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Designing inclusive products — Saielle DaSilva on The Product Experience "Product people - Product managers, product designers, UX designers, UX researchers, Business analysts, developers, makers & entrepreneurs 29 July 2022 False inclusive design, Podcasts, Product Design, The Product Experience, Mind the Product Mind the Product Ltd 6340 Product Management 25.36
· 31 minute read

Designing inclusive products — Saielle DaSilva on The Product Experience

We all know what product design is but what does inclusive design mean, and why does it need to be a priority for product managers? On this week’s podcast, we were joined by Saielle DaSilva, Director of User Experience at Cazoo to talk all about designing products for people who might face limitations when using your product.


 

 

 

 

Featured links

Follow Saielle on LinkedIn and Twitter | Saielle’s website Blossom | Kat Holmes’ talk ‘Design for 7 Billion. Design for One’ | Kat Holmes’ Inclusive Toolkit | Kat
Holmes’ book ‘Mismatch’ | ‘What is Inclusive Design? Principles and Examples’ by Justin Morales | Help Saielle with Gender Transition

Episode transcript

Randy Silver: 

Hey Lily, can we change things up a bit and talk about design today?

Lily Smith: 

Randy, this is a product podcast, you know, for product people. Why would we talk about design,

Randy Silver: 

but behind the link design, working with good designers has made my life so much easier. It’s the beautiful process of turning a business objective or an idea into something that’s tangible for everyone to understand and use.

Lily Smith: 

Randy, I can see my approach went wrong. I was trying to demonstrate the anti pattern of today’s theme. Ah,

Randy Silver: 

okay, I see what you did there. We’re talking about inclusive design. So you

Lily Smith: 

Yeah, I went there. But that’s overweight, because we’ve got Saielle DaSilva here today. And it’s hard to not be inclusive when we’re talking to her.

Randy Silver: 

And in case she sounds familiar, Saielle is a repeat guest. She joined us when we talked with Martin Gaspar about neuro diversity. But today, let’s get straight into the inclusive design.

Lily Smith: 

The product experience is brought to you by mind the product.

Randy Silver: 

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Lily Smith: 

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Lily Smith: 

minded product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. And there’s probably one.

Randy Silver: 

Saielle, well, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this week. Thank you so much for having me. So, you’ve actually been a guest before, but it’s been quite a while. So for anyone who doesn’t remember, do you mind just reintroducing yourself? Who are you? What are you up to these days? And how did you get into this world of product and design in the first place?

Saielle DaSilva: 

Hey, my name is Saielle DaSilva. My pronouns are she/her. I’m currently the director of user experience at a company called kazoo, we sell used cars online. And my very first job in product was a while back, but I got into it by starting as a freelance graphic designer and then realising that the graphic design I was doing had people who needed certain things from it, and try not understand the psychology of people who are interacting with design led me down this very strange and, you know, wonderful world of like product, tech, and design.

Randy Silver: 

And we wanted to talk to you about one of the specific aspects of that, which is about inclusive design, which I know is something that’s near and dear to your heart. We know what design is, I think, what do we mean by inclusive though, what does inclusive design actually mean?

Saielle DaSilva: 

That is a great question. I think inclusive design means designing for the broadest number of cases that you wouldn’t normally expect somebody to use your design. And so what I mean by that is thinking very specifically unconsciously, about the ways in which someone might face limitations, whether physical or emotional, or psychological, or financial, even when they interact with a product or service and thinking about that very consciously to make things easier, more efficient, more effective, more usable.

Lily Smith: 

So does inclusive design mean designing for like taking this approach to design for potentially the person or the people who may struggle the most with your product? And then, like everyone else benefits like that. That’s kind of how I’ve heard people talk about it before.

Saielle DaSilva: 

Absolutely. One of the things that really stood out to me is I know Kat Holmes is previously VP of inclusive design at Microsoft and has talked a lot about this. They did a talk about design for one design for 7 billion that I had the privilege of seeing and it really stuck with me. And one of the things that they had really made stand out is the way that like, when you design for people who struggle the most everyone benefits so in real life, this looks like crosswalks. The noise alerts that come from crosswalks, things like ramps and elevators and lifts you know all these things are forms of inclusive design, and it’s around us everywhere, right? But we tend to take some of those things for granted. Now that they’re standardised, but even, you know, glasses, reading glasses are an accessibility device. And they’re so common that we tend not to think of them that way. But they really are. And so designing a world that allows people to see or to move around is really, really important. And can go a long way for making a product better. You know, there’s probably for every one person that you have explicitly designed for him, quote, unquote, the best case, there’s another, you know, half dozen dozen people who are not necessarily meeting their needs with your product, or don’t know that they can use your product in that way. You know, one of the other examples that I think is really good, here’s closed captioning, and actually invented for deaf people to enjoy television is something that most millennials and younger used to enjoy television, just closed captions and become part of the way people watch TV. And that’s a form of inclusive design, just becoming, like pervasive and standard. And that kind of thing is really beautiful. And you don’t know what people are missing. Until you design for people who may have beans that are not easily caught or expressed.

Randy Silver: 

That’s great. So years ago, my wife and I were watching the wire and my wife is Irish. And she watched the first episode and she wasn’t sure about and I said, Okay, let’s watch the next episode. But let me put on the captions, the closed captions. And she enjoyed it so much more. She just had such a hard time adjusting to the Baltimore accent at that I never thought of that as inclusive design. But we got five great series out of it from that decision. That’s wonderful.

Saielle DaSilva: 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, closed captioning as an American who now lives in London, like there are certain times that accents are words just don’t really make sense to me. And I can actually like pause and go look something up that maybe I haven’t seen or come across in language before. And it’s a really helpful way to learn.

