How to build inclusive technology for a diverse world | LRN234

[Music] welcome ignite attendees my name is anthony kerr i serve as the go to market lead for our skills for employability in the worldwide learning organization here at microsoft uh and you are at the how to build inclusive technology for a diverse world session i'm here with two esteemed guests both experts in their fields and i'm going to ask them to introduce themselves as well as provide a short background of what they do here at microsoft mj i'm going to start with you hi there everyone my name is mj de palma i'm the head of multicultural and inclusive marketing at microsoft advertising and my role is really an empowerment role empowering internally our employees at microsoft advertising to equip them with strategies on inclusive marketing but also you out there that are our customers and our clients on research and insights we've been on a journey of the last three years in conducting our own first party research on how inclusion plays a role in innovation and how brands can play a role in using inclusion to drive technology advances and advertising and really in any part of business so very excited to be here uh my pronouns are she her they and them i am a white female with short blonde hair usually styled with a pompadour i have a blue velvet jacket on um for those of you who uh have vision impairment or who cannot see so happy to be here thanks for watching mj and also thanks for the reminder i forgot to describe myself i am a man with a shirt that's a black shirt that says we see you for those who are visually impaired and next hector can you please introduce yourself and give us a short background and tell us what you do here at microsoft yeah hi everybody my name is hector minto i'm an accessibility evangelist for accessibility uh based in europe based in the uk i'm joining from an evening an early evening in in oxford i'm a white male with glasses bald head slightly longer than normal gray beard my role is to really drive accessibility as a as a muscle within microsoft but also within our partner network and to help our customers understand the investments we make in digital inclusion what we call accessibility i've spent my entire career working in what we call assistive technology or accessibility and essentially we're we're helping our product teams and our customers and our partners build more inclusive experiences to include the one in six people on the planet with disabilities thank you for that intro hector so i'm going to stick with you and ask you to help the audience understand what does it mean for a technology or technical product to be inclusive absolutely so as i say i've worked my entire career in technology and disability and i can tell you 25 years ago we only spoke about what we called assistive technology these were specialist tools to essentially allow people with disabilities to access tech uh so we i worked a lot with things like uh speaking computers to allow people to speak i worked a lot with home automation systems for people to control their homes but it always started with kind of a medical diagnosis a health or social care professional assessing somebody for their technology this has moved more to what we might call uh is is the experience accessible really that came around the same time as the the world wide web you know it was this idea that lots of people were out there building technology that people could access uh but was it accessible was it built with people with disabilities in mind i think what's really super interesting i love the title of this session anthony it's a inclusive tech i think this is a recognition of the evolving relationship that human beings have with technology so now people with disabilities are one group of people who might require their technology to be built with inclusion in mind but actually we can widen this topic out now to people with low levels of literacy people from low socioeconomic groups people who are disconnected from the web who who don't have that connectivity in the world so it's a i would say it's kind of a spectrum if we think about the kind of the relationship of humans and technology but fundamentally my my remit is to really focus people on perhaps the most excluded group people with disabilities because you don't make something accessible to somebody with a disability unless you deliberately do so so how can we as a tech industry start to build this muscle to actually routinely start to deliver these accessible experiences absolutely that was a wonderful answer and mj could you thank you mj could you give us your perspective on on the same question uh what does it mean from your lens for technology to to be inclusive and and how does that impact our audience when we go to market with technical products absolutely thanks for that question so when i think about technology and i think about how it is related to inclusion it really is about trusted technology and trusted technology by design is fundamentally rooted in inclusive design principles which is to uncover exclusions and when we uncover how our tech might be excluding accidentally someone or a system or a set of data we can innovate and thereby serving more people and diversity of thought and diversity of data gets us to better outcomes and so inclusive technology is really i believe a way to innovate and a way to drive uh impact and scale and serve more people in more of a uh personalized and relevant way um you know i think often i'm asked you know what is the the direct roi or when you go to market sometimes you're in a space that has no data that has no baseline to say this is the direction we need to go but i always ask clients are you interested in reaching more people are you interested in finding new markets and new ways to step in to solve problems for people usually the answer is an absolute yes right and that's what innovation is is rooted in and inclusive approaches to business which includes technology report three times higher levels of innovation so who wouldn't want that right absolutely we love innovation here at microsoft uh hector mj was speaking about opening up new markets uh disability is not quite rare in the world is it so how prevalent is a disability or people with disabilities and how are those people impacted when technology does not solve for their needs yeah so estimates around one in six of the general population so over a billion people on the planet have some form of a disability whether that's a disability that excludes them from the experience depends on the experience yep so if we think of a phone call as a simple example a phone call is not necessarily exclusionary for someone who's blind but it is exclusionary for someone who is deaf yeah so the the service that's being