 Thank you. We usually have to share a mic. So this is great. So I don't want to share Hi everybody, how's everybody doing? Happy Saturday. Happy Saturday morning. So we're gonna get into it So we have slides to say who we are so I did that so we're fin digital we are a mobile app and Development firm we are based in DC Washington Washington DC, New York and LA we Believe in the trifecta philosophy and that is we build for mobile web and IOT and we like to see Projects that do all three of those and once we believe in full fully collect connected Development projects. I am Rakiya I'm the CEO of fin digital. I Oh, what happened did I do that go back to me and somebody special And we don't believe in we like to use emoticons as much as possible So I only think it's a better visual force could live in really good user experience design So here's some fun things about me guys. I First went to school for sociology and then that then turned in me going for my MBA During that time in school. I found out that I really really loved technology became a developer I was getting my MBA and with that I Met this guy. We decided to start a firm And build really extensive at the time. We were building on very my Marcus isn't mobile and I was in database development So we came together and through that we have started a number of startups And have had our app development firm and we've opened a lot of doors for Building applications for everybody with everybody in mind at the time that I was in the space people that looked like me whether it was Race and or sex weren't really there. So it allowed us the opportunity to kind of design With our our subgroups in mind. I'm an avid bike rider. I am happily married with a child And I love building mobile apps with this guy over here I'm Marcus Finley a little bit about me. I'm from the the sunny state of Florida born and raised But I've always had a love of technology and mobile and that's really driven my career and work my my path But you know now at the beginning in the foundation of in digital We've been working with companies all shapes and sizes and developing Applications and really helping them Identify the their user experience and really honing in to get their ideas into the world. It's that's been really exciting low football all-thing sports Have a son that I'm freaking nuts about and then You know, I love user experience and I teach at general assembly in Washington, DC So on to the on to the festivities There's two things that if we walk away with anything I want you guys to walk away with And that is truly understanding what unconscious bias is and I'm sure that you guys kind of feel like you know the definition We're really talking about how that definition affects you and affects people that it are experiencing it whether or not they're experiencing it because of you and How to really take responsibility in Unconscious bias and how you play a role in that I know majority of this room are devs And it's very easy for us to say, you know, this isn't our problem. This isn't our fault You know, it's it's it's the other guy's fault when they're doing the idea making so we're really going to talk about how you Put yourself at the table to prevent unconscious bias from happening in technology Sorry, I got I got who who has the new iPhone 7 who secretly hates the new iPhone 7 They're conducting a test in case nobody knew So first is going to the easy part. What is unconscious bias? Everybody has it unconscious bias is actually a knee-jerk reaction It's actually our defense mechanism that we have in society It allows us to group things together and to allow us to make quick decisions It means that I as a person don't have to Assess and take time to assess and spend that time I can make very quick knee-jerk decisions in the way of development that helps us Right, we all know the basic standard code when you're starting to build, right? Very know what we're supposed to write We already know if we're doing a Data import or not data import. I'm sorry wrong wrong talk. We know if we're doing Registration form on a app that we're building really know what it's supposed to look like What fields are supposed to do first name last name email? We know that right? That's that knee-jerk reaction allows us to work a little bit faster. We all have that. It's good that we have it But what the downfall to that to that as individuals is we do that same knee-jerk That same dealt data Organizing to people and we do that when we do that to people it means This particular person might act this way towards me. So I need to act this way Right and when we're designing we say a person with an iPhone 7 is a really smart individual They might you know, they love technology. They love doing things So I know if I put the menu at the top and I barely say that it's there They're gonna know right but then we say well the person with an iPhone 4 is never gonna download my app So I really don't care, but what you accidentally did is you did an economic biased So it's something that we do we don't really realize we're doing it, but it's okay So this is the safe space where I tell you it's okay. Everybody in here has that problem Right, we all have that issue. So now we're gonna talk about how to use it. So we're gonna do a little exercise So I'm gonna ask a question Who here When you woke up this morning