Randy Silver: 

I’ve heard of some other things that people do like testing to make sure you like pretend you’re holding a baby, where you’re holding on to a strap hanger on a on a bus or a subway student trying to do the app with one hand or people having a few drinks and trying to do it while while drunk. And seeing things like that. What kinds of things can we do to ensure that we are being inclusive in our designs,

Saielle DaSilva: 

and I really like to call it the stress test. You know, if you think about as a product person of any kind, right, whether you’re a designer or a product manager or an engineer, when you think about stress testing your app, or product or whatever it is that you’re doing, what is the worst case scenario that somebody might attempt to use your app in. So today, I’ve actually been really struggling with a smart metre. And I’m really, really frustrated. But this is an example of. So this is a device that’s supposed to just let you like, figure it out and kind of turn your power on with very little like support on the original company. But because of the way it’s set up, and there’s not a whole lot of guidance, or accessibility, built into this device, I ended up bouncing around all afternoon trying to track down who to call to figure out why my power was working. And to figure out like, why I have no hot water. And there’s not a whole lot of like very accessible information, the documentation was really poor. And so, you know, I think one of the things to think about is when you consider the stress test is like, who is using your service and under what circumstances right? People don’t generally care if you know, their smart metre is pretty they want it to be usable, I would actually rather have a lot more information about who to call if something is wrong, or what buttons to press, then no information and a really clean interface that just doesn’t actually do anything for me. So that’s an example. And like, you know, the stress test is what, you know, some of the things that I’ve asked us like, what is the worst case scenario? Like how do people’s feelings interact with this product? Is there anything that we can do to minimise bad feelings? What physical obstructions might happen while somebody is using this application? Right? So think about people who are on trains, right? What kind of connectivity? If you’re designing a news app, and people can’t read stories unless they’re online? You’re just gonna get less than reaction and engagement, right? And so thinking about what kinds of stresses or factors come into the way that you make decisions about what’s on your roadmap can be really, really important. And, you know, another way to think about some of the things related to doing this design is a framework called the Kano model. And the Kano model talks about, it’s basically a desirability focus, but you can use it along with other inclusive design tools to understand what things really make or break an application experience for your users.

Randy Silver: 

So sale, I’m curious, we were talking about stress testing and things like that. There’s something that you and I have talked about previously, that was something that was incredibly basic and actually incredibly helpful. Because I’m working with a team right now that’s redesigning an application flow. And just a very quick, basic thing that you talked about was improving form design and being inclusive. And can you talk a little bit about that?

Saielle DaSilva: 

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, one of the things about forms as forms are everywhere online. And one of the easiest things that you can do to make a form more accessible is if you have information that you’ve already collected from a user, use that other places and do the work behind the scenes to streamline inputs and interfaces. If you have done the work to like, take information from a user, a really good principle is only take information once wherever possible. Because what that will do is it builds trust, and it helps the user like move through what they’re doing, right. And another thing that you can do is just make sure that things are like tappable, a lot of people use screen readers or try to use keyboard shortcuts. And if you’re not doing the work to make your forms more accessible, it can really like detriment, people’s experience. The other thing is for the love of God, please don’t prevent copy paste in password fields. The reason for that is, a lot of people are using password managers now that do allow them to copy paste. And that’s not a bad thing if people are using the right security. So don’t go out of your way to restrict things that people can or can’t do. Another form of inclusive design is like name validation. So one of the things that we looked at, at kazoo was trying to make sure that accent marks and, you know, other characters were allowed. So, and there was no like, short limit on names, because we really wanted to try to get that right. And if you tell us that your name is your name, we wanted to be able to respect that in our database, even if we had to, you know, work with, you know, third parties of various kinds, who may not speak to you that way. Whenever we as kazoo speak to you, if you put an accent mark in your name, you know, I really called out that we needed to do that because we live in an international society. And we have people from all over. And if you tell us your name, you should be allowed to tell us your name with its own native marks. So that you know that we speak the same language as you see you the way that you see yourself.

Randy Silver: 

I’ve been a victim of that I tried to sign up with one of the phone providers here for to register interest in a new service. And they wouldn’t let me take my email address, they wouldn’t accept my name, because Randy, in the UK means something slightly saucy. And they use something and blocked in it was absolutely hilarious to me. I mean, I didn’t really suffer they they lost a potential customer. But that is, you know, I never thought that my name would trigger something like that.

Saielle DaSilva: 

Absolutely. And that’s, you know, that’s a product that’s lost a customer. That’s a team that’s lost revenue. And that’s you telling the story to I’m sure, lots of people over the years and just saying, Yeah, I wouldn’t bother with them.

Lily Smith: 

So when we’re thinking about designing inclusively, and you know, we’re thinking about our audiences and personas, you know, is this something that everyone needs to consider? Or is it more for kind of, if you’re like a government organisation doing a product for like the masses, or a DTC brand? Like should we be thinking about inclusive design, when we’re working on b2b products as well? And I’m, I kind of knew the answer for this. I’m just curious today.

Saielle DaSilva: 

No, that’s a great question. So I think this definitely applies to government agencies and services just because they write the accessibility and inclusive laws, but it applies commercially to I think in the US Recently, I mean, recently Hold on, it was 2019. So yeah, I have recently ish. It’s during the pandemic time. But one of the things that stood out was that Domino’s was sued for being non inclusive in the way that they like set up their ecommerce flow in the States. And the Supreme Court handed the victory to the blind man who sued them for the ways in which their product was not accessible to him as a blind man. And, you know, that’s an extreme case of consequence. You know, but there is liability and risk, and especially in the consumer sector, but here’s the thing, even in b2b cases, you know, disabled people go to work disabled people add to our society, and the more inclusive your design is, the better the results you’re going to get. I know that some of the best cases of like, you know, forward thinking b2b software, have probably started from places where people said, Okay, what are the actual stresses, pains and frustrations of doing this job? And then what are the actual limitations? A couple of years ago, I was working on a job at a healthcare company, and one of the things we were trying to do was help limit the number of things that somebody who was working in a call centre had to pay attention to, in order to have a successful phone call, because when they were making these calls, there was like these massive receipts with tiny font. And like, people were scanning these very long emails trying to find things. And we massively increased efficiency in the way that people could like, call out information, because they had to verify this information over the phone, just by highlighting things that stood out. And just by making things slightly bigger, and taking all that data and making it slightly opinionated about what to focus on. And we really thought about designing for a very difficult very long phone call, where you have to get the exact data and the exact numbers and the exact characters very, very precisely, or else you can end up with the wrong thing. And because it was healthcare, like if you make the wrong order, like you could impact somebody’s health care, you could impact the quality of life of that person. And so we wanted to really prevent that from the beginning.

