Hello, so today I'm going to be presenting on "How Transgender People and Communities Were Involved
in Trans Technology Design Processes." This paper was authored by myself along with Kai Nham,
Hibby Thach, and Aloe DeGuia, and Hibby is going to be co-presenting with me today.
So we all know how things are supposed to work in human-centered design processes. So for example,
this is a diagram from the Nielsen Norman Group website on design thinking,
and in this process users are supposed to be involved in the "empathize" phase and
then later on in the "testing" phase. But are designers and developers actually doing this,
especially when it comes to designing with marginalized groups? We wanted to understand
how marginalized users are involved in design processes, so that we can go beyond considering
how design processes *should* work to illuminate how they actually work in practice in this
context. And the context that we're looking at in this study is transgender technology.
So trans technology as defined in prior work is technology designed to help
address some of the challenges that trans people face in the world. And it's often
designed in response to the lack of trans inclusion in more mainstream technologies.
So our research question in this work was: To what extent and in what ways were trans
people in communities involved in trans technology design processes?
For methods in this work, we did 104 interviews with 115 trans tech creators throughout 2021
and 2022. And our recruitment involved criterion sampling, where we contacted creators, designers,
and developers of trans technologies, and we also did some snowball sampling as well.
And for data analysis we used reflexive thematic analysis.
So these are just a few examples of trans technologies in our dataset. So it included
lots of different types of technologies ranging from things like websites and
apps to things like augmented and virtual reality as well as things like supplies.
So I'm going to now hand it over to Hibby who will be presenting on our Results.
Thank you. So for our results we found that trans technologies can be most impactful when
they involve trans people and communities in design. So trans community involvement
enables technology to best address trans needs and challenges. Trans perspectives and lived
experiences enable a reworking and rethinking of how technology design can benefit trans people.
So here we have our six Results sections, very quickly they're human-centered and
participatory design processes, requirements gathering and initial research, gathering and
incorporating feedback from users, trans people and communities involved in design processes,
user testing and iteration, and finally successful design versus successful deployment.
So before we speak on the specific sections, quotes, etc. we wanted to talk about why we
identify the people we identify today in this part in this presentation. So most participants in this
research explicitly wanted to be identified rather than anonymous, so we use their full names here
with permission. Other participants wanted us to use first names only or pseudonyms, or wanted to
remain anonymous, so we respect those wishes and report their names based on what they wanted.
So Guillerme Colucci Pereira and his collaborators used participatory design methods over a period
of more than six months to create LGBTrust, an app to help increase safety for trans and queer
people in Brazil. The process involved a series of workshops in which participants were involved
in the design process. Pereira began the project without a sense of what exactly he and the design
workshop participants would be creating, and left the direction up to workshop participants.
As he says here, "This is very deeply related to all these concerns about violence in Brazil. So
it was natural to talk about and to think about safety: how to create a safe place... to share
about what places you should be careful, where you should not go... But it was not given by
me -- it was not my choice at the beginning. It was just the natural development of the project."
So in this human-centered design process Pereira learned along with participants
that safety was a primary concern and that the technology design should focus on safety.
So Solace, a transition resource app, gathered feedback via a user survey. As Robbi Katherine
Anthony from Solace says here, "One of the biggest complaints we got was that there's
no way to change your name in the app itself, which is an incredibly glaring design decision
on our end. But that was one of those points that we're able to say, 'okay how do we actually design
around this,' because this problem probably reflects more than 51% of this population."
So in this way, gathering user feedback enabled Solace to discover an issue that trans people
typically face in mainstream software, but would not expect to encounter in a trans-designed app.
So here Dylan Paré described their Creative Futures project,
in which they worked with three trans youth to create virtual reality or VR art for immersive
storytelling that eventually became two films. As they say here, "The linear film would tell the
story of how these youth came up with their ideas of what stories they wanted to tell,
and what they were hoping people would learn from their projects. The 360 [film] was where you
actually can go into the art with them, and they tell you about their art that they've created,
and what that means to them." So this project enabled Paré to tell diverse trans stories using
this innovative medium, and it was also a way to teach VR skills to young people.
An important tension that we discovered here is that many of the most successful human-centered
design processes we encountered took place in academic settings, and the technology was then
not actually deployed. On the other hand, the technologies that are actually deployed are
often not designed with a human-centered approach. Pereira described the barriers
to deploying LGBTrust, noting that he "kind of" deployed the app. As he says here, "but
it was like a prototype deployment. I had most of these functionalities working so people could
ask for help, people could post things, it would appear in the map, and people could ask for any
other kind of support and this kind of stuff... I think that in the end, and this is something that
really frustrated me at the time, for you to be able to [deploy an app] you need a lot of money
and you need a lot of people working with you." As a safety app, to keep people safe, it had to work
well without any issues. So participants were also disappointed that the app was not fully deployed.
So in our Discussion, we focus on a few main points that I will discuss here. First, trans
technology creators are often embedded in trans communities, so trans tech creation is often both
personally meaningful and focused on addressing community needs. It really matters that trans
people are involved in trans tech design processes because trans people need technological solutions
that actually address challenges that they face in the world. And one thing that we have noted
is that despite the empowering and potentially liberatory potential of trans technology, for
many of the most successful human-centered design processes, technology was not actually deployed.
So we have a few suggestions here for how to move a community-based trans technology more towards
deployment. First is setting up programs to bring designs from classrooms and academic research to
deployment. Next is setting up matching programs for trans tech designers and developers,
also setting up programs to connect tech creators with trans community members.
And then finally, making more space for publishing on technology deployment and user studies.
So thanks so much for listening.