Interview with Carina C Zona

user groups with lots to say interviews and more no way sharing great ideas in the tech community fascinating conversations a plethora of information find out for yourself today at uktastic.com hi it’s Mike with uktastic I’m sitting here at the SCNA 2013 conference in Chicago right now I’m sitting down with Karina Sisona who is just giving a talk on schemas for the real world she talked about how we can think or we should think more about how we’re either inclusive our applications are inclusive or exclusive and how we’re approaching our users and think about how they feel using our software I think it’s great taking the time to sit down with me I really appreciate it oh thanks I want to do this for a while this is great great so so your talk can you tell us a little bit more about what’s what you’re presentation was and how you came to that topic yeah it’s always a little bit hard to summarize because it’s um it’s unusual I think it’s not something we have books about where we’ve already had some thoughts planted but essentially it really comes out of my work as both a developer and a sex educator and how those combined gave me some insights into how people feel about software I think a lot of times we’re creating features and we’re really excited about them so we have a sense of our own excitement but we don’t have a really good idea of how the users feel and particularly when they’re you know quite the opposite about excited because when people are really unhappy what they do is they walk away from an app right they don’t they don’t let you know that that this isn’t working for them so we lack that feedback loop and so I got to hear from a lot of people as a sex educator they often bring up questions that are were initially unexpected to me right you know if you think sex educator a lot of people just think in terms of you know tell me how to have sex which are questions that occasionally come up but most of time it’s actually much broader throughout our lifetime we have different ways in which we as a sexual being and those around us of a sexual being have things come up questions that don’t really show them books how do I relate to people how do I manage a relationship you know how things change in my life when I’m saying married or have children those are all really relevant and they are really the topic for me and you mentioned also that about being empathetic that these people are often embarrassed yeah yeah you can’t be judgmental yeah so the work I do is a sex educator is for a group called San Francisco sex at San Francisco sex information SF SI wow we’re used to just saying Svisi so the actual names are actually hard for me to remember but you can just say Svisi yeah so we run a hotline it’s been run for 40 years completely by volunteers and there’s a really strict educational program behind that that’s kind of world-renowned so one of the things that was really taught to us in training is that essentially there are two common questions that come up and neither of them is what one would predict but one is essentially am i normal right tremendous number of questions come down to am i normal not how do I do something you know is that okay but just are other people in the world like me and it really struck me that in any part of our lives and world that comes up all the time in different ways you know and am I am I not right in some way are there other people like me and can I find them you know can I have people in the world that validate my experience and my identity you know the choices that I make all that kind of stuff all the time we’re telling people I don’t recognize you so you’re wrong and software is a really good or bad depending on how you look at that place where that happens where our software is really it is developed within the constraints of our own imagination and so where we don’t have a good sense of how marginalized people exist whatever their dimension is of being marginalized and god knows there’s infinite then then we can’t really serve them and so we create these values or experiences completely oblivious to it it’s definitely not out of some sort of sense of you know you don’t belong you shouldn’t use our app it’s just our own you know a lack of awareness of how incredibly diverse humans are and how we relate to each other and what we care about as individuals and you know how we interact with each other and what we care about as individuals and you know the people in our lives how we care about them how we would describe ourselves to others not just in a very personal way but things like you don’t get asked questions like you know what’s your profession and I was really struck for instance kind of early you know we used to have those paper forms for magazines for instance that ask you like which of these ten categories do you work in and I always look at that and you know regardless of what I was doing go you know and it’s so funny you mention it because I think about how I’m I personally for most of tend to be in the the wire I’m let’s see I’m I’m not quite middle-aged white guy you know in the Midwest who speaks English in America and I fall pretty much in inside of the the brackets for most things but even going on to a business site and saying what kind of business do you have and I try to do something with you classic I’m like I am none of these and this is so frustrating because I don’t want to be any of those yeah I’m not the sales company and you’re gonna miss you’re gonna misunderstand me based on whatever I choose none of them are close and I’m gonna pick something I’m like this is kind of like over there yeah yeah yeah well the other one it’s really fun is when they have stuff like web and software engineering and I’m looking at going you forced me to pick one I don’t know how to answer your question yeah and then you’re trying to think about well what a value I’m gonna get if I from this specific source if I say web you know what are they doing that’s a good point you know what are they doing with this information so in this context I would say web maybe because I care more about some certain aspect yeah but if they’re giving me libraries to do calculations well then I might just say I’m a software developer yeah it’s hard to know and a fair number of times or ask a question because they want to know how to monetize your data right and so they’re going to be sending stuff that you weren’t expecting