Lily Smith: 

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Randy Silver: 

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Lily Smith: 

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Randy Silver: 

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Randy Silver: 

This is one of those things that unfortunately, like, like so many things, companies can talk a good game about it and pretend that they are being inclusive or pay lip service to it, but not necessarily follow through. What does that look like? Where does inclusive design go wrong? Sometimes?

Saielle DaSilva: 

I think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of companies that want to look respectable, and they know that these things are important to you know, people who have buying power now. But I think one of the things is like television apps just as a category of app are hilariously bad. And I have a bone to pick with Apple TV because I think Steve Jobs would hate the way that they’ve done the keyboard for the Apple TV. And I get voice navigation being a thing but I think that we’re still far away from like intuitive voice controls for a lot of things may think that. There’s a lot of ways in which that kind of oh, look at how forward thinking we are because you can use your voice but like voice based controls are not necessarily discoverable. And then, you know, you don’t account for accents. So one of the things, having a British google home that I bought here is half the time, it does not recognise my accent, and it does not know what I’m trying to say. And that can be really difficult when you’re just trying to do something. And so I think there are a couple of other examples like that. But one of the things that stands out to me is, there was a pool float, that made the rounds and is a slide and one of my talks from a few talks back that I gave, maybe, it wasn’t the before times, but I remember there was this pool float specifically designed by, you know, a pool float company, and it looked like a menstrual pad. And you can tell that nobody had really talked to women about what this pool float looked like, because it was obvious to literally every woman that I would, you know, give this talk in front of that, like, this was not really like what they wanted to be reminded of when they’re swimming. And so those are the kinds of places where I think you can see very obviously, that inclusive design hasn’t been considered. But there’s a lot of other examples of places where inclusive design just doesn’t quite happen. And I think that forms are a really big one. And you know, anything having to do with finance or utilities is really terrible. One thing I want to say about inclusive design, is that when it comes to inclusive design, in a b2b context, the more efficient you can make your workers, the better the results you’re going to get. And a lot of those things are not just like process management, a lot of those things are just basic inclusive design, right, thinking about the volume of information somebody has to juggle, or the number of things they need to track or how their workflow works in a day, or what else you’re asking them to pay attention to, or being aware of what other stresses that worker might be bringing to the context in which they’re attempting to solve a problem. You can do a lot of things to make it much, much simpler for people as a b2b product manager. And so ask yourself, what are the stresses that somebody is bringing to the table when they would be using our product? And how do we alleviate that?

Lily Smith: 

I felt like design has come a hell of a long way in the last sort of 1520 years online. And we are definitely in a better place. But they’re kind of like a set of principles or guidelines that you tend to follow. So we’ve obviously got the accessibility guidelines. But is there something that you know, is there anything else extra that is just really helpful, that if you don’t have time to fully test with various different people of different abilities, you know, that you can follow to ensure that you’re just covering at least the basics?

Saielle DaSilva: 

Yeah, actually, that’s a great question. To go back to Cat homes, they’ve got a really great, inclusive design toolkit. There’s a manual with activities, and a lot of these were road tested internally at Microsoft. And Microsoft has actually like won an award for some of the work that cow Holmes did. Specifically on disabled representation in gaming. So they redesigned their avatars app, and included wheelchair use, and prosthetics and a bunch of other things in the new version of avatars that they launched, and it really like went a long way for people who had never quite seen their own bodies represented in gaming avatars, right, you know, especially gaming, like, you know, a lot of the games that we play tend to focus on able bodies, like when you want to represent yourself. As a gamer, there were very limited options. And so, count Holmes has this really awesome toolkit on their website, cat homes, design.com/inclusive-toolkit. But I think a couple of things that, you know, if you don’t want to use like a very specifically like branded guide, or you want to do some of your research, I think some of the principles that occurred to me when I’m thinking about things is what is the most difficult thing the person on the other end of the screen is facing right now. And, you know, I try to keep that in the bounds of like, things that would be common, you know, like, I can’t necessarily solve your existential crisis with my Apple product, but what I can do is make sure that if you are struggling with stress or bills or anything else that I’m mindful of that as a designer, and I am encouraging that mindful and This in my product team so that we can all get better results. The other thing is every body is literally different. And when it comes to things like neuro divergence like, and just because you know, I say use high contrast, use less words, use common language, make things easy make things intuitive, you know, design is intuitive when it’s predictable. And so think about the predictability of your product. And like, do people come in and always have something like new to discover? And if so, is that adding to their lives? Or is that taking away from their lives? You know, timeline based apps, like social media apps, do a lot to bring you tonnes of new information, but they’ve standardised that pattern that allows you to really like Garner that information within a very SETT Framework. But you want to make sure that you’re thinking about the ways in which you build standardised patterns and the ways that you test the patterns for efficiency and ease of use.

Lily Smith: 

And when you’re doing user research and user testing, do you sort of specifically seek out people who, you know, may struggle?

Saielle DaSilva: 

That’s a good question. I mean, Short answer, yes. And no. I mean, you find all levels of struggle, whenever you’re just sampling a random population. I think the other thing is, you know, I have worked places where accessibility was a really big concern. And so we went out of our way to try to find people who had slightly more specific disabilities, but not everyone needs, necessarily that level of fidelity or testing. But I think it is important to where you have some discipline of user research to really attempt to do it, even if it’s once or twice a year. And there are all sorts of consultancies that can help you with accessibility testing, but it really goes a long way. You know, and when you and a lot of people will be having to dig themselves out of accessibility dishes. But when you design for accessibility, by default, your products are better your code is cleaner. And the things that are part of your user experience are easier to manage, because you’ve put a little bit more care and thoughtfulness into the way that you design your product. Accessibility isn’t something that you can bake in at the end and hope to get right. You really have to, like start from scratch, and really do the work to build it into the DNA of your product. And for the product, people listening to that, who go, Well, I’ve inherited this product, and it’s already not accessible. What do I do? I think one of the things is like, start small, and like be willing to take some bites out of it, and be willing to make things better where you can and highlight the importance of that. Because for every users whose needs you are meeting, there’s a couple whose needs you aren’t meeting.

Randy Silver: 

So I’m curious, you were talking about how to make this work for going external from the company for baking into the product. But I wonder, is this the kind of thing that works better if it’s also baked into the workplace itself? You know, how do you make an inclusive workplace? How do you make an inclusive team? What do you start? What does it look like?

