Summary
(Originally titled “Making Uber More Efficient through Informed International Insights”) Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global Research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs and aspirations. At Uber, the Global Scalable Research program is intended to influence product teams at HQ and around the world, to design and test in global regions: currently Mexico, India, Brazil. In this talk, I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Our Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today.
Key Insights
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Empathy is a necessary baseline but insufficient alone to design products that scale globally.
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Western designers often suffer from a 'nobility complex,' unintentionally imposing biased solutions without understanding local needs.
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Localized language and cultural context can triple user adoption rates in some countries.
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Testing product designs in multiple global markets early prevents costly failures—Uber saw 5 to 20 times profit losses due to lack of localization.
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Incorporating diverse teams and ethnographic research improves understanding of power dynamics in product design.
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Global research programs like Uber’s GSR enable agile, bi-weekly regional studies that inform global product decisions.
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AI and sensor technologies often reflect racial and cultural biases, revealing the absence of diverse perspectives during development.
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Reverse innovation occurs when insights from emerging markets influence improvements in developed markets.
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Understanding users’ financial habits and environmental risks—like hurricane-prone areas—is crucial before adding features like electricity.
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Scaling globally requires designing for marginalized, underrepresented users from day one to create truly inclusive products.
Notable Quotes
"Empathy has become a buzzword, a fad. You’ll hear empathy maps and empathy product design, but is empathy enough to build for scale?"
"I call it the nobility complex—Western privilege blinds us to explicit and implicit biases as we design solutions."
"People in some countries are three times more likely to buy a product if it’s localized in their language."
"When we launched a feature for deaf drivers, immigrants used it because of their language barriers, and others used it because they just didn’t want to talk to drivers."
"If you put garbage in, garbage comes out—that’s what happened with Microsoft’s Tay chatbot."
"Oculus wasn’t designed for Asian cranial structures or socioeconomic backgrounds, showing exclusion in hardware design."
"Soap dispensers’ sensors struggle with darker skin tones because they absorb light, causing financial loss in Africa."
"Design is not art. Design is problem solving."
"We need to stop designing for a Western market. This is the next billion users’ economy."
"There might be a beach cabana experience waiting for your users as well, if you slow down and empathize deeply."
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