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Notarize gender field

yeah definitely really excited to be here today and talk about a topic that is definitely personally important to me but i'll go ahead and get rolling um so first just a little bit about me i'm alex i started working in web development uh two or three years ago after transitioning from a career in a video production i identify as as non-binary and queer and uh i like to not get frustrated filling out forms on the internet which i think most people could uh get on board with and you know that is a lot of the reason why that this is um something of personal important importance to me i work at salvas labs we're located in downtown durham well we're located remotely but for the most part based out of downtown durham and we focus a lot on user experience when we're building uh sites and and apps and whatever the case may be user experience is one of the the biggest focuses in in what we do and along with that we've had a lot of conversations internally about um you know what user experience looks like beyond the traditional tenants and just um based accessibility and and you know other ways we can think about that so as far as what we'll cover um let's give a quick introduction on the talk go over um some terms and related terminology just to make sure everyone's on a level playing field in terms of that uh talk about why does this matter why should you be worried about it uh dig a little bit into assumptions we're making about users and unconscious bias uh and then finally um learn to ask why before how going beyond the form field and and thinking about it beyond a user interface perspective and feel free to drop questions in the q a chat as we go um i'll try and answer things as we go and if i don't see them then we'll definitely make discussion time at the end so i want you to think about how many online forms you fill out in a year which is a lot you know i think even in a month we're all filming out a lot of online forms whether it's you know facebook or twitter profile you know filling out medical history at the doctor's office surveys all sorts of things that you're online and providing information about yourself and some of the standard questions so to speak that come on those are things like your name uh your birthday to get your age your email getting a password and extremely frequently is gender um and these are just two example forms i pulled online but gender frequently is one of those standard questions and i think it's one that most of us don't think about and i myself had not really thought about at all until a couple of years ago and so thinking of all those online forms you filled out have you ever had to select other or prefer not to say as an option in a field or just not had anything to choose um or have you ever had to submit a required field that was information that you just didn't want to share with whatever it is you were signing up for um i know it's an experience i've had i know it's an experience a lot of under underrepresented minority groups have had and you know transgender people specifically specific to this talk but it's definitely something that's common and informs throughout and just as a quick disclaimer i'm not here to talk about politics or social justice or push any kind of agenda it's something like i said that's that's passionate to me i'm passionate about just because of my identity but i i don't want to have a little conversation and rather i'm here to advocate for your users um and users are going trans non-binary users are people that are going to exist within your user base whether you agree with their identity or not and in the same way we all build accessible sites for a small percentage of users that are visually or mobility impaired because we know it's important to create an equal and accessible user experience for them my challenge is to be building positive and good user experiences for users across an array of demographics and everything i'm talking about here is pretty specific to gender but i think can be applied across a lot of different demographic groups overall i just want to advocate for users and do the best i can there and you know leave all the nasty politics out of it uh so quick primer on words um definitely around uh gender and gender identity there can be a few terms thrown around that people aren't always familiar with and one of the big things there is is differentiating between gender and sex and a lot of times to explain this i use the gender-bred person which is a really great tool and resource if you're ever trying to learn more about some of this terminol terminology and vocabulary they're available at genderbread.org but the purpose basically is to differentiate and make the point that gender identity uh your biological sex your gender expression and your sexuality are all different things and none of them are the same none of them can be lumped in together and while they certainly combine to create the person you are they should all be thought about kind of independently and that's more or less what um the group that makes the gender red person are trying to express uh and so like i said one of the primary things that tends to come up here is the difference between um sex and gender um and sex you know can be thought about basically as you know physiological attributes uh genitalia chromosomes hormones things like that whereas gender identity is more in here it's a psychological sense of self and you know who you know yourself to be um and then gender expression uh being that outward expression and kind of the way you present yourself to the world uh and the other way the gender red person is interesting is it encourages people to think about these things on a continuum so it's not necessarily an identity of i feel like a man or i feel like a woman but the idea that we can feel both um and on different levels so you know we someone who identifies solely as a woman would probably be pretty along that continuum of womanness and either not on that continuum or pretty low of madness but i like this example because it leaves room for there to be a lot of flexibility in how people identify and to give kind of an example of how someone would actually look on this i tried to like put my identity in into this scale which you know is not an easy thing to try to try and do and quantify into three uh small little sliders um but you know the idea being that you know as