Saielle DaSilva: 

That’s a great question. This is something that I’ve looked at with my current position. One of the things that we tackled was, how do we build an inclusive hiring process from the ground up? And how do we understand what needs people have when they’re looking for a design job? And so I looked at a lot of research about design tests, which are not something that most of your audience probably has a strong opinion on when it comes to hiring designers. But they you know, even product tests, right product management, like portfolio cases, or whiteboarding exercises can be very difficult and non inclusive and kind of esoteric. And so I challenged the team that was working on hiring with me, what do we need to know about people? And how do we know it? And how do we test that? And, you know, when push comes to shove, do we really need this information to make an informed decision about somebody’s skill or qualities to join our team? And what that did is it focused us on just the right principles. And we designed a process that was clear, we designed a process that had, you know, an email that went out that set the stage for like, what to expect and what we’d be looking for. And you know, we went all in on like if we tell you everything that we’re looking for, you can rise to the occasion or you cannot, but we’re going to do our best to give you the tools that you need to be successful. As a candidate, right, we’ll give you emails, setting clear expectations, we’ll talk you through the process and what to expect, we’ll make sure that communication is timely and effective. We’ll support you through interviews by reminding you of things. And by giving you a chance to ask questions both ways, right? It’s not just for us to test your performance is for you to test ours as the team that you want to entrust your career to. And so I think it has to cut both ways. And we need to think about things a little bit more mutually, if we’re going to get to inclusive design in the workplace. And then the other thing is, like when you’re trying to build an inclusive environment at work, you know, in starting a job interview or doing anything, when you start a meeting, and you’ve got some new faces, introducing yourself with your name, and pronouns can go a long way to just reassure people, you know, hey, I’m Sal, my pronouns are she, her, I’m the director of user experience. It’s really simple. It’s super effective, it gives people a clear sign that like they are among people who will respect whatever they bring to the table in terms of name and pronouns, and like, it goes a long way. So I think it’s really important to do those sorts of things as a form of courtesy and greeting. And then the other thing when it comes to like building an inclusive workplace is, if you’re in a leadership position of any kind, make sure that you listen to people and don’t just listen to like, the loudest people listen to people that you don’t necessarily talk to right, inclusive design is about designing for everyone. And I think it’s really important to listen a lot and to listen to people who are more marginalised and more, you know, on the fringes of benefit in your company, be they people of colour, or women, or, you know, women of colour, in tech, who, you know, face discrimination and prejudice on two different intersections, right at two different axes of the way that they have to live in the world and navigate what it means to be alive and be a person in the workplace. So it really does help to think about like, what are the conditions that somebody kind of already brings to an interview? Thinking about things like representation? And how do we make sure that somebody who is applying for a job with us can see at least one example of somebody who looks like them? Or who they might relate to a little bit more consciously? Right? And just how do we do that? How do we help them see that we are the kind of team that they want to work in?

Lily Smith: 

I think that’s some really great advice. And I guess one of the kinds of concerns that I hear people talking about when they think about trying to build an inclusive environment is just like, the fear of getting it wrong, or the fear of saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing. And I suppose that would also translate into sort of building digital products as well, you know, almost like offending people by doing things a certain way, or I don’t know, taking it into a direction that they were concerned might be construed as offensive. So do you have any advice for people who have who are kind of feeling and that sort of situation?

Saielle DaSilva: 

Lily? That’s a great question. I think one of the things is just be willing to admit that you’re not sure and ask for help or guidance. I think, you know, one of the things is, Randy, and I do talk quite a bit. And Randy, you know, I’m transgender, Randy doesn’t know everything about being trans. And he doesn’t always know what questions are safe and questions aren’t. But he will say, hey, help me understand this. And I, you know, I’m just trying to understand, but if this is not a safe question, I get that, but please tell me why. And I love that because it gives me permission to correct him. But also, he’s admitting he doesn’t know something. And that mutual vulnerability is something that can be very, very high impact, right? And so, there’s ways that you can do that no matter who you are, no matter what’s happening in the situation that you’re in, right? And then just generally avoid like ableist kind of ways of talking about things right. So there’s a whole list of examples that are just baked into language, especially English these days, but you know, we have done stupid, foolish. There’s all sorts of like, way more offensive things. But just do your best to say, Oh, that was unexpected, instead of that was crazy, right? Like mental health is such a thing has so much stigma around it and like there’s no need to add Add to that, because I think one of the things about inclusive design that’s really, really important is thinking about the ways in which there’s already exclusion baked into the things that are happening already in your product every day, right? So who is being left out? is a great question and a great way to build empathy. Even if you don’t know anything, who might we be leaving out is a great way to start that conversation. And I think the other thing, there’s humility, like, it’s okay to get it wrong, but like it, you don’t know rather than going, well? How was I supposed to know? Or? Well, nobody told me. You know, I think that being open to to being corrected versus being defensive is really important. As a sign of like, character growth.

Randy Silver: 

You think we as product people, our entire approach is about going in and learning new things and trying to learn quickly, you think we’d be good at this? It’s a really good lesson, it’s a good thing for us to remember to apply some of the things that we use for our approach to our products to ourselves in our relationships, and just making sure we we do it right as well.

Saielle DaSilva: 

Yeah, absolutely. I think a little bit of curiosity goes along by and that’s kind of what if nothing else, you know, if I could only sum up inclusive design in like, one kind of like ethos, or one statement, I would say, a little bit of curiosity about what’s really happening with real people goes a long way.

Randy Silver: 

So thank you very much for coming on today. We really appreciate it. And I appreciate the rest of our conversations. I’ve learned an awful lot. I love that in our conversations. We’ve got enough history that you can assume good intent from me and you know where I’m coming from, even if I’m sometimes make a mistake, and I really appreciate being educated and learning more. So thanks again for tonight and for everything. Thank you

Saielle DaSilva: 

so much for having me on the show. I am a big fan and it’s always good to come back and share thoughts with you.

Lily Smith: 

Thanks, Saielle. The product experience is the first and the best podcast from mine the product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith,

Randy Silver: 

and me Randy silver.