you immediately checked your emails awesome Okay, when you checked your emails who replied to the very first email that they saw Nobody you come up here. You're the you're a participant So you can take Marcus's mic, thank you for your honesty So I'm gonna ask you to look at the screen This is a regular phone. That's an iPhone. I have an Android. I'm just kidding. I'm sorry Hi, I'm conscious bias that was easy So this is a regular phone I Want you to everybody in this room? I want you to figure out who this phone belongs to I want you to picture that person That person is sitting right next to you. What are they wearing? Did you talk to them? What did they eat like I want you to see that person? All right, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions What's the gender of this person? Are they important at their job? What's the race of this person? How knowledgeable is this person about technology? Are they an admin or are they a dev or are they in dev ops? You can extend that what do they do? Are they a coder front-end? What do they do? Would you hang out with them? Really simple questions Tell me about this person answer those questions for me They're really hard questions, too So I'm not capable of determining gender from looking at a screen So I think it could be either with what anyone identifies with so I'm gonna punt on that one I'm being serious like I'm just being open and honest are they important at their job Could be I Think I should take somebody else Can't you know can't determine race from a phone in my mind, but I Mean there's lots of apps that I use there, right? So I'm gonna play along a little bit so Maybe they are like me How knowledgeable are they about the technology? Well, they've got Starbucks on there, so they're very knowledgeable Coffee yes pretty drinkers. I apologize Pinterest maybe I don't know what that says Nothing against Pinterest Are they an admin or a dev? I Think they're an iPhone user, but I won't hold that against them Yeah, I'm playing a little different into it, but anyhow, and yes, I'd hang out with them I hang out with all sorts of individuals So yeah, I'd mind to just run this for you. Yeah Sorry, yes, you have you have a lot of implicit bias going on. Yes me Just map this person out for me if you had to just force yourself to kind of knee-jerk reaction Who is this person describe them for me organize person who likes coffee? Potentially drives a lot because they have ways on there, so they could be in their car quite a bit enjoys looking through lots of different photos and ideas on Pinterest, so probably creative and Really needs to return phone calls 232 is that your phone? I'm just curious Who disagrees with what we've heard okay go for it Okay, if you're gonna like Stereotype all the heck Pinterest almost always people assume that it is going to be a female gender the Bible application definitely isolates you down to potentially an older population that's the Assumption they don't have any like extremely Detailed filters for their email they look at phone calls, but they don't clear out ones that have been You know they've seen or acknowledged, so they're not particularly technically obsessed I can't quite tell what the P the green P icon is tadpoles Okay, I mean if I were to like completely make an inappropriately biased guess I guess maybe an older potentially non-white woman that you know drives suburbia wild guessing I think I'm gonna make a challenger on the on the bottom row You know, it is someone who's really focused on what they're doing at a particular time. There aren't any apps like interview me or Slack something like that where you're like I think it would be a more of a giveaway Like a technical background Yeah, that's really tiny good eyes Liz All right, does anybody else have anything that they thought haven't been said? Yeah You guys are good So you a lot of you were correct the person is me I heard a lot of people whispering it's her The person is me. Um someone asked about tadpoles. This is my my kid goes to daycare This is the app they use to actually take pictures and I can spy on my kid while he's in daycare So that's that always I'm tricks people up. Um, it's a very bad app. They need a redesign really bad So yes now we all realize everything we said here was unconscious bias We're very aware of that, right? So I just wanted to activate your unconscious bias. I decided to martyr myself to do that Um, does anybody have questions about my life whether all of them are phone? Why don't I read my emails? I get a lot of them. I am I am um I manage our devs So there's a lot of emails about what my devs are supposed to be doing So I I um I force press I I see them and then I slack them and tell them what they need to be doing So I don't open I preview and I need to stop doing that Yeah, yeah, so, you know, my mom calls me a lot and It's just it's just really bad. I'm working on that. I'm working on that one. That's a personal issue So yes, um, awesome But what's really important is that we use frames of reference to be able to You know the pinterest app, you know a lot of women use pinterest or heavily use pinterest And so those types of references allows us to be able to make assumptions of you know person's personality or who they are and so based upon that we're able to I hate to say put them in a box, but allows us to at