing and it's on you know, IOS and android. It's within the google app and you can take a picture of anything. Uh and search results will appear. And now we just launched a new version where you can take a picture and add text. So you can take a picture of, I see Richard, I can take a picture of his shoes and those shoes will appear, it's kind of magical. Or when I'm hiking I'll take pictures of plants and it will tell me what that plant is. And I could take a picture of the shoes and I could say I want them in black and similar results would appear. So it's just it's really cool uh technology and we're working on better storytelling muscles to get people to understand these, these cool use cases in which they can use this, you know, very cutting edge technology to do new kinds of searches. Do you have data on the demographics of, you know, by age? Uh, you know, who's likely to use that? Do you have a sense of like what all of us use that if we knew how to do it and figured out or is that really gonna only be something like people under age 25 are going to, you know, I think, you know what we, we've found is with a lot of our technology. Uh, you know, some of these things that are bleeding edge, it may be under 24 that are early adopters, but they, you know, set the trend that everyone else will, will follow. So to me, you know, my my hope is that this just becomes a base way of searching in the future that it isn't just something that we, we see uh youth leading into. So um you know, one of the questions we started with yesterday was about the challenges ahead and, and talent was, you know, top of the list I'm curious to ask both of you. I'll start with you Joanne, um how what's the challenge of finding the talent, you need to build these, you know, new capacities at Uber and where are you looking to find talent and to diversify your talent pool? Yeah, overall hiring is a big challenge for everyone at this point. Especially finding diverse talent. It's also very hard. I think I will wear away are introducing you know, program called the design pathway. Uh it's a way to start contributing to the community to bring people who are underserved who want to change their career. Uh they can, you know, work with us first going nine weeks of general assembling partnership for training and then come back to Uber embedded into our team for eight months. It's kind of like an apprenticeship right this way we can nurturing more diverse talent and also contribute back to the design community. I feel overall, you know, not only hiring the challenge, how my way created momentum as a design leaders to contribute back to the community and grow the next generation. Our diverse talent is our responsibility. Great. We do have one question. We have time for one quick question. So just identify yourself real quick, Justin McGuire, Chief Design Officer Salesforce, um huge respect for both of you and the roles you have and advancing on the profession. Uh the question is um you know, we've all lived long enough in our design profession to see us go from a place of like fighting for a seat at the table, put in air quotes to deeply having one and I'm curious when you think about on your roles, can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing to help drive a different level of accountability for what a ceo should expect from a chief design officer. That's a great question. I'm I'm I'm happy to start off. I think one of the areas that we've really leaned into goes back to where we started this conversation which is uh research in that if we can be driving the conversation, if we're looking around the corner, if we instead I'm looking at the obvious things, we're looking at the adjacent areas and really provoking the company to think about uh these areas that are nontraditional to us but where the opportunities are and to me that is the area that if we're really gonna be driving strategy that we need to help our executives not just deal with the here and now. I think we're good at that. We've developed a great practice there. But how do we look around the corner of what the next thing is and and that's what I've been really excited to lean into. Great, I think that's a great place to leave it. We gotta keep looking around the corner and thanks so much Catherine and Joanne for joining us today