Social app development challenges us to code for users’ personal world. Users are giving push-back to ill-fitted assumptions about their own identity — name, gender, sexual orientation, important relationships, and many other attributes that are individually meaningful.
How can we balance users’ realities with an app’s business requirements?
Facebook, Google+, and others are struggling with these questions. Resilient approaches arise from an app’s own foundation. Discover how our earliest choices influence codebase, UX, and development itself. Learn how we can use that knowledge to both inspire the people who use our apps, and to generate the data that we need as developers.
== META ==
Author: Carina C. Zona
Conference: PyCon 2015
City: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Date: April 11, 2015
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYYfVqtcWQY
URL: https://us.pycon.org/2015/schedule/presentation/426/
3. @cczona
Imagine walking through the world knowing that everyone’s first assumptions
about how you see yourself, who you love, and what feels right for you are
completely wrong. Now imagine signing up for a cool website, and then being
required to select an option from a drop-down menu that doesn’t include
anything that represents you....
You’ll feel defeated.You’ll want to argue that whatever they think they’re
learning from that drop-down menu, it’s not really true.You’ll want to tell
them that they’re adding to your humiliation by making you do this.You’ll want
to tell them that they’re missing a huge part of you…
—Sarah Dopp
47. @cczona
...the most complicated thing I’ve ever
spent a lot of time learning about.
And I’ve spent a lot of time learning about
quantum mechanics...
—Randall Munroe, xkcd
49. @cczona
"Which pronouns do
you prefer?"
he/him/himself/his/his
she/her/herself/hers/her
they/them/themself/theirs/their
it/it/itself/its/its
by name
50. @cczona
"Which pronouns do
you prefer?"
he/him/himself/his/his
she/her/herself/hers/her
they/them/themself/theirs/their
personal name
other: ____________
51. @cczona
"Which pronouns do
you prefer?"
he/him/himself/his/his
she/her/herself/hers/her
they/them/themself/theirs/their
personal name
other: ____________
59. @cczona
Mitch
"I was orphaned.
The name — my birth
name or given name —
didn't go anywhere.
I didn't feel a connection
to it based on any sort of
lineage that I could trace
back anywhere."
70. @cczona
Mental Schema
• Pre-conceived ideas
• Framework for representing some
aspect of the world
• System of organizing & perceiving
new information
71. @cczona
Database Schema
• Structure described in the database's
language
• Blueprint for database construction
• Describes how the real world is being
modeled
121. @cczona
I like to be truthful, and "It's Complicated"
is really deceiving. It is not complicated. I
am separated from my husband, who I am
still legally married to.
—Facebook user
122. @cczona
I just can't stand the thought of changing it to
widow, but I don't want it to say single either. It
will be 3 years on September. I don't want to
hurt his family by making the change, either.
- Facebook user
140. @cczona
Data Science &
Information Architecture
•Sociological normalization
•Database normalization
•Using Machine Learning On Social Networks To Figure Out WhatYou Should
Read On The Web
•NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques
•"Data & Reality," by William Kent
• "Bad Data Handbook," Q Ethan McCallum
•Data Science of the Facebook World
142. @cczona
Sex & Genders
•“Disalienation:Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora”
•“Gender & Drop Down Menus”
•“Sex & Gender”
•“Bucket Gender”
•"Recommendations for Inclusive Data Collection of Trans People"
•"Facebook goes beyond gender"
143. @cczona
Names
•"Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"
•"Your Last Name Contains Invalid Characters"
•W3C Internationalization: "Personal Names Around the World"
•Spanish Names
•Chinese Names
147. @cczona
More
•"Redesigning the Country Selector"
•"American Religious Identification Survey, Summary Report 2008"
•"Linguistic Potluck: Crowdsourcing Internationalization in Rails"
149. @cczona
Many Thanks
André Arko
Chiu-Ki Chan
Corey Haines
Estelle Weyl
Heather Rivers
Jack Danger Canty
Jeremy Dunck
Josh Susser
Michele Titolo
NIRD
Renée DeVoursney
Sarah Mei
San Francisco Sex Information
Sylvain Abélard
Yoz Grahame
150. Get in Touch
Carina C. Zona
@cczona
http://cczona.com
cczona@gmail.com
http://slideshare.net/cczona