STEPHANIE BOUDREAU: Hi, everyone.
Thank you for joining us today.
We're very excited to share with you
what we are doing in Workspace around product inclusion.
My name is Stephanie Boudreau, and I'm
a Program Manager overseeing Product Inclusion
for Workspace.
Sydney Coleman will start the conversation
to give us more information about product inclusion.
Over to you, Sydney.
SYDNEY COLEMAN: Hi, everyone.
My name is Sydney Coleman and I work
on product inclusion across Google
to ensure that underrepresented users are considered
throughout the entire product design and development process.
Product inclusion and equity is about building for everyone,
with everyone.
It's the practice of bringing an inclusive lens
throughout the entire product development and design process.
No matter where you are, who you love, the color of your skin,
or any other dimension of identity that makes you you,
we want all users to feel seen, validated, and uplifted
by Google products.
We look at 13 dimensions of diversity listed on this slide,
including identity groups such as age, race,
socioeconomic status, physical attributes, language, and more.
We also think about building products
that address intersectionality.
A user who is a Woman of Color is not a woman on Tuesday
and a Person of Color on Wednesday-- she's always both.
We are all multifaceted, and so we
should think intersectionally about the things that
make users who they are.
Product inclusion does not live with one person or one team.
Everyone has a part to own.
What you're seeing here are different points
in the process where you need to ask, who else?
And make sure voices at the margins
are brought to the center.
Our team spent two years doing research
on the business case for inclusion,
and we found that there are four areas, highlighted in blue,
that disproportionately helped teams
launch more inclusive and equitable products.
The first step, ideation, involves
bringing in diverse perspectives to ensure
you aren't just building for yourself or others like you.
This is especially crucial for homogeneous teams that may not
have diversity across gender, age, ability,
ethnicity, and so forth.
Next, user research is the first inflection point
where you can get to the core of what the user needs are
and what challenges you're trying to solve for.
This often involves getting out of Silicon Valley
and learning how people use technology
and what gaps there are.
Once the product or service is created,
testing involves getting feedback
from a myriad of potential users from all walks of life.
By stress testing, users may be able to break your product
or find challenges and opportunities that the team had
not thought of.
Lastly, it's important to consider
whose voice is being represented with your marketing.
Are you avoiding perpetuating stereotypes
about marginalized users?
How are you attracting new and underrepresented audiences
in user journeys?
And now Steph will share some specific examples
of what this looks like in the product development process.
More specifically, how some of our products and features
are designed to drive equity in a hybrid work environment.
STEPHANIE BOUDREAU: Thank you, Sydney.
Let's talk about how we've taken the theory of product inclusion
and made it part of our product.
To share some history, in 2019, we
launched Low Light Mode in Google Duo.
And last year at Next, we talked about our journey
to make sure it worked for users with different skin tones.
So what is Low Light Mode on Duo?
It will automatically adjust the brightness of your video.
And during the product development process,
we noticed it was triggering falsely
in conditions that were reasonably
well-lit for individuals with darker skin tones.
Participants felt like it misrepresented who they are.
We understood from Duo's Low Light research and feedback
that false triggering of the feature
caused a negative experience for the user.
This is where we started when building a similar feature
in Google Meet.
The goal was to improve the image quality
for stationary video calls and back lit scenarios.
While we took good care in our feature design
to make sure the algorithm worked for darker skin tones,
it turned out that under certain lighting conditions
users with lighter skin tones turned pink,
or as a report said, "I look like a lobster."
Through feedback from a diverse group of testers,
the team was able to determine which algorithm was
more robust and worked for all.
This ensured that all video calls on Google Meet
work well for everyone.
Meet Light Enhancement is an AI feature
that automatically detects when a user appears underexposed
and enhances the brightness to improve
their visibility, irrespective of their skin tone.
The AI algorithm has been tuned to ensure people
with darker skin tones are illuminated in video chats,
as well as people with lighter skin tones are lit up.
We have developed processes to run these tests for up
and coming and future features.
Product inclusion is now a mandatory verification
during our launch process for all our work,
and has provided us with the foundation of fairness testing
at scale for our image processing algorithms.