a non-binary person i pretty much fall in the middle there and you know while i present more masculinely biologically i'm more female so that's you know uh and i present that mostly just as a case of like i want you to think about who users like this might be what they look like case in point um and what's nice you know everyone's gonna be a little bit different on that and and have different preferences as far as names and pronouns and and things like that uh as far as some other quick definitions uh you might hear the the term cisgender a lot uh which simply means that uh your gender lines up with the sex you were assigned at birth oh when i say assigned at birth it's you know the doctor is there and says aha it's a boy and puts mail on the birth certificate that would be your birth assigned sex so if you were born male and identify as a man you would be cisgender generally speaking um and transgender is just exactly the opposite of that it's someone who's gender identified identity is different than the sex that they were assigned at birth and then non-binary is basically an umbrella term for folks who don't identify exclusively as male or exclusively as female and falls somewhere in the middle there and sometimes that might look like someone choosing to be androgynous sometimes that might look like someone skewing slightly masculine center or feminine center or switching back and forth and there are a lot of identities that fall under there i listed a few there at the bottom as much as i would like to be able to ex explain all the nuance there there certainly isn't time for that in this presentation um but the the point being that non-binary is is this in between kind of gray area uh to think of and and folks who aren't identifying one way or the other on that gender binary so to speak so why does this matter um and to talk about why this matters it for me it's pretty simple but i like to go back and think about what user experience and ux design is all about um and i kind of pulled some quotes from my co-workers as well as uh cruising through the internet and some thoughts of you know what is ux design all about and obviously this is something that everyone will define a little differently and see a little bit differently but you know some of the things i pulled out are creating things for the people uh solving problems with empathy and re removing obstacles and friction from your user's path um creating positive emotions establishing trust making accessible interfaces all of this is something that can go into to ux design and and some of the goals in that and pay attention to the bolded words because those will carry us a little bit into the next slide um and i have a couple quotes on the next slide that are from a company called league has a really great post on medium about creating inclusive gender inputs and as part of that they did some user testing and surveys and so a couple of these quotes are what they included within that blog so one of them is i feel like i'm a person that doesn't get reflected in forms it's invalidating it's possible folks will identify with one of the options on a form when they don't it can be a hurtful reminder that their journey is not reflected and for me the entire answer of why does this matter lies here and that if we're talking about user experience and ux design we're talking about building experiences and interfaces for the people using them you know we want to get those positive emotions we want it to be accessible we want our users to trust us and have empathy when using them and when you juxtapose those with words like invalidating and hurtful and you know having someone's journey not being reflected in the world to me that's the whole answer is simply that if a user has come to my site or try to use a tool i've created and they feel invalidated by it then they're probably not going to use that tool they're certainly not going to recommend it to somebody else and i haven't left them with a very good experience regardless of how good that tool might be um so next i'll dig in a little bit on some of the assumptions we make about our users and i know uh we can talk and con unconscious bias to death in this field a little bit but i do want to touch on it um because it's certainly important to this and and all of our work um and really what i want to say is everyone battles unconscious bias you could be the most woke person in the world and still this kind of stuff works itself in and the reason why is because everything we do is informed by our own life experience you know when i'm building out an interface the first person that i'm testing that on is me um or occasionally you know a co-worker being like hey i'm trying to do this do you think this works and obviously of course we're going through a lot more tests and qa specifically around uh accessibility and usability but as we're building tools the reality is we're we're the first person we're testing and all we have there is our own life experience and so with an idea of unconscious bias and how that can show up and work this happened i guess a month or so ago someone did a little experiment and uploaded both these photos on the right to twitter to see where the twitter algorithm would fix would choose as the focus point and obviously in the case of this tweet it shows uh mitch mcconnell mcconnell in both cases and a lot of people ended up doing a lot of variations on this where they changed cut thai colors or using different people and images uh using different dress and uh every variation it seemed to be kind of this consistent theme of this algorithm choosing to to show white people over um black people or people of color um and you know i actually really enjoyed enjoying might not be the right word but reading some of the twitter developers response to this and you know simply saying that wow you know this is something that we were actively trying to work against um you know we ran this through some some bias testing to make sure that this wasn't the case but obviously we missed something we're going to take a look at it again which to me is a perfect example of this wasn't intentional this is something they were actively working to combat and it still happened which again is just simply that your own user experience working your own experience in the world working its way into an actual user's experience this is another similar case uh you know photo upload doesn't meet criteria because the subject's eyes