Lily Smith: 

Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 

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We all know what product design is but what does inclusive design mean, and why does it need to be a priority for product managers? On this week's podcast, we were joined by Saielle DaSilva, Director of User Experience at Cazoo to talk all about designing products for people who might face limitations when using your product.
       

Featured links

Follow Saielle on LinkedIn and Twitter | Saielle's website Blossom | Kat Holmes' talk 'Design for 7 Billion. Design for One' | Kat Holmes' Inclusive Toolkit | Kat Holmes' book 'Mismatch' | 'What is Inclusive Design? Principles and Examples' by Justin Morales | Help Saielle with Gender Transition

Episode transcript

Randy Silver:  Hey Lily, can we change things up a bit and talk about design today? Lily Smith:  Randy, this is a product podcast, you know, for product people. Why would we talk about design, Randy Silver:  but behind the link design, working with good designers has made my life so much easier. It's the beautiful process of turning a business objective or an idea into something that's tangible for everyone to understand and use. Lily Smith:  Randy, I can see my approach went wrong. I was trying to demonstrate the anti pattern of today's theme. Ah, Randy Silver:  okay, I see what you did there. We're talking about inclusive design. So you Lily Smith:  Yeah, I went there. But that's overweight, because we've got Saielle DaSilva here today. And it's hard to not be inclusive when we're talking to her. Randy Silver:  And in case she sounds familiar, Saielle is a repeat guest. She joined us when we talked with Martin Gaspar about neuro diversity. But today, let's get straight into the inclusive design. Lily Smith:  The product experience is brought to you by mind the product. Randy Silver:  Every week, we talk to the best product people from around the globe about how we can improve our practice, and build products that people love. Lily Smith:  Because it mind the product.com to catch up on past episodes and to discover an extensive library of great content and videos, Randy Silver:  browse for free, or become a mind that product member to unlock premium articles, unseen videos, AMA's roundtables, discount store conferences around the world training opportunities. Lily Smith:  minded product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. And there's probably one. Randy Silver:  Saielle, well, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this week. Thank you so much for having me. So, you've actually been a guest before, but it's been quite a while. So for anyone who doesn't remember, do you mind just reintroducing yourself? Who are you? What are you up to these days? And how did you get into this world of product and design in the first place? Saielle DaSilva:  Hey, my name is Saielle DaSilva. My pronouns are she/her. I'm currently the director of user experience at a company called kazoo, we sell used cars online. And my very first job in product was a while back, but I got into it by starting as a freelance graphic designer and then realising that the graphic design I was doing had people who needed certain things from it, and try not understand the psychology of people who are interacting with design led me down this very strange and, you know, wonderful world of like product, tech, and design. Randy Silver:  And we wanted to talk to you about one of the specific aspects of that, which is about inclusive design, which I know is something that's near and dear to your heart. We know what design is, I think, what do we mean by inclusive though, what does inclusive design actually mean? Saielle DaSilva:  That is a great question. I think inclusive design means designing for the broadest number of cases that you wouldn't normally expect somebody to use your design. And so what I mean by that is thinking very specifically unconsciously, about the ways in which someone might face limitations, whether physical or emotional, or psychological, or financial, even when they interact with a product or service and thinking about that very consciously to make things easier, more efficient, more effective, more usable. Lily Smith:  So does inclusive design mean designing for like taking this approach to design for potentially the person or the people who may struggle the most with your product? And then, like everyone else benefits like that. That's kind of how I've heard people talk about it before. Saielle DaSilva:  Absolutely. One of the things that really stood out to me is I know Kat Holmes is previously VP of inclusive design at Microsoft and has talked a lot about this. They did a talk about design for one design for 7 billion that I had the privilege of seeing and it really stuck with me. And one of the things that they had really made stand out is the way that like, when you design for people who struggle the most everyone benefits so in real life, this looks like crosswalks. The noise alerts that come from crosswalks, things like ramps and elevators and lifts you know all these things are forms of inclusive design, and it's around us everywhere, right? But we tend to take some of those things for granted. Now that they're standardised, but even, you know, glasses, reading glasses are an accessibility device. And they're so common that we tend not to think of them that way. But they really are. And so designing a world that allows people to see or to move around is really, really important. And can go a long way for making a product better. You know, there's probably for every one person that you have explicitly designed for him, quote, unquote, the best case, there's another, you know, half dozen dozen people who are not necessarily meeting their needs with your product, or don't know that they can use your product in that way. You know, one of the other examples that I think is really good, here's closed captioning, and actually invented for deaf people to enjoy television is something that most millennials and younger used to enjoy television, just closed captions and become part of the way people watch TV. And that's a form of inclusive design, just becoming, like pervasive and standard. And that kind of thing is really beautiful. And you don't know what people are missing. Until you design for people who may have beans that are not easily caught or expressed. Randy Silver:  That's great. So years ago, my wife and I were watching the wire and my wife is Irish. And she watched the first episode and she wasn't sure about and I said, Okay, let's watch the next episode. But let me put on the captions, the closed captions. And she enjoyed it so much more. She just had such a hard time adjusting to the Baltimore accent at that I never thought of that as inclusive design. But we got five great series out of it from that decision. That's wonderful. Saielle DaSilva:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, closed captioning as an American who now lives in London, like there are certain times that accents are words just don't really make sense to me. And I can actually like pause and go look something up that maybe I haven't seen or come across in language before. And it's a really helpful way to learn. Randy Silver:  I've heard of some other things that people do like testing to make sure you like pretend you're holding a baby, where you're holding on to a strap hanger on a on a bus or a subway student trying to do the app with one hand or people having a few drinks and trying to do it while while drunk. And seeing things like that. What kinds of things can we do to ensure that we are being inclusive in our designs, Saielle DaSilva:  and I really like to call it the stress test. You know, if you think about as a product person of any kind, right, whether you're a designer or a product manager or an engineer, when you think about stress testing your app, or product or whatever it is that you're doing, what is the worst case scenario that somebody might attempt to use your app in. So today, I've actually been really struggling with a smart metre. And I'm really, really frustrated. But this is an example of. So this is a device that's supposed to just let you like, figure it out and kind of turn your power on with very little like support on the original company. But because of the way it's set up, and there's not a whole lot of guidance, or accessibility, built into this device, I ended up bouncing around all afternoon trying to track down who to call to figure out why my power was working. And to figure out like, why I have no hot water. And there's not a whole lot of like very accessible information, the documentation was