Deana is a senior user experience researcher at Google who ensures user needs are represented when building new products or improving existing ones. She discusses how bias can occur in user research if certain groups are excluded from interviews without consideration for why. For example, in researching its food ordering product, Google initially only spoke to consumers and later realized it needed to also speak to merchants to understand their needs to build an equitable ecosystem. As a researcher, gaining a variety of perspectives through inclusion is important to develop fair solutions that impact all people.
Deana is a senior user experience researcher at Google who ensures user needs are represented when building new products or improving existing ones. She discusses how bias can occur in user research if certain groups are excluded from interviews without consideration for why. For example, in researching its food ordering product, Google initially only spoke to consumers and later realized it needed to also speak to merchants to understand their needs to build an equitable ecosystem. As a researcher, gaining a variety of perspectives through inclusion is important to develop fair solutions that impact all people.
Deana is a senior user experience researcher at Google who ensures user needs are represented when building new products or improving existing ones. She discusses how bias can occur in user research if certain groups are excluded from interviews without consideration for why. For example, in researching its food ordering product, Google initially only spoke to consumers and later realized it needed to also speak to merchants to understand their needs to build an equitable ecosystem. As a researcher, gaining a variety of perspectives through inclusion is important to develop fair solutions that impact all people.
Hi, My name is Deana, I'm a senior user experience
researcher at Google. As a user experience researcher,
I really channel the voice of people, their motivations, their desires, their needs. I bring those insights back to my team, which they use to help build new products or improve existing products. Let's talk about bias in user research. That can happen in many ways, in many shapes and many forms. I'll give one example. In user research, we set out to interview people. What we may not realize is for every person we interview, we're probably excluding someone. And so as a researcher, it's really important to know why we choose to interview certain people over others and who we are excluding and whether or not those we're excluding need to actually be interviewed. One of the products I work on is Google Food Ordering, where we help consumers be able to order food from businesses around them. But along the way we realized we hadn't really spoken to the merchants since we weren't really directly integrating with them. We didn't speak to them and understand their needs. So we set out to actually do that. Once we uncovered that insight, it was a light bulb moment for us, and we realized we had a great opportunity to build an ecosystem that was going to be equitable for everyone. As a researcher, you uncover so many insights. We take those insights, and we're constantly improving on the products that we build. So overall, that solution enabled us to realize that we need to understand the bigger picture, the whole ecosystem. We need to include all voices when we're designing so that we build a solution that is equitable and fair for all the people who will be impacted as a result.