least quickly Put some perspective on the interaction we're about to have and so that's really how unconscious bias works And we'll talk a little about implicit And what I want you to do is switch this from the development side and switch us from the branding side A lot of these apps are built to give us a certain perspective pinterest, right Girl, we know it's girl, right Even a lot of when we do this this talk a lot a lot of people don't know what tadpoles is But they reference it to a woman Just because big eyes and it looks fine. It looks curly or they'll say, oh, it's a really girly game Right, so we even in our profession Tend to judge applications and then judge the people or we judge the devices And we judge the people so All right, so now we've activated our unconscious bias our realization is We think we know what tech looks like We think we know what a dev looks like we think we know how they function how they talk and when we go into a new job Or a new opportunity or a new or a new team that we're about to build We have a perception of what our team's going to look like and how we need to function Even when we get dressed as a technology person We tend to dress what we feel like it's expected of us, right? We put on our tech outfit Whenever I go to a conference, I try to dress up as much as possible because it throws people off I'm like, well, what are you here for? Are you a sponsor? It's supposed to be here, right because there's a perception that we have around technology All right, but what we what we see On a regular basis, but we can't seem to change our unconscious bias about Is that tech doesn't really look like that anymore Tech actually looks like all people Now it's not always as diverse as this, but we I need to take responsibility of our unconscious bias and speak up and say, you know, I want my team to look like this Because I want to believe that we're going to build for these people So we have to represent our team as developers have to represent the people that we're actually building for So How do we do that? There's this term called implicit bias I like to liken it to the AA meeting of biased Because having implicit bias truly means that you identify your unconscious bias You acknowledge your unconscious bias and you activate it so you can be more conscious So I Rikia know that I have no true understanding of the complete opposite of myself. So a white male In No middle class America. I don't really know his day-to-day. I don't really know how he functions I don't know what device he uses. I don't even know how he utilizes technology So I'm going to acknowledge that and realize I have biases around that person And I have preconceived notions about that group. I'm going to activate it. I'm going to be implicit I'm left-handed when I tend to design All my stuff is on the left side. I promise you you will know if I built an app because the menus on the left The buttons on the left everything's on the left because I use my phone my left and it's always really hard to like hit stuff So I acknowledge that when I design I design for myself I have a preconceived notion unconscious bias that people that are right-handed All their apps are for them. Anyway, they're fine. They'll get by so I don't care when right-handers which predominantly devs and ux's are build, you know, they have The prominent menu is on the top right Logo's on the left menu is somewhere that my finger can't get to So they have a unconscious bias of left-handers who don't have a problem with us. They're fine So you have to acknowledge it and be conscious So as a right-hander when you're designing or developing we say, okay, where is everything placed? Can everybody in one hand actually Work with this layout that we have here Right, so that's being implicit. It's just putting your conscious to action so What are some things you can do to be implicit? These are kind of my my five staples of when you're beginning a dev project and who here is mobile Who's here? Who's mobile? Who's building mobile? Okay one mobile whose web Back end just deep web interface blah blah blah Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay mostly. Okay. What didn't I say who's like? Ops, who's just ops manager? Yeah, okay. Okay lots of ops manager people. Okay. I don't care about you guys so What do you do Because usually and and not to shout you guys out but the managers and the head of ops are the people that you actually have to activate These five things too So the first thing is flip the narrative when you go into your first project and you have your user case Right, you know what you're building for you have an idea of who you're building for And you know what it's supposed to do You do that and you go in and you guys are talking about this like arbitrary person Right, that's going to be using this thing that you're building and you you see them when you talk about them It's either the CEO or the manager that brought the project on You know, it's usually your manager who came and brought the project to you and it's like here's what we're going to do For this said client who doesn't have a face So you have this but you have this concept in your head of who you're building for you had to flip that And what I always do is I picture that person because we always find a person And I I change their demographic So if I immediately