are closed um obviously the person's eyes are open but if an algorithm is used to isn't used to seeing that kind of image or that kind of look then obviously the algorithm is not going to know to recognize that and again this is something that is unintentional um unintentional and just kind of result the way it is and the only reason i bring these up is simply to say it's okay to like make mistakes we're we all are not going to be perfect every single time and the best we can do is be aware of it uh and quite simply the best way to to realize how to fix these problems is to realize that you do make assumptions about users i make assumptions about users all the time i usually make assumptions that they will be more intuitive that they are but it's something all of us uh do as developers and i'm actually going to skip over the next slide um and with all that it just boils down to we don't know what we don't know so i think many of you like me growing up probably grew up with the idea that there are two genders male and female that's it um that's what i knew to be true until three or four years ago so personally you know if i was creating a form it would never occur to me to give any option other than male or female and i know that's the case for a lot of people now is you don't know what you don't know and if you've never thought about there being a third or fourth or different option on gender fields then that's okay it's not criticism it's it's simply a way to learn and become more informed and try and find ways that you can create these user experiences and kind of um put aside that assumption that you've carried for however many years um so with a lot of that context uh and definition kind of things we have i'll dig into asking why before how and what i mean here is the question of how do we make this gender field as inclusive as possible which is a great question to ask and one that i love to see people ask but before we get there we need to start with why do we need to ask for this at all and again this talk is specific to gender but this you know can be anything why do we need to ask for users race why do we need to ask for their age why are we asking for this data from our user and how are we going to use it and more importantly how is that information going to create a better experience for the user if they offer that information to us we need to be using it uh in an effective way um so a lot of things that come up uh specifically to gender in this regard is demographics um so obviously a lot of all of us i think get demographics on who is using our our site who's using our tool um and the question to dig in there is why is gender specifically important in that demographic data so let's say you pull data and you find out that 75 of your users identify as male okay that's great what are you going to do with that information is it well since most of our users are male we need to appeal to them more by having a more masculine design maybe but at that point what about your other 25 users that aren't male are you going to choose to do something that might off-put them to appeal to that larger demographic um is that really the most effective thing to be basing designs off of and that's just kind of an off the cut cuff um example but simply put how are you using that data are using an effective way and if you're not challenge why you're asking for it jonathan i see you said here that there's a parallel here with responsible data collection um if you're going to plan some send someone a coupon during their birthday night the month the only detail to collect this month not the full birth date um and to be intentional and inclusive when collecting information and you're absolutely right um all of that plays in here is stopping and asking why are we asking for this data how are we using it and like i said you know it's a perfect example jonathan that this applies way beyond gender um and obviously it's just my specific focus another example uh is legal in medical records um so yeah you know let's say you're filling out medical records for your doctor's office online um obviously you're really concerned about security and privacy in that case um and that's a perfect example of perhaps you should be asking for sex instead of gender um because more than likely that's the information you need and if a person's sex is the information you need then that's the information you ask for um which kind of leads the the last question there is if you're using that gender field to deduce something if you're trying to figure out pronouns don't just try and figure it out based off one field ask specifically for the information you need and more importantly tell the user why you're asking for it and as a personal aside uh you can tell the user why you're asking for it but it also really helps if it's a compelling reason i know recently i was going through a signup form with a streaming service and gender was a required field and it had a little uh i could hover and see why are we asking for this information it's like well we're asking to give you a more personalized um set of recommendations on what to watch which to me was just not a good enough reason because for me i don't know how they could possibly construe what i want to watch based off of my gender so it's think about why you need that information and also making that a compelling case uh to your user and like i said this is a conversation that we have a lot on our team and actually led us to make a tool around this um called should i ask for gender which is just simply as should i ask for gender.com uh and the idea there is folks can go through a quiz uh it'll take you to an answer that said no you should avoid asking for gender and here's why or yes you have a great use case or maybe but here are some things to consider and along with that providing some resources uh and a glossary of terms to help people understand things more and you know one of the goals we had in creating this was simply to create a more accessible and easy or easy as can be tool that folks can share with other people so the day after we launched this uh i had a friend text me and say hey i'm working on this site with a client um i think it was like a high school or something and their interest form uh has gender on it what what should that look like do you think we even need that there and i was like oh my gosh your timing is perfect let me send you this website um because it has some of the