provided if somebody's not included in the design that's where the exclusion happens now what i'm trying to what we're trying to get to with this is from some time the tech industry has looked at its obligations essentially on accessibility are we designing experiences that are accessible but as every company becomes a software company exclusion now actually means not being able to bank not being able to shop not being able to access government services not being able to vote you know these are all human rights that we have but in this digital first world what's what it's going to mean if we don't build inclusive experiences is actually just lack of access and we've learned this through kovit yeah i mean what we saw with this rapid acceleration of digital transformation what we were seeing was everybody's scrambling to kind of you know deliver their service their product digitally allow their workforce to work from home allowing the meetings to happen digitally suddenly there was this massive recognition of disability out there honestly we saw it everywhere from employers speaking to us and saying i never knew i had any deaf employees until everybody was sat on a screen because people cover their deafness in the workplace or people coming to us and saying i didn't even realize i had people with dyslexia until we realized that we were forcing people into into uh written materials uh or into training modules where they had to read big bodies of text so it's the experience and the exclusion that drives the awareness quite often i guess the challenge is how do we as a tech industry support every industry to deliver these inclusive experiences and i love that we're already talking about roi how do we help them to understand like what the what the benefit is to reach more people um interestingly when we think about hidden disability approximately 70 of disability is hidden it's not until we force people into this one way of accessing a business or this new way of accessing business that you'll start to recognize the customers you're losing because you haven't built these inclusive experiences the audience has brought up or i'm on me to know and you're right the audience has uh brought up uh roi several times into questions so once we have um let's say an inclusive product and an inclusive experience i'm going to ask this question to mj uh first can you define inclusive marketing for us so everyone knows what we're talking about uh and then second can you get into detail in regards to um the roi of doing inclusive marketing and the new opportunities it uncovers for a business sure this is really at the heart of like why do this right and a couple years ago i set out to answer this question because we got the uh often the same sentiment like what is the roi what is inclusive marketing let's level set first marketing is often described as the five or six ps right so product the people you're trying to reach place promotion process and we've added purpose too knowing a company's purpose is really important so that you can come across authentic now product is really important to understand here is part of marketing marketing is not just promotion marketing is not just an ad marketing is not just picking a particular image and checking a box and saying i got some audience that looks diverse i'm good to go it's also about engineering it's also about the way we do business is our marketing and so we set out a couple uh years ago now um and did some research what are the trust drivers of brands and the psychology of inclusion in the effects in advertising and what came out of those studies is a clear indication that inclusion drives loyalty inclusion in advertising experience increases purchase intent by a factor of 23 points and it didn't matter what gender or ethnicity the respondents were the increase was very clear sometimes it was 38 points as high for women and 18 points for men but i think that what's really important to understand is every brand every experience is rooted in understanding your customer getting close to them and understanding how they get to your product service or experience how your product service or experience solves their problem i think there's a question too about like how do i do this as a a marketer on a daily basis and and if you're in tech how do i do this as an engineer we have to be human-centered approach to and understand how somebody uh what their lived experience is to get those insights right and so understanding like say how a person with a physical disability plans a vacation and what words do they use to search on that or say from the lgbtqi plus community uh what words do they use to to search to plan their vacation i'm i'm going to guarantee you that there's a high percentage that use the phrase gay friendly there's lots of signals and cues and so out of both of those studies we understood that there's three trust drivers for for companies so whether you're designing a product or an ad campaign being responsible whether that's with privacy or making sure that you're compliant to accessibility laws and transparent with how you use people's data it's being responsible it's coming to the table and and and showing that you have your customers best interest at heart values to know what you stand for and that your mission is front and center with how you design technology anything you do needs to align to that so people can connect and say i believe in this in this brand i have shared values and then last but not least inclusion is another area of uh the core building blocks to trust and um inclusion can be activated in so many different ways but it's really about uncovering our biases and making sure there's diversity and thought in every single project because we can't possibly know everything right we're all in a journey no one has this perfect it's about deliberate curiosity about our customers being the best student of our customers business so that we can uncover those aha moments and you know those those golden nuggets that lead us down a path of technology that can help uh humans um navigate this accelerated world so i hope that answers that question it does perfectly and sticking with let's say the the theme of solving for an audience and purposely solving for that audience when you are solving for an audience that has a disability sometimes that results in a new product together so hector give us an example of uh new products new technologies that were built with uh accessibility in mind and how that impacted the business and the importance of that to the business absolutely and just so you know this is not a new trend i mean believe it or not 20 years ago i was flipping touch screens to the front of school computers for kids with physical disabilities they were kind of five grand