picture the The white guy in the jeans and the black blazer with the t-shirt, right? I flip it. I'm like, okay We're going to do black woman dresses left-handed You know and and opens this app every single day So we flip the narrative and I start talking about the app like I'm building it for her so activate yourself to flip the narrative And of course, we're going to activate our unconscious bias where we're going to question ourselves Am I aware of who I'm building for do I know about them? Have I experienced them before do I know how they utilize technology? So you want to question yourself and more often than not you're going to say no So what do you do when you say no? You acknowledge And if you look around at any time you're sitting who here has done a project where they're sitting at their table with their team And every single person is a white male Hi How are you guys? Right, so that's when you go to your manager and you very find the best way to say We are lacking diversity in our team And that doesn't mean that we're bad at our job Doesn't mean that we're not going to do this correctly. It just means that we don't have the unbiased skills To build for everybody So We need to fix that and then your manager's going to be like, well, what do you want me to do about it? All right Do you want me to fire you and hire someone else? You're like, no, it's not what you do I just want us to have a very honest conversation about who we're building for And sometimes that means you have five user case scenarios and you don't like all of them that you're working with Marcus is going to talk about a little bit more. But one of the examples we always have is um your um your first name Add in we have a valid let's say we have a first name field got put in your first name It's a validator to make sure that it's not an error What do you what do you do to validate that the first name is an error? What are some of the validation roles that you create someone throw one out? Starts with capital that's good It's not a number right There we go. It's a single word always happens. Someone always says it I love it Right, but I'm that and I know singlehandedly a very very smart and amazing woman named jimmy Her name is spelled j i space m i majority of times including with her bank including with her her Her employee portal jimmy cannot put in her name All it required was a user case scenario with someone who didn't have a regular american name And that would have been fixed before you even began to develop code So it's it's really acknowledging diversity in the room and activating that and saying we don't know anything about this So if we're not going to hire someone to speak for these particular people We need to have more user case scenarios where I know as a developer. I'm functioning correctly And your manager will like flurry and be like how many more hours is that going to be? Oh my god without budget and then you say we can handle it. We can do this All right, and then when you do that you hold yourself You hold your manager and you hold your team accountable So at all times when you're talking about what you're building you say well, do we factor in jimmy? Do we factor in left-handers? Do we factor in? um How we do the sex field are we doing salutations are we factoring all concepts of that So you hold yourself accountable at every phase of development And then my favorite Find the power of empathy I know you guys talked a lot about empathy yesterday. It seemed like it was really awesome talk. I'm really excited about that right in Finding empathy is giving you the fortitude to continue to have this conversation When you're up way too early, you've coded this thing way too much You've talked to your manager way too much and you've already entered your hours and you're not going to do it again You kind of get to this point of like it's fine It's fine. Looks we're good. It works. It's great But you have to have the empathy and to generate the fortitude to keep pushing forward and say does this really apply to everybody so those are the five things That I want you guys to truly remember To to activate your implicit bias So we want to talk a little bit about the experience side and I know there's a lot of devs in here, but Now as we're thinking about experience everyone plays a part in that You know from the development side and how we're talking about validation and in those parts You know, so there's so many aspects of experience now that we all Depending on your role on team play a part in how that's you know, how we present an experience to the end user And we can't mention this particular Example, but you know as you're thinking about in the experience the really places where the you know Unconscious bias may present his head is usually when you're looking for input back from the user So there may have been a moment where like Rikiya said a use case was not factored in or we didn't broaden our use cases to factor in All the kind of groupings of users that could possibly be there And so something could be missed like the first name and to a two-part first name So being very knowledgeable about expanding your use cases making sure that you're Thinking about all the scenarios of the people who could be in you know being part of the or interacting with the application in some way So there's a couple ways Rikiya's