resources that will be helpful that you can then you know share with your client which was awesome and thanks guys for that feedback definitely excited about creating that tool and hopefully making it a little bit easier for people to ask that question and help other people think about it uh in the last section here is thinking beyond the form field in terms of user experience so again i think the very well-intentioned good question people ask is how do i create this inclusive form field that's great and that's good but user experience extends far beyond that form field um and to illustrate this i just want you to think about user story as users realize the new gender identity and they're going through the process and they've changed their name um obviously using a different gender they've changed their email to align with the new name they've had for themselves and simply are you equipped to handle that and you would think that most people would say yes that seems like a very obvious thing i should be able to be handled but you would be surprised at how difficult this is in some places so some questions to think of here to reduce the friction uh for users going through this is can users update their data are you giving them edit access on their own data so you know i've run into a name field not being editable more times than i think i could even count at this at this point um and sometimes depending if it depending on the service it might require a phone call which i'm a millennial i don't like phone calls if i can't do it online i get i get really grouchy um but you know sometimes it happens but that is all part of the user experience is if i'm going through your site and trying to find a way to change my name and i realize i'm going to have to call you and figure it out i'm not feeling great i'm feeling a little bit grumpy versus just being able to change it there with an online form in the same place that i created the profile another thing to think about in reducing that friction is this is a repeated action so we talked about how many form fields you grow up you fill out any year think about how many profiles you have that exist and you have to change your name and your email on all of them all with different processes so my challenge is always to strive to be the pleasant surprise uh throughout that process so you know while users are slogging through and on the phone and sending off emails whatever the case may be be the one that makes it really easy you can stop and smile and be like oh thank you for this thank you for this gift of my time because we don't want our users to be stuck and encountering friction and not being able to get through things and with that is challenging the process and affecting change at higher levels so a lot of times a phone call is required is because they need to run it through some other department or someone specifically has to make that change as people building the sites as people building or advocating for a product i always advocate that we take on that burden the burden should be on us there not on our users um you know giving the users a simple form that says give us all this information here's how it's gonna go we'll let you know what happens the terrible voice wrecking yeah yes nothing worse than calling customer service i agree with you you all in the chat for sure uh and finally in terms of reducing friction is propagation so when i hit save on that form i assume that that change is going to be visible everywhere across that site and especially in the page that i'm on and surprisingly that doesn't happen all the time uh kathleen said one of the designers avoid asking for gender how do you make sure you don't fall into there are no women on the internet issue i tend to find gender isn't directly specified online and people default to assuming everyone is male yes absolutely and i think that's a good question um and it's the same thing you know when you look at unisex t-shirts unisex t-shirts or male t-shirts um a lot of things default to mail on the internet and i think you know one of the easiest ways to figure out if you are is having women and females involved in the process which obviously speaks to one of the issues we have in this industry is is diversity and having people in the room that can they can understand and point out uh where some things might you know be defaulting to a male perspective and i guess you know the other thing that i would always challenge people to is if you are using that demographic data in a specific way and notice that 75 percent of my users are male and only 25 are female perhaps the data usage there isn't in how can i serve the majority of my audience it's asking how can i serve this minority and get more people that don't identify as male to to use my product or site or service legal name changes um are kind of a different animal and i don't think in most case would be something that we would be handling in open source projects but banks in particular medical services mostly banks it feels like have legal name changes but if that is ever something you run into universities for sure um if someone's changed their name legally they have documentation um they already have it like that's just what happens when you change your name legally so the user is always going to be able to verify that legal name change and you just need to give them an avenue to be able to do that and of course going back to asking why do you need a legal name if you just need to know what to call them ask for your name ask for their name uh and then always keep in mind that a lot of times people ask for a preferred name and i know a lot of folks uh get really put off by that and the idea that names not a preference it's it's just their name so i see a lot of ways people get around this is simply asking what do we call you or what name do you go by or something similar to that and having that be your primary source for the name versus you know the legal one and only using that legal information where it needs to be changed it's a good example of a user-friendly process in this regard is paypal where next your name they have a little thing that says do you need to change your name uh and you can choose between uh updating you know a nickname making a minor correction or changing your legal name now change your legal name they say upload your id upload your documentation and we'll handle it and that's exactly the kind of user experience i think we need to