Original subtitles

My name is Akhil, and I am a UX designer at Google.

I'm a part of the Next Billion Users team.

We design products for

users that are coming online for the first time.

In my job, I make sure that people

can interface seamlessly with technology.

An example of that would be,

let's say you want to send your mom a text

and the phone has the capability to send a text.

My job is to bridge that gap and make sure that you

can tell the phone to send a text to your mom.

Now if done well,

you won't be pulling your hair.

The strange thing about UX design is that

you won't really notice it if it's good design.

You only notice it when it's bad.

There's about a billion users

that are going to come online

from countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico.

These users have slightly different constraints

from users that we typically design for.

One of them is that a lot of these users are

using low-end devices. What does that mean?

It could mean that they don't

have enough storage on their phone,

which means they can't install a big enough app.

That's an example of using a low-storage device.

Sometimes they won't have access to data or

they have access to flaky data.

You want to make sure that your app works

offline just as well as it works online.

Another example could be literacy.

A lot of these users aren't literate

or they might not speak English,

whereas a lot of the internet

is serving people who speak English.

That's another thing to think about.

How do we make multilingual interfaces?

Or how do we make interfaces that

don't rely on language at all for someone who can't read?

An interesting example of this could be the music icon.

Something as simple as

a music icon that we take for granted.

The music note is something that a lot of

people don't understand, or they don't know what it means.

The reason for that, we think

is because the music icon is

a very Western classical music piece of iconography.

Since a lot of users aren't exposed to that,

they don't actually know what that icon means.

I think when technology is built correctly,

it can be a very effective tool.

For things like navigating to a place or finding

a partner or seeking information or learning a new skill.

I don't think your access to these things should

be based on how old or new you are to technology.

A lot of our users that are coming online for

the first time aren't often confident with technology.

And so to not design for them and

not help them have

access to the internet and to technology,

it feels like a great disservice to them.