or five thousand dollars ago uh we were experimenting with touchscreens before we got anywhere near the mainstream in the disability space same for word prediction same for emojis same for everything you know disability or innovation in the disability space has always been this rich space and one that every company should really uh explore no matter what industry you're in there's some lovely examples just in the standard modern microsoft offer uh the immersive reader is just amazing right i mean if you if you're watching this on edge right now highlight some text on a page right click go into the immersive reader and you just see this amazing experience for people with dyslexia that's where it was predominantly designed where you can change the color background use some what we call dyslexia friendly colors the urban colors split the words into their syllables and even have picture support for the text that's on that website that you're looking at right now now that's now available on azure because actually what we're starting to see is that people look at that and say that's going to help people acclimatizing in a new country you know straight away with the pictorial support uh and with the translation and with the read aloud feature built in it's going to help people with with low literacy you know it started with dyslexia but consider that the average reading age in the uk here where i'm sitting is is nine years old you know when we go and build product for the general populace who are all using technology now that tool that started in dyslexia is going to be just as appropriate for a much a much larger audience another great example i think is this voice transcription that you see everywhere now uh oh sorry i should have said the immersive reader is built into teams you can actually play with it right here in right here in teams actually um but the the the captioning that you're starting to see the auto captioning that's in powerpoint present live powerpoint itself here in teams but actually also in stream the ways that we're starting to see that used are things like uh meeting search within businesses if everything is transcribed think how that you know accelerates search in any business i can tell you that i use that all the time before i go and see a customer i'll i'll look at the customer's name on our microsoft stream channels see who's talking about that business within the business do my homework and go into that meeting fully prepared so the captions really help people who have a second language people who are deaf or hard of hearing but then it also just accelerates this productivity win uh because the features are just there people start to to use them for their own means so the the idea that we you know that we hack around disability we use the modern toolkit to design these new products but what we're really looking for next i think are people to look at what microsoft are doing with our product take that tech and go and apply it to their own products their own industries thank you for that example that really highlights the the power of solving uh for accessibility uh and being inclusive intentionally and how that technology comes into proportion uh mj i'm going to give you the opportunity to go through one of our many inclusive marketing case studies but we have a question uh from the audience uh what type of feedback loop is important after you have approached your customers with tech based inclusion are there specific microsoft case studies that show incremental success based on customer feedback i ask because needs of customers are evolving quickly during the pandemic well i think having open communication channels with customers has always been an imperative to be able to deliver what our customers need uh so i think that from a kovitz standpoint technology has played an incredible role in being able to step in and and help people have access to education and work um you know there's a also i would say an a need for constantly seeking out that feedback so it's it's one thing to get feedback just you know passively but i think having deliberate extensions into different types of customers is really important being deliberate that your you know diversity in geography making sure that where you're getting your feedback from your customers is not just from one geographical area or one type of customer but making sure that that input is is diverse we often at microsoft advertising have what we call product advisory groups and it's a usually a round table where we do get real-time conversations and feedback from customers and we've been deliberate at making sure that those customer panels are diverse diverse in types of businesses and human beings of who they are and just ensuring that that cohort is is diverse leads us down to a better outcome and that we're not missing anything and i think that's fundamental scientific method right right i think it's the original case study was mckinsey did a study many years ago on the diversity of groups and that a homogenous group performs really well very fast but only attains a certain level of performance but if you have a diverse group of people it's very messy at first and once you start to hear everybody's point of view you get to eventually performance that outpaces your homogenous group so it might take a little longer to get to performance but you will perform at a higher level and get better outcomes um so i also just want to call out that from deliberate curiosity this is just one small you know microsoft i wouldn't call it a case study but i would i call it a really extremely great example of a group of employees at microsoft wanting to understand people with disabilities and how they gained and if you're not familiar with it xbox's adaptive controller was created because they wanted to help meet the mismatch because the definition of disability is is the relationship between uh the person in their environment that it's a mismatch it's not the condition of the person any longer it is a mismatch and they solve that mismatch and you know in terms of you know standing for what xbox is about when you know everyone plays we all win and i think that there is incredible halo effect that can happen for brand favorability and um and whatnot so i hope that helps i see a lot of activity coming in on the questions i think here i'm gonna start to read i'll i'll pass it back to anthony absolutely so yes we have seven minutes left so if you have a question that you're you're burning to have that our panelists answer for you uh get that in right now uh so another question from the audience uh is there a way to connect uh with someone at microsoft around accessibility and that goes to you hector yeah absolutely i mean one of the reasons that we're out there now in the