Words. Ideas. Actions.

23 March 2023

I’ve never lived more than a 30-minute drive from a large, salty body of water. I’m not really sure what life would be like without that access. I know there’s a cliché about coastal bias, but this is different. And I will fully admit that I am biased for the coasts. Whether it was during my early years in Florida, or my current ones in San Francisco, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be land-locked. And this is where we make a dramatic change in direction, and head straight into content strategy!

See, I think one of the most important attributes for a good content strategist is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whether you do that through user interviews or customer data or even persona explorations, we need to be able to build for people outside of our own lived experience. Like baking accessibility fundamentals into product launches, rather than trying to tack them on afterwards. We need to build for everyone, not just for ourselves.

Sometimes, all that takes is some imagination. Other times, it’s really questioning the assumptions we have about how people will use what we’ve built. And, occasionally, it’s stepping in to say that what we’re building is not ready for public consumption because it could put people in harm’s way. There’s a lot of that kind of discussion happening now around AI tools and large language models, and I highly recommend you digging into those ideas on your own (try following Timnit Gebru and Mia Shah-Dand as a start). But we should be that skeptical about everything we build, making sure we’re not making design decisions based on narrow perspectives and unquestioned assumptions. It’s why I believe our design teams need to be more diverse. It’s also why I think we need to move away from attention-based metrics, and more toward ones focused on task completion. And, most importantly, it’s why I hope that if you read anything in these posts which misses the mark, you call me out on it; I can’t see my own blind spots until someone points them out to me. And I want you to!

This push for expanded perspective, though, isn’t limited to just building new things. It can come into play when looking at our own habits, too. I have a story which rattles around in my head that I don’t really know the source of. It feels like family lore, and for someone, maybe it really is. But on a recent call to my parents, they verified that they’d heard the tale, too, but it wasn’t from our family. The version of the story I know (embellished a great deal because I’m typing this on a plane and it’s what I’m doing to entertain myself for a bit) is this:

A college-aged daughter brings her new boyfriend to his first family gathering around Easter. There are many generations huddled in the kitchen, getting to know the new beau, and sharing those embarrassing childhood anecdotes which always seem to pop up as soon as someone you’re trying to impress comes around. As these get tossed about, meal prep is in full swing. And it has all the hallmarks of a classic Easter feast, with deviled eggs, fresh peas and asparagus, buttered new potatoes, green bean casserole, fresh-baked rolls, and a large honey-glazed ham. By the time everything is ready, the new boyfriend is ecstatic. He can’t wait to taste it all, especially the ham. It’s his favorite part of the feast, particularly the crispy, sweet end. 

When they all finally gather at the table, serving plates piled high with a steaming assortment of menu items, the boyfriend notices something which stops him cold: The end of the ham has been completely shorn off! He spends the next few seconds in a whirlwind of coalescing emotions. He’s simultaneously disappointed, appalled, confused, concerned, stunned, and even a little angry. As diplomatically and furtively as he can, he leans over and quietly asks his girlfriend, “What happened to the end of the ham?” 

Without catching his unspoken agreement of stealthy communications, his girlfriend casually replies, “Oh, that’s the way we’ve always made it. It’s our family recipe.” And without taking a moment’s breath, she turns to the other end of the table and loudly asks, “Hey Mom, how come we cut the end off the ham?”

The boyfriend sinks low into his seat. 

“It’s the way we’ve always done it,” the Mom shares. “It’s our family recipe.” 

“That’s right,” Nana weighs in. “We’ve been doing it this way for years. Isn’t that right, Ma?” 

All eyes now turn to the matriarch of the family, seated at her traditional spot at the head of the table. “Yep,” she confidently confirms, “It’s how my mother used to do it. See, when I was growing up, we had a very tiny stove and only a small baking pan would fit in it. Every year, when we’d get an Easter ham, we’d have to cut a part of it off so that it would fit, and since we didn’t want to get rid of the end with the larger slices, we’d just cut off the end.” 

Everyone else stopped their chewing. Some mouths even fell open a bit. 