strive for is i'm sure paypal has to do something on their back end to push that through and make it all official but the point is that they're taking that burden and not putting it on the user and furthermore they're even giving you an option to upload it from your phone too uh frustrating processes from my own personal experience and i think if you're in this chat these are probably not things that you're um encountering or have to run into but simply uh one credit card company i was trying to change my name with i literally could not do it i felt terrible for the person i was talking to on the phone because she was trying so so hard and realized that she just like did not have the power to change my first name and so ultimately i had to send them a letter via snail mail saying what i needed which as far as user experience goes is pretty horrifying if i have to drop something in the mail and wait uh a full week or whatever it is and you know if you contrast that with a different credit card company where i send a secure message and they're like okay great um another one was a utility company their online portal i had to go get a form notarized verifying that my certified court order of a name change was a certified court order i've never figured that one out again as far as user experience goes if i have to go to a bank and send you a form then i'm frustrated um and then there's one account where it's just impossible for me to change my name period still haven't done it um so it's things like those that if you're asking for these things that this is a consideration you're making is you know when i say beyond the form field this is the stuff that i mean is that it's not just i've asked you for your gender in a responsible way but that i've created a really positive user experience for you throughout my entire site and beyond the site and just with you know our organization as a whole so for the summary the too long didn't read version have a compelling reason to ask for gender explain to the user why you're asking for it give users the control to change their information put that process in place reduce the friction as much as possible check on your assumptions uh you know even if you can't relate to a person's life experience do what you can to understand and empathize with them and figure out what you can do to make them have a good experience with with your your product and last you know these trans and non-gender non-conforming folks exist they're using tools they're using products every day um and their experience matters just as much as the next person so that is what i've got and obviously already some discussion in the chat there and definitely happy to open it up to more questions with the last few minutes we have here thank you maria jonathan yes names are not a preference preferred pronouns is definitely another pet peeve that comes up thank you so much lucia i definitely agreed there gail um i'm really fortunate to work for a place that is focused so much on inclusivity and hopefully it's something that uh we can keep bringing to people in the future um let's see uh do you have any resources for new devs to learn more somebody asked and i do let me pull up a couple options so i mentioned that um that medium article that had some of the user stories there i'll paste that in i think this is a really good resource i also saw mention on the gender bread person paste that in and actually i think my best collection of resources in regards to this is on that should i ask for gender website i'll also paste in uh and the resources here really go through you know a lot of things that are specific to um clips to development some are simply like glossary terms transgender lots of different things but that's kind of my best set of resources india yeah checking accounts uh looking into processes for updating personal information it's a it's a wild ride uh let's see with the number of options for gender and pronouns feels like a free text input is the best way to let people provide their information are there some best practices for reconciling information and aggregate um other concern is users who needs to use those fields yeah and this is what's really challenging is with that many gender identities it it is incredibly difficult to have a free text field um in large part because the data storage is so challenging and actually this um principles for inclusive gender inputs i really like the process they go through here and actually creating fields kind of like this one that are multi-select field where you have the option of adding one uh that might not be there um i i think that i've struggled a little bit with the free text fields i'll have to i feel like i at some point had something uh had read something pretty concrete um outside of that on on ways to handle it but there are uh some resources out there that'll give you a list of of possible fields to to fill a select box but yeah i think the best we can do in terms of combating against people who are providing hurtful or mocking kind of information is um you know filtering out some words you know words that we know to be derogatory which is a huge pain on the developer side um or yeah you know part of the problem is aggregating it is just a tough uh from that developer perspective and actually i do remember the resource that was good there which is and this article when binary code won't accommodate non-binary people is actually what got me started down that path so that might be a good read gonna be very predictive uh yeah multiple choice options male female other um i think for me gender field should always be optional i think that is 100 of the time and kind of one of the most important things you can do um and i think there's a case for obviously male female if it is a required field at least having the option of prefer not to answer um i like to avoid the word other because um nobody wants to like be considered an other so another thing i've seen people do a lot is uh you know male female and then having a radio option for self-identify and if you select that option um a text field can appear that they can put in their own custom input so that's another option as well thank you for having me you're here we really enjoy the session mr alex and that was a lot to learn and really appreciate it absolutely it was a pleasure i always like um sharing the good word and talking about it especially with some like-minded folks which it looks like we have you