really poor. And so, you know, I think one of the things to think about is when you consider the stress test is like, who is using your service and under what circumstances right? People don't generally care if you know, their smart metre is pretty they want it to be usable, I would actually rather have a lot more information about who to call if something is wrong, or what buttons to press, then no information and a really clean interface that just doesn't actually do anything for me. So that's an example. And like, you know, the stress test is what, you know, some of the things that I've asked us like, what is the worst case scenario? Like how do people's feelings interact with this product? Is there anything that we can do to minimise bad feelings? What physical obstructions might happen while somebody is using this application? Right? So think about people who are on trains, right? What kind of connectivity? If you're designing a news app, and people can't read stories unless they're online? You're just gonna get less than reaction and engagement, right? And so thinking about what kinds of stresses or factors come into the way that you make decisions about what's on your roadmap can be really, really important. And, you know, another way to think about some of the things related to doing this design is a framework called the Kano model. And the Kano model talks about, it's basically a desirability focus, but you can use it along with other inclusive design tools to understand what things really make or break an application experience for your users. Randy Silver:  So sale, I'm curious, we were talking about stress testing and things like that. There's something that you and I have talked about previously, that was something that was incredibly basic and actually incredibly helpful. Because I'm working with a team right now that's redesigning an application flow. And just a very quick, basic thing that you talked about was improving form design and being inclusive. And can you talk a little bit about that? Saielle DaSilva:  Yeah, absolutely. So you know, one of the things about forms as forms are everywhere online. And one of the easiest things that you can do to make a form more accessible is if you have information that you've already collected from a user, use that other places and do the work behind the scenes to streamline inputs and interfaces. If you have done the work to like, take information from a user, a really good principle is only take information once wherever possible. Because what that will do is it builds trust, and it helps the user like move through what they're doing, right. And another thing that you can do is just make sure that things are like tappable, a lot of people use screen readers or try to use keyboard shortcuts. And if you're not doing the work to make your forms more accessible, it can really like detriment, people's experience. The other thing is for the love of God, please don't prevent copy paste in password fields. The reason for that is, a lot of people are using password managers now that do allow them to copy paste. And that's not a bad thing if people are using the right security. So don't go out of your way to restrict things that people can or can't do. Another form of inclusive design is like name validation. So one of the things that we looked at, at kazoo was trying to make sure that accent marks and, you know, other characters were allowed. So, and there was no like, short limit on names, because we really wanted to try to get that right. And if you tell us that your name is your name, we wanted to be able to respect that in our database, even if we had to, you know, work with, you know, third parties of various kinds, who may not speak to you that way. Whenever we as kazoo speak to you, if you put an accent mark in your name, you know, I really called out that we needed to do that because we live in an international society. And we have people from all over. And if you tell us your name, you should be allowed to tell us your name with its own native marks. So that you know that we speak the same language as you see you the way that you see yourself. Randy Silver:  I've been a victim of that I tried to sign up with one of the phone providers here for to register interest in a new service. And they wouldn't let me take my email address, they wouldn't accept my name, because Randy, in the UK means something slightly saucy. And they use something and blocked in it was absolutely hilarious to me. I mean, I didn't really suffer they they lost a potential customer. But that is, you know, I never thought that my name would trigger something like that. Saielle DaSilva:  Absolutely. And that's, you know, that's a product that's lost a customer. That's a team that's lost revenue. And that's you telling the story to I'm sure, lots of people over the years and just saying, Yeah, I wouldn't bother with them. Lily Smith:  So when we're thinking about designing inclusively, and you know, we're thinking about our audiences and personas, you know, is this something that everyone needs to consider? Or is it more for kind of, if you're like a government organisation doing a product for like the masses, or a DTC brand? Like should we be thinking about inclusive design, when we're working on b2b products as well? And I'm, I kind of knew the answer for this. I'm just curious today. Saielle DaSilva:  No, that's a great question. So I think this definitely applies to government agencies and services just because they write the accessibility and inclusive laws, but it applies commercially to I think in the US Recently, I mean, recently Hold on, it was 2019. So yeah, I have recently ish. It's during the pandemic time. But one of the things that stood out was that Domino's was sued for being non inclusive in the way that they like set up their ecommerce flow in the States. And the Supreme Court handed the victory to the blind man who sued them for the ways in which their product was not accessible to him as a blind man. And, you know, that's an extreme case of consequence. You know, but there is liability and risk, and especially in the consumer sector, but here's the thing, even in b2b cases, you know, disabled people go to work disabled people add to our society, and the more inclusive your design is, the better the results you're going to get. I know that some of the best cases of like, you know, forward thinking b2b software, have probably started from places where people said, Okay, what are the actual stresses, pains and frustrations of doing this job? And then what are the actual limitations? A couple of years ago, I was working on a job at a healthcare company, and one of the things we were trying to do was help limit the number of things that somebody who was working in a call centre had to pay attention to, in order to have a successful phone call, because when they were making these calls, there was like these massive receipts with tiny font. And like, people were scanning these very long emails trying to find things. And we massively increased efficiency in the way that people could like, call out information, because they had to verify this information over the phone, just by highlighting things that stood out. And just by making things slightly bigger, and taking all that data and making it slightly opinionated about what to focus on. And we really thought about designing for a very difficult very long phone call, where you have to get the exact data and the exact numbers and the exact characters very, very precisely, or else you can end up with the wrong thing. And because it was healthcare, like if you make the wrong order, like you could impact somebody's health care, you could impact the quality of life of that person. And so we wanted to really prevent that from the beginning. Lily Smith:  Randy, do you fancy levelling up your product management skills? Randy Silver:  Always? Lily Smith:  Are you ready to take that next step in your product career? Randy Silver:  I thought you'd never ask. Well, you're in luck. Lily Smith:  My inner product runs regular interactive remote workshops, where you can dedicate two half days to honing your product management craft with a small group of peers. You'll be coached through your product challenges by an expert trainer, and walk away with frameworks and tools you can use right away. Randy Silver:  And they're offering a one time 15% discount for any of their August 2022 classes taking place on August 11, and 12. Lily Smith:  You can choose from product management, foundations, communication and alignment, or metrics for product managers. Randy Silver:  Just use the code summer 15. When buying your ticket, that's su M M, er, one, five, Lily