community working with our partners working with our customers working on our offices we're we're scaling our accessibility teams around the globe you know getting people up to that level where they're comfortable to go and have these conversations go and have these exciting conversations so you know the population at microsoft supporting accessibility out there in the field is so much larger than it ever has been so please get in touch with me on linkedin or find us on twitter msft enable you can also get in touch with our global disability answer desk in terms of any product issues you may be facing or any accessibility support that you that you need with our products in terms of you know connecting with us in the community the other thing is we have our ability summit in may we're hoping to have 20 000 people attend the ability summit this year so that's an amazing place to actually get time with all of us uh with everyone across the ability team but also people from our product teams our engineering groups the people actually building inclusive technology so yeah put may 5th 6th in the diary perfect and mj if one of our customers wanted to do some inclusive marketing how would they get in touch with us so i think they there's two avenues and resources that are incredible that we have at microsoft if you go to microsoft learn there is a whole collection on inclusive marketing that you can take those courses and we're going to push those links out to you right now the other thing that i would say is just uh i have a series of blog posts on the microsoft advertising blog and it's everything from accessibility to image choice to um marketing with purpose and how to drive growth through more trusted customer experiences all of the resources that i've been producing with my team can be found that way um i also know i could see that there is also a question on how do you internally sell this this idea and i think it's a journey right and it's a journey of learning and we didn't and i didn't get here overnight it's been a few years now but i think the first order of business is to understand what your core purpose as a company is what is your brand purpose and how does um how do you show up in the world and how can you build a more trusted customer experience i think there's so many opportunities there's there's small tactics and there's big motions that you can that you can do tactics like understanding the customer consumer decision journey and understanding how various dimensions of what it means to be a human being whether you're in one geographical area or you're a parent or you're older or you're younger or a person with a disability or what have you we all have different experiences and what is that journey for your customer that's really like the deliberate curiosity drives incredible insight and you can uncover opportunities that way so um learn go to microsoft learn and marketing with purpose and you can find that by going to my blog just just do a do a search on bing for once [Laughter] definitely do the search one thing uh sticking with you mj is there any advice for driving to change in an organization in your own organization so that they build the muscle uh build the the energy and the will to do inclusive marketing yeah so i just had a really great conversation with an ad agency in london that um we had talked about inclusive marketing just only it was like a couple of years ago and they've been on this path to do exactly what this question is getting to like how do you enable internally how do you get everyone on the same page and they just simply looked at how they currently do business and what are the opportunities that can you can apply an inclusive lens so for instance if you're going to um look at your assets and the audiences and your automation and just what you normally do on your day-to-day basis what would be some activities that you could do to apply an inclusive lens and they created a inclusive marketing checklist for all of their campaigns and it is a way to help their teams feel confident uh it's a journey that i think each and every company should do some research and work that works for for their processes that they already have in place it's not about an add-on campaign and it's not about a separate discipline i really believe that at some point this is the way marketing will be and so it's about building it in to the current systems that you already have and the way that you approach your clients business and that's the same with like designing tech it's about building it in you know hector can can can share with how building it in instead of bolting accessibility on later it works out way better for everyone it's much more cost efficient it's a better experience and it and you don't have to revisit and pull everything apart to redo it it's the same with campaigns make sure that you know you take a look at the marking with purpose playbook you'll find that through going to my blog and it can give you all the data that anyone's asked for data points it's in the playbook and you can make the case for not just inclusive marketing remember marketing is not just promotion marketing is about product design and how you frame your products and what problems you're solving for people so it's it's a much more larger discipline and can really drive growth through more customer um trusted experiences absolutely and hector uh we have one minute left so i'm okay give me up you are closing thoughts i i just like to corroborate what mj's saying here you know when i often think when i when i see companies who've been picked up when they've dropped the ball on accessibility and they kind of try to bolt it on afterwards in the same way that it's much harder to do it digitally and in terms of the technology it's also much harder to get your reputation back if you if you're seen to publicly try and add on inclusion afterwards so whether it whether you're marketing whether you're creating a company whether you're a company culture whether you're creating a product getting that inclusion conversation honestly just a conversation and some cons of rigor on the topic into your project as you kick off i think that's what's going to protect you in the long run as you move forward people love to hear the back story about how you've been deliberately inclusive from the start that's when you actually really take people with you absolutely absolutely and with that unfortunately we've ran out of time so what you have on uh on your screen here is the speaker so feel free to connect with them on linkedin or twitter and we will hopefully have this discussion again at the next big microsoft event ignites so thank you for attending and have a great ignite

2021-03-07 15:05

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