highlighted a few as we're thinking about the user experience side There's a number of activities. If we have more time, we'll go into deeper and what these activities are But if you do low research you can find resources on implicit bias exercises for teams to really kind of get your team thinking And really start thinking outside of their unconscious and be able to activate implicit bias more intentionally through all the exercises and all activities in development Empathy exercises are pretty Well known but thinking more of besides just a user but thinking about empathy exercises relevant to cultural Differences will be really important as you're thinking about Expanding the reach of your application and then user interviews are going to be really critical Like you said some some development teams just aren't diverse enough And so being able to actually talk to users and making sure there's a rich enough pot Of diversity within that user group to make sure that you know if we don't have a full understanding of cultural differences Whatever they may be we can be able to have user interviews that will actually unearth things and we may not have thought about before Just a quick example, we're developing a kind of natural language bot the round history But really it was really a good exercise for us to be able to actually activate our own implicit Bias as we're developing the application. So thinking about you know from from children to adults to Whiteback the Hispanic Latino all the whole the whole gambit to think about how People are going to have a conversation with a bot and how that conversation could be different Could it be a different language could it be English and Spanish? And thinking about how that could affect how the bots going to respond based upon as inputs So having a diverse set of use cases was really helpful for us to make sure that we were going to hit on the head All these different groups and how that we can make sure that it's going to be a useful experience Depending on no matter what your background was and so that's really how you think you really want to make sure that You know you really nail in said, you know if we're going to have a really diverse group of users How do we develop use cases and make sure that we're going to make sure we have a great experience for them And just an example of or just to give you a synopsis of this particular app. It's called. Hello history It's an educational app where um teenagers could have an organic text message with someone from history um to kind of get them to a point of Learning about that in history. So it's really fun. Um ai that we did But what we also had to do is we had to write a natural language for the Historic figures that we were writing for and we realized as african-americans that we got into the the historic figures that were african-american We had an unconscious bias about how they would talk And we had to kind of activate that for ourselves to be like, okay. Well We don't know if i'm okay would say like what's up like we don't know We don't know that guys calm down. So it's really even from our perspective Um, you have to really acknowledge when you have that unconscious bias whether it's positive or negative and really activate it So talk a little bit about how you factor this in through the the actual development process. So We're all familiar with discovery process that as you probably Still limited, but you're still usually pulled into discovery process They want to make sure the architectures write things like that But making sure that now that we're all part of the process We need to also make sure that we're all forcing our teams to be implicit So that's making sure that you're pushing. Hey making sure everyone's clear like who are we targeting Are their cultural differences? Do we have a full understanding of what those differences are? And then have we talked to them and so really kind of pushing your team And being if you need to be that spokesperson you're that and really making sure these points are pushed to make sure that You're you're making sure you're creating an inclusive experience And then the development process like we said there's probably development validation rules that may need to be changed If certain groups or use cases weren't addressed Really pushing into vality assumptions through prototyping user testing is going to be key and then Really making sure if there are personas that you can create that then could be shared across the team That could be also consistent references of the groups that you're trying to target And again prototyping is going to be huge Especially as we think user testing will be the the best way to make sure that you're you're creating an inclusive experience The faster you can get to the prototyping phase and to be able to get the idea out in people's hands It'll help you validate as well as help you to start validating some of your own assumptions of how people Or react to the experiences. So of course paper prototyping is great And balsamic i'm not sure everyone's familiar with that But it's a really great prototyping tool that allows you to be able to quickly be able to get this experience out And be able to get validated ideas really quickly So I think that covers what we want to talk about today, so any kind of questions and answers Thank you. Thanks guys