We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
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
-
•
Empathy is necessary but insufficient for designing products at global scale.
-
•
Introducing technology without deep context can create unintended harms, such as electrical hazards during hurricanes.
-
•
The 'nobility complex' leads Western designers to impose solutions based on privilege, causing product confusion and market failures.
-
•
Localization, including language and cultural practices, can triple product adoption rates in some countries.
-
•
Microsoft’s Tay chatbot quickly turned toxic because it learned from biased internet data, illustrating dangers of unchecked AI.
-
•
Google’s photo recognition failures and racial bias in tech products reveal systemic flaws due to lack of diverse input during design.
-
•
Physical product designs, like Oculus VR headsets and sensor-based soap dispensers, often overlook racial and anatomical diversity, limiting inclusiveness.
-
•
Uber’s global scalable research platform tests products simultaneously in multiple countries to catch localization issues early.
-
•
Testing innovations from global markets back in the U.S. can uncover unexpected opportunities and foster reverse innovation.
-
•
Integrating marginalized voices from day one in product design improves scalability and avoids costly post-launch corrections.
Notable Quotes
"We all want to design for scale, but empathy alone is sometimes a shortcoming when thinking about scale."
"The nobility complex is when we in the West unintentionally create solutions without accounting for our own biases."
"People in some countries are three times more likely to buy a product if it’s localized in their language."
"Tay became a racist, sexist monster in less than eight hours because it learned from toxic internet data."
"Google’s photo algorithm mistakenly tagged Black people as gorillas, which was called out by Jackie Elsene."
"If you put garbage in, garbage comes out – AI reflects the biases in its training data."
"Soap dispensers and water sensors often fail on darker skin because they rely on light reflection."
"We Westerners are designing for ourselves without realizing it, feeding back into a loop of luxury products."
"In India, a cow crossing the road can disrupt Uber pickups, showing the need to design with local realities in mind."
"If you want to scale, incorporate global UX research from day one and test your assumptions broadly."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Tags are a balance; project tags are wild and flexible, global tags must be controlled to avoid chaos."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"Destiny is the belief that a certain future outcome is predetermined regardless of the path."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"Innovation labs don’t work because their mission is to be innovative, not necessarily to solve real customer problems."
Jeff GothelfInnovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"Accessibility is more of a process than a result; it starts at the very beginning of product development with research including disabled users."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"Creating moments of joy in the day can encourage positive behaviors and brighten people’s days."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"Being intentional about how we spend our time is the purest manifestation of our values and our value."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Your career is a design project. It’s the only one you own, so own it like you would a product."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"Choosing the right hill to die on is so important and so hard; the problems that matter come around again and again."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"Slowing down is hard in a capitalist economy that values speed, but patience and self-care are necessary."
Rachael Greene Alison DavisBuilding a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
October 2, 2025