Smith:  find out more and book your place in an August workshop at mine, the product.com forward slash workshops. Randy Silver:  This is one of those things that unfortunately, like, like so many things, companies can talk a good game about it and pretend that they are being inclusive or pay lip service to it, but not necessarily follow through. What does that look like? Where does inclusive design go wrong? Sometimes? Saielle DaSilva:  I think there's a lot of there's a lot of companies that want to look respectable, and they know that these things are important to you know, people who have buying power now. But I think one of the things is like television apps just as a category of app are hilariously bad. And I have a bone to pick with Apple TV because I think Steve Jobs would hate the way that they've done the keyboard for the Apple TV. And I get voice navigation being a thing but I think that we're still far away from like intuitive voice controls for a lot of things may think that. There's a lot of ways in which that kind of oh, look at how forward thinking we are because you can use your voice but like voice based controls are not necessarily discoverable. And then, you know, you don't account for accents. So one of the things, having a British google home that I bought here is half the time, it does not recognise my accent, and it does not know what I'm trying to say. And that can be really difficult when you're just trying to do something. And so I think there are a couple of other examples like that. But one of the things that stands out to me is, there was a pool float, that made the rounds and is a slide and one of my talks from a few talks back that I gave, maybe, it wasn't the before times, but I remember there was this pool float specifically designed by, you know, a pool float company, and it looked like a menstrual pad. And you can tell that nobody had really talked to women about what this pool float looked like, because it was obvious to literally every woman that I would, you know, give this talk in front of that, like, this was not really like what they wanted to be reminded of when they're swimming. And so those are the kinds of places where I think you can see very obviously, that inclusive design hasn't been considered. But there's a lot of other examples of places where inclusive design just doesn't quite happen. And I think that forms are a really big one. And you know, anything having to do with finance or utilities is really terrible. One thing I want to say about inclusive design, is that when it comes to inclusive design, in a b2b context, the more efficient you can make your workers, the better the results you're going to get. And a lot of those things are not just like process management, a lot of those things are just basic inclusive design, right, thinking about the volume of information somebody has to juggle, or the number of things they need to track or how their workflow works in a day, or what else you're asking them to pay attention to, or being aware of what other stresses that worker might be bringing to the context in which they're attempting to solve a problem. You can do a lot of things to make it much, much simpler for people as a b2b product manager. And so ask yourself, what are the stresses that somebody is bringing to the table when they would be using our product? And how do we alleviate that? Lily Smith:  I felt like design has come a hell of a long way in the last sort of 1520 years online. And we are definitely in a better place. But they're kind of like a set of principles or guidelines that you tend to follow. So we've obviously got the accessibility guidelines. But is there something that you know, is there anything else extra that is just really helpful, that if you don't have time to fully test with various different people of different abilities, you know, that you can follow to ensure that you're just covering at least the basics? Saielle DaSilva:  Yeah, actually, that's a great question. To go back to Cat homes, they've got a really great, inclusive design toolkit. There's a manual with activities, and a lot of these were road tested internally at Microsoft. And Microsoft has actually like won an award for some of the work that cow Holmes did. Specifically on disabled representation in gaming. So they redesigned their avatars app, and included wheelchair use, and prosthetics and a bunch of other things in the new version of avatars that they launched, and it really like went a long way for people who had never quite seen their own bodies represented in gaming avatars, right, you know, especially gaming, like, you know, a lot of the games that we play tend to focus on able bodies, like when you want to represent yourself. As a gamer, there were very limited options. And so, count Holmes has this really awesome toolkit on their website, cat homes, design.com/inclusive-toolkit. But I think a couple of things that, you know, if you don't want to use like a very specifically like branded guide, or you want to do some of your research, I think some of the principles that occurred to me when I'm thinking about things is what is the most difficult thing the person on the other end of the screen is facing right now. And, you know, I try to keep that in the bounds of like, things that would be common, you know, like, I can't necessarily solve your existential crisis with my Apple product, but what I can do is make sure that if you are struggling with stress or bills or anything else that I'm mindful of that as a designer, and I am encouraging that mindful and This in my product team so that we can all get better results. The other thing is every body is literally different. And when it comes to things like neuro divergence like, and just because you know, I say use high contrast, use less words, use common language, make things easy make things intuitive, you know, design is intuitive when it's predictable. And so think about the predictability of your product. And like, do people come in and always have something like new to discover? And if so, is that adding to their lives? Or is that taking away from their lives? You know, timeline based apps, like social media apps, do a lot to bring you tonnes of new information, but they've standardised that pattern that allows you to really like Garner that information within a very SETT Framework. But you want to make sure that you're thinking about the ways in which you build standardised patterns and the ways that you test the patterns for efficiency and ease of use. Lily Smith:  And when you're doing user research and user testing, do you sort of specifically seek out people who, you know, may struggle? Saielle DaSilva:  That's a good question. I mean, Short answer, yes. And no. I mean, you find all levels of struggle, whenever you're just sampling a random population. I think the other thing is, you know, I have worked places where accessibility was a really big concern. And so we went out of our way to try to find people who had slightly more specific disabilities, but not everyone needs, necessarily that level of fidelity or testing. But I think it is important to where you have some discipline of user research to really attempt to do it, even if it's once or twice a year. And there are all sorts of consultancies that can help you with accessibility testing, but it really goes a long way. You know, and when you and a lot of people will be having to dig themselves out of accessibility dishes. But when you design for accessibility, by default, your products are better your code is cleaner. And the things that are part of your user experience are easier to manage, because you've put a little bit more care and thoughtfulness into the way that you design your product. Accessibility isn't something that you can bake in at the end and hope to get right. You really have to, like start from scratch, and really do the work to build it into the DNA of your product. And for the product, people listening to that, who go, Well, I've inherited this product, and it's already not accessible. What do I do? I think one of the things is like, start small, and like be willing to take some bites out of it, and be willing to make things better where you can and highlight the importance of that. Because for every users whose needs you are meeting, there's a couple whose needs you aren't meeting. Randy Silver:  So I'm curious, you were talking about how to make this work for going external from the company for baking into the product. But I wonder, is this the kind of thing that works better if it's also baked into the workplace itself? You know, how do you make an inclusive workplace? How do you make an inclusive team? What do you