We didn’t call these people’s identities and scenarios “edge cases,” though. We called them stress cases. — 34: 497-498
Thankfully, our clients’ disagreement over the right way to present race turned into a rethinking of our whole approach. Pretty soon, we’d removed all the stock photos and replaced them with icons of people working—giving presentations, sitting nose-deep in research materials, that sort of thing. I haven’t attached a photo to a persona since. I’m not alone in this shift. User researcher Indi Young, author of Practical Empathy and Mental Models, also advocates for designers to get rid of the demographic data used to make personas “feel real.” She writes: To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.16 — 40: 583-590
The only thing that’s normal is diversity. — 41: 596-596
Their standards state: You shouldn’t ask users for their title. It’s extra work for users and you’re forcing them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do. . . . If you have to use a title field, make it an optional free-text field and not a drop-down list. — 58: 850-855
That’s why we all need to pay a lot closer attention to the minutiae we encounter online—the form fields and menus we tend to gloss over so quickly. Because if we want tech companies to be more accountable, we need to be able to identify and articulate what’s going wrong, and put pressure on them to change (or on government to regulate their actions). It’s never been more important that we demand this kind of accountability. Failing to design systems that reflect and represent diverse groups can alienate customers and make people feel marginalized on an individual level, and that would be reason enough for us to demand better. But there’s also a pressing societal concern here. When systems don’t allow users to express their identities, companies end up with data that doesn’t reflect the reality of their users. And as we’ll see in the coming chapters, when companies (and, increasingly, their artificial-intelligence systems) rely on that information to make choices about how their products work, they can wreak havoc—affecting everything from personal safety to political contests to prison sentences. — 65: 960-968
Uber may be an extreme example, but it can help us understand tech’s insular culture much more clearly: if tech wants to be seen as special—and therefore able to operate outside the rules—then it helps to position the people working inside tech companies as special too. And the best way to ensure that happens is to build a monoculture, where insiders bond over a shared belief in their own brilliance. That’s also why you see so many ridiculous job titles floating around Silicon Valley and places like it: “rock-star” designers, “ninja” JavaScript developers, user-experience “unicorns” (yes, these are all real). Fantastical labels like these reinforce the idea that tech and design are magical: skill sets that those on the outside wouldn’t understand, and could never learn. The reality is a lot more mundane: design and programming are just professions—sets of skills and practices, just like any other field. Admitting that truth would make tech positions feel a lot more welcoming to diverse employees, but tech can’t tell that story to the masses. If it did, then the industry would seem normal, understandable, and accessible—and that would make everyday people more comfortable pushing back when its ideas are intrusive or unethical. So, tech has to maintain its insider-y, more-brilliant-than-thou feel—which affects who decides to enter that legendary “pipeline,” and whether they’ll stick around once they’ve arrived. Plus, there’s the pesky problem of how diverse teams challenge existing cultures. In all that research about the benefits of diversity, one finding sticks out: it can feel harder to work on a diverse team. “Dealing with outsiders causes friction, which feels counterproductive,” write researchers David Rock, Heidi Grant, and Jacqui Grey.35 But experiments have shown that this type of friction is actually helpful, because it leads teams to push past easy answers and think through solutions more carefully. “In fact, working on diverse teams produces better outcomes precisely because it’s harder,” they conclude. That’s a tough sell for tech companies, though. As soon as you invite in “outsiders” who question the status quo—people like Uber’s “Amy,” who ask whether the choices being made are ethical—it’s hard to skate by without scrutiny anymore. As a result, maintaining the monoculture becomes more important than improving products. — 166: 2425-2443