But inclusion work is not always about building new features.
It can also be about updating existing features.
This is why it's important to advocate
for inclusion and equity among all parts of the product
lifecycle.
When we started looking at our current features,
we were able to see opportunities to bring
inclusion to what it needs.
One example is the work recently done in Google Slides.
In June, the Slides team changed the term Master
to Theme Builder, which better articulates
what the user is doing.
Master was used as a way to define
the style of the slide deck.
It's a term that was standard in the industry
when creating presentations.
However, we felt that Theme Builder better
communicates the benefits to help you just quickly customize
the font, color, and layout, ensuring
a consistent experience throughout the presentation.
By removing it, it eliminates a non-inclusive term
for our products, helping us build
toward our goal of having inclusive language
throughout Google Workspace products.
There are other ways to approach inclusion beyond just product
development.
Inclusion and equity has evolved when
it comes to work based on the current state of the world.
Some people are in the office while others
are working remotely.
It may not be possible to swing by someone's desk
to ask a question or have an impromptu meeting
in the hallway.
It's vital that we are approaching
equity and inclusion in the workplace,
and this is where Google Workspace is fostering it.
Here are logos of some of the products that
make Google Workspace--
Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slide, and Meet,
just to name a few.
What I'm excited about sharing is a few ways
these products, specifically Google Docs, Google Meet,
and Google Calendar, can bring inclusion and equity
in a hybrid work environment.
Let's start with Google Docs.
Have you ever needed a dry erase board or physical space
to brainstorm ideas?
It can be challenging when everyone isn't
located in the same place.
Instead of using a dry erase board
to brainstorm in or out of a meeting, open a Google Doc.
Add collaborators and you can brainstorm together
in real time.
This is a great way to bring people
who are in the office and those that are remote together
on the same surface.
It also allows people who may not regularly
speak up in meetings the chance to share
their ideas in writing.
Speaking about meetings, Google Meet
is a great way to connect virtually
with team members, customers, or anyone you want to meet with.
Here are a few examples of ways to bring equity and inclusion
to your meetings.
We encourage people to use the Raise Hand feature, which
allows attendees the opportunity to share their thoughts
and participate in the conversation
without speaking out over each other.
It also makes sure that people who aren't in the room
have the ability to be a part of the discussion.
Chat and Meet is another example of having a voice.
An attendee is able to share their thoughts, ideas, or words
of encouragement through chat--
through a traditional chat box in Meet.
Lastly, and probably the most important, is closed captions.
This allows people who are hard of hearing, deaf, or someone
who may not be a native speaker to better understand
the conversation.
Oftentimes, a meeting starts with a Calendar invite.
Here are some ways that Google Calendar can foster inclusion.
I don't know about you, but there
are some things that I prefer to do in-person,
or at least would like to know ahead of time if someone
will be joining virtually.
Google Calendar now offers this option.
When you are accepting an invite,
indicate whether you'll join a meeting virtually or in-person.
The organizer and guests will see
how attendees are planning to attend the meeting in the event
details, which helps attendees know
how to prepare accordingly.
You are also able to set your working hours and location.
First, let's talk about working hours.
Not everyone works the same hours or on the same time zone.
It's important that we recognize and respect it.
By sharing your working hours, people on your team
and within your organization are aware of when
you are reachable, hopefully limiting people messaging
or setting up time when you aren't available.
You can also split your working hours
to accommodate re-occurring times, like lunch or dropping
your child off at school.
This allows for a more detailed understanding of when you're
available during your workday.
But it's not just knowing someone's working hours
that's useful.
You can also share your location.
For instance, I'm working from home today
but will be in the office tomorrow.
By setting my work location, people
can schedule a time based on where
I will be for that meeting.
This is really useful, for example,
if you're taking a meeting with a customer in another city
and you want your team to know where you are.
There are different ways that inclusion and equity is
thought of in Google Workspace.
We hope that the content was insightful and informative,
and that you will start using some of the tips
we shared today in your next meeting.
In Workspace and at Google as a whole,
we are always looking for ways to build a more inclusive work
environment with our products.
I'd like to thank Sydney for her contribution,
and thank you for joining us at Next '21.