start? What does it look like? Saielle DaSilva:  That's a great question. This is something that I've looked at with my current position. One of the things that we tackled was, how do we build an inclusive hiring process from the ground up? And how do we understand what needs people have when they're looking for a design job? And so I looked at a lot of research about design tests, which are not something that most of your audience probably has a strong opinion on when it comes to hiring designers. But they you know, even product tests, right product management, like portfolio cases, or whiteboarding exercises can be very difficult and non inclusive and kind of esoteric. And so I challenged the team that was working on hiring with me, what do we need to know about people? And how do we know it? And how do we test that? And, you know, when push comes to shove, do we really need this information to make an informed decision about somebody's skill or qualities to join our team? And what that did is it focused us on just the right principles. And we designed a process that was clear, we designed a process that had, you know, an email that went out that set the stage for like, what to expect and what we'd be looking for. And you know, we went all in on like if we tell you everything that we're looking for, you can rise to the occasion or you cannot, but we're going to do our best to give you the tools that you need to be successful. As a candidate, right, we'll give you emails, setting clear expectations, we'll talk you through the process and what to expect, we'll make sure that communication is timely and effective. We'll support you through interviews by reminding you of things. And by giving you a chance to ask questions both ways, right? It's not just for us to test your performance is for you to test ours as the team that you want to entrust your career to. And so I think it has to cut both ways. And we need to think about things a little bit more mutually, if we're going to get to inclusive design in the workplace. And then the other thing is, like when you're trying to build an inclusive environment at work, you know, in starting a job interview or doing anything, when you start a meeting, and you've got some new faces, introducing yourself with your name, and pronouns can go a long way to just reassure people, you know, hey, I'm Sal, my pronouns are she, her, I'm the director of user experience. It's really simple. It's super effective, it gives people a clear sign that like they are among people who will respect whatever they bring to the table in terms of name and pronouns, and like, it goes a long way. So I think it's really important to do those sorts of things as a form of courtesy and greeting. And then the other thing when it comes to like building an inclusive workplace is, if you're in a leadership position of any kind, make sure that you listen to people and don't just listen to like, the loudest people listen to people that you don't necessarily talk to right, inclusive design is about designing for everyone. And I think it's really important to listen a lot and to listen to people who are more marginalised and more, you know, on the fringes of benefit in your company, be they people of colour, or women, or, you know, women of colour, in tech, who, you know, face discrimination and prejudice on two different intersections, right at two different axes of the way that they have to live in the world and navigate what it means to be alive and be a person in the workplace. So it really does help to think about like, what are the conditions that somebody kind of already brings to an interview? Thinking about things like representation? And how do we make sure that somebody who is applying for a job with us can see at least one example of somebody who looks like them? Or who they might relate to a little bit more consciously? Right? And just how do we do that? How do we help them see that we are the kind of team that they want to work in? Lily Smith:  I think that's some really great advice. And I guess one of the kinds of concerns that I hear people talking about when they think about trying to build an inclusive environment is just like, the fear of getting it wrong, or the fear of saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing. And I suppose that would also translate into sort of building digital products as well, you know, almost like offending people by doing things a certain way, or I don't know, taking it into a direction that they were concerned might be construed as offensive. So do you have any advice for people who have who are kind of feeling and that sort of situation? Saielle DaSilva:  Lily? That's a great question. I think one of the things is just be willing to admit that you're not sure and ask for help or guidance. I think, you know, one of the things is, Randy, and I do talk quite a bit. And Randy, you know, I'm transgender, Randy doesn't know everything about being trans. And he doesn't always know what questions are safe and questions aren't. But he will say, hey, help me understand this. And I, you know, I'm just trying to understand, but if this is not a safe question, I get that, but please tell me why. And I love that because it gives me permission to correct him. But also, he's admitting he doesn't know something. And that mutual vulnerability is something that can be very, very high impact, right? And so, there's ways that you can do that no matter who you are, no matter what's happening in the situation that you're in, right? And then just generally avoid like ableist kind of ways of talking about things right. So there's a whole list of examples that are just baked into language, especially English these days, but you know, we have done stupid, foolish. There's all sorts of like, way more offensive things. But just do your best to say, Oh, that was unexpected, instead of that was crazy, right? Like mental health is such a thing has so much stigma around it and like there's no need to add Add to that, because I think one of the things about inclusive design that's really, really important is thinking about the ways in which there's already exclusion baked into the things that are happening already in your product every day, right? So who is being left out? is a great question and a great way to build empathy. Even if you don't know anything, who might we be leaving out is a great way to start that conversation. And I think the other thing, there's humility, like, it's okay to get it wrong, but like it, you don't know rather than going, well? How was I supposed to know? Or? Well, nobody told me. You know, I think that being open to to being corrected versus being defensive is really important. As a sign of like, character growth. Randy Silver:  You think we as product people, our entire approach is about going in and learning new things and trying to learn quickly, you think we'd be good at this? It's a really good lesson, it's a good thing for us to remember to apply some of the things that we use for our approach to our products to ourselves in our relationships, and just making sure we we do it right as well. Saielle DaSilva:  Yeah, absolutely. I think a little bit of curiosity goes along by and that's kind of what if nothing else, you know, if I could only sum up inclusive design in like, one kind of like ethos, or one statement, I would say, a little bit of curiosity about what's really happening with real people goes a long way. Randy Silver:  So thank you very much for coming on today. We really appreciate it. And I appreciate the rest of our conversations. I've learned an awful lot. I love that in our conversations. We've got enough history that you can assume good intent from me and you know where I'm coming from, even if I'm sometimes make a mistake, and I really appreciate being educated and learning more. So thanks again for tonight and for everything. Thank you Saielle DaSilva:  so much for having me on the show. I am a big fan and it's always good to come back and share thoughts with you. Lily Smith:  Thanks, Saielle. The product experience is the first and the best podcast from mine the product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith, Randy Silver:  and me Randy silver. Lily Smith:  Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor. Randy Silver:  Our theme music is from humbard baseband power. That's P AU. Thanks to Arnie killer who curates both product tank and MTP engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide. Lily Smith:  If there's not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more go to mind the product.com forward slash product Thank Unknown:  you

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