“You mean the only reason we’ve been cutting off the end is because, years ago, your stove was too small to fit an entire ham‽” Mom managed to ask. 

“Uh huh,” the great-grandmother responded between the bites she never stopped taking. “It was the only way we could cook a ham.” 

“Then why are we still making it like this if we have pans and stoves big enough for a full-size ham?” the daughter asked.

“It’s our family recipe.”

The point, obviously, is to question even your own ways of doing things. Just because something has worked one way in the past doesn’t mean we still have to do it the same way today. Repeating outdated methods isn’t going to lead to progress. And won’t let us learn anything new. By breaking out of the ways we’ve always done things, either for ourselves, or our users, we get to introduce new perspectives on familiar ideas. Like the moment your daughter first hears The Beatles. Or your initial taste of your now-favorite food. Or jumping into a familiar ocean from a brand new pier. 

We all can use a reset sometimes, especially when we’re building for others. We have to constantly remind ourselves that we’re not our target audience. By imagining how and why other people are coming to us to solve their problems, we’ll build them better solutions. It just takes a little empathetic imagination. 

See you tomorrow?

(Also, if you know where this ham in the pan story is actually from, I’d love to know how I came upon it.)

23 February 2023

Today, let’s talk a little bit about mental health. Hooray! Specifically, the many ways brains process information. I know it’s maybe not what you’re expecting in these, but I think it’s an important component of what we think about when we’re making design decisions, and I don’t want it to go left unsaid as the content design-related posts pile up around here.

It should be obvious, but I’ll start with this anyway: I’m not a doctor. So, any of the suggestions I have here are based on my work and life experience only. Your mileage (and mind) may vary. But even as I type that half-joke caveat, I think we’ve already unearthed the gem at the center of why I think this post is important. Everyone consumes and creates knowledge and ideas differently. Those could be slight differences, like thinking you’re talking about either a flipper or a turner or a scraper when someone mentions the word “spatula”. Or, there could be large gaps in understanding for people who are better at processing audio information versus written.

These are just a couple of examples, but they both speak to why we need to build our experiences for a spectrum of understanding. This includes making good decisions around taxonomies and metadata, but it also means that we need to make all of our components accessible at launch, not an afterthought to add into the v2 iteration. Additionally, we should be attracting and retaining team members who either have these considerations top-of-mind, or are at least willing to learn why they are so important. 

Let’s dig a little deeper on those last two points, though, starting with accessibility. I hope everyone knows about the curb cut example, but I can summarize it quickly, if not: Initially thought to help people using wheelchairs to navigate their environments by removing barriers to crossing intersections, installing  curb cuts was also helpful for people pushing strollers, delivery people hauling large loads on hand trucks, and even for people with mobility issues where stepping up or down was difficult or dangerous for them. So when we build accessibility into our products and services, we don’t know how widely those benefits will reach. 

When Kat Holmes spoke to our team at Twitter, she shared a concept which has stuck with me to this day. What I took away from part of the talk was that we’re all potentially temporarily abled. We don’t know what each day can bring, but we should build for the broadest possible accessibility rather than limiting our ideas to what we consider the “norm” (I’ll talk about that naming more in a bit). Think of it this way: You may have full mobility and strength in both your arms and hands. One day, though, you might need to navigate a mobile site from your phone while holding a bag of groceries, or a child, or with one arm in a cast. We need to account for these temporary scenarios when creating items like navigation menus and thinking about button placement, as just two examples.

Now, let’s talk about our teams, and how we’re defining them and our own users. First, I want us, as an industry, to move away from the idea of a “normal” user. What even is that? Have you met anyone normal recently? I know that, at the very least, the last two-plus years have made that term basically meaningless for me. Instead, let’s talk about our users’ needs, and then frame those using a more mathematically based term, median. What do the most number of our users need? And then, how far to each side of that cluster are we building? Defining these edges becomes important because we are actively deciding not just who we are including, but also who we are willing to exclude. To quote Eric Myer, who was paraphrasing Evan Henſleigh, “When you call something an edge case, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.” Defining our target audience is also a de facto exercise in letting people know who we’re not building for. This is where building strongly opinionated teams comes in.

I am purposefully avoiding saying “diverse” teams. Diverse teams can still fall into a group-think mindset. And I don’t think that building teams based on physical characteristics alone is the way to go either; the definition of diversity doesn‘t start and end in the mirror. Yes, those physical factors are important, but what’s more important to me is what lived experiences these people can bring to your discussions. No doubt that how people present and how they are perceived have shaped those experiences, so they are a major factor in the perspective they can contribute. But we also need to keep in mind that no one person from a marginalized group, for instance, should be placed in a situation where they are having to explain and educate the rest of the team on what it’s like to be part of that group. That burden of education is not for them. It’s for you, and your entire team. Do the research! It’s not like all intersections show up as visual cues, either. Looking at me, for instance, you’d have no idea about the alphabet soup of acronyms and abbreviations that my brain has been saddled with. But am I supposed to be the spokesperson for everyone with an OCD diagnosis, for instance? Hell no! But I can say, “Hey, have we considered how this decision will affect people living with XYZ?” Whether you have that condition or not, we need to build teams that are fluent enough with the diverse needs of our users to ask these questions, whether or not we have team members who identify with them. 

Let me be clear, though: Building more diverse teams will let you build better products. Period. The more accessible your products are, the more people who can use them. Isn’t that the point? To get as many people as possible through your onboarding flow and into the thing you’ve spent so much time, energy, and resources creating? Ideally to solve one of their problems? Every time you push to make something more accessible and as open as possible, you’re increasing the number of customers potentially available to you. And you can do that by prioritizing their needs, understanding how to expand the definition of your target audience, and putting together teams who know what questions to ask and how to advocate for everyone, everywhere. This can be as simple as having your team ask things like, “How will this work for low-vision users?” or “Is our language as inclusive as it could be?” or “Will this feature work as well for people in low-bandwidth situations?” or even “Who are we potentially harming if we launch this?” The broader the perspectives are on the teams asking and answering these questions, the better your products will be.

See you tomorrow?

01 February 2023

As we start February, I’m feeling more than a little melancholy about not being a part of my team at Google. Yes, there’s the very real pressure to line up something new soon so that we can continue to pay our bills (Congress, they’re just like us!), but I’m also lamenting the loss of one of the roles I played in our org: writing our monthly Diversity and Inclusion newsletter.

At the start of every month since December 2020, I would publish a handful of links to share with our team. These included internal events, outside resources, book recommendations, relevant podcast episodes, and the like, to help foster a greater sense of belonging on the team and more broadly as a part of Google. It was work I enjoyed. And cherished. Although I didn’t get a chance to gather this year’s stats on how we were doing, anecdotally our D&I group heard we were definitely making a difference. 

Now, I don’t want you to think that this was an extra task we took on. On the contrary. As part of our job descriptions, we were highly encouraged to add a people-focused working group to our daily duties. We had choice over which ones we could contribute to, and it just felt natural for me to take the lessons and activism I learned at Twitter and incorporate it into my day-to-day at Google. We didn’t have a lot of access to the sentiment metrics which HR tracked, but we were given pretty broad leeway about the topics we covered and events we could sponsor and promote. 

The February newsletter, which I started drafting a few days before the Google layoffs happened, obviously included links to our Black History Month events. But in addition to any monthly themed events, we also made a point in each edition to show our team that belonging wasn’t just an effort based on how you presented or how you’re perceived. So we also included information about things like neurodiversity (there’s an incredible internal support group at Google), parenting (working from home added a whole new component to work-life balance), and ageism in the workplace (did you know Barbara Walters started “The View” when she was 67‽).

I’m incredibly proud of the work we were doing. And gutted I can’t still be a part of it. But I know those who are still there continue to put in the work to make sure everyone on my old team knows they are seen, respected, and understood. In short, they belong. Wherever I land after this layoff, I hope to join a team with very similar priorities. 

See you tomorrow?