or adapting the software in some way to something that they think is is most suited to you but may not be so so I was like I said I was really interested in this idea that you know everywhere we we are constantly making choices for other people on who they’re allowed to be essentially or who they’re allowed to describe themselves as even on really you know sort of bland stuff like what’s your job right and certainly much more personal much more personal things and so this talk really came it evolved over a series of years actually where I was just collecting information out of just interest it was really interesting to me and I wanted to be more aware and it was on a great range of topics one of the ones that I’ve really been exploring most recently is names our understanding and in any given country of what a name is it can be is incredibly culturally constrained when one of the interesting things to me for instance was to learn that the British think it’s really weird that Americans have this whole middle name concept middle initial concept but if you look at most Americans you know websites especially it’ll be first it’ll last right and we could strain it usually to initial to which is all kind of funky there are many countries in the world in which well for instance a lot of times we’re at least savvy enough to know that surname and last name are close to being the same but we’re too we’re too foolish in recognizing that they’re not they may seem similar but they can actually be really different good example is say China where a surname and a last name are not the same because one’s family name is first so anybody who is Chinese for instance filling in one of these Western forums has to ask themselves what do you really want for me as last name are you asking what is what is the last in my names or are you asking me something about you know my family and so it becomes complex and this is this doesn’t need to be complex at all there were some other interesting cases where I as I started digging in deeper I learned that people who descend from Spanish or Portuguese usually have some sort of tradition of building last names based on both the paternal and maternal side of the family and so you get last names we’re going to call them last names that can be really long and this is this is a cultural decision that we honor both sides of our family and so when you have children your last name is not the same as their last name because they have different parents right then your parents and so each time you’ve got a family with different last names but they they can see their family tree reflected that name and all of it is important and so we have a lot of times as Americans this this constraint on length and I you saw an example of that in my talk you know where the field like has to be between one and five characters for your 20 I’m sorry between one and twenty characters for a name there are a tremendous number of people who have to decide now what part of my name am I going to throw out which part of my family tree in history am I just going to pretend doesn’t exist that’s crazy right our databases can totally tolerate things like varied length fields yeah it’s not 1972 where we have a right a tumbler that’s trying to hold you know right bits of data right the difference between cars and bar cars at this point is really important there’s there’s no longer any reason why we need to be that conservative about reserving space for a field yeah because the trade-offs aren’t there yeah maybe back in when it was just oh my gosh we have a computer okay all right I gotta and people were just like oh I got a trunk in my name okay fine that’s what computers need and they were thinking about it right now we can think about what does a person need right what do they need right to to have their yeah their their personhood perspective I do want to just jump back to a point when you were talking about with the sex education when you said am I normal and in thinking about our our interfaces how many times do we look at an interface and go am i stupid or is everybody having problems with this you know is is healthcare.gov broken or am i stupid yeah a lot of users will think they’re the ones so that’s it sounds like that’s a theme in our lives like how do we in my am i normal am i normal for not having this yeah understanding what’s going on yeah well an aside having to raise those questions for yourself if you conclude the answer is it’s not me then you know that can be really alienating and potentially really you know provoking that that person you know to be told you’re not you’re not normal we don’t recognize you you’re you know you you need to to adjust yourself you you need to fit better and that that can be the subliminal message that people get out of those is I’m not welcome here you know one of the examples I bring up in the talk for instance is Facebook with a fair amount of lobbying of Facebook eventually they added a relationship status of open relationship and that seemed like a big step except that they only allow you to list one partner so it’s as if you’re you know married or otherwise in some sort of relationship where there’s one-to-one partner that’s a problem because now that person can say they’re in an open relationship but they have to choose who essentially is the real relationship which is the point of an open relationship is they’re legitimate all of your relationships are legitimate and there’s you know there may or not be a rank order to them where you could say this is the top most relationship so that’s something that can be you know really painful to have to make a choice like that you know and also who’s gonna be mad at me right if I choose this partner and say like this is the run I’m gonna tell you publicly about that really says like you know what does that say maybe I’m ashamed of you or you’re not you know you’re less important to me which maybe didn’t affect the person who had to fill out the form but it does have a ripple effect down to somebody else who feels like our lifestyle isn’t right and that’s beyond lifestyle I mean that’s that’s my relationships I mean how much more personal can you get then you know who do you love I think another problem with that kind of stuff is even if you can kind of figure out a solution that works for you when you have to make a choice down to one it can feel like in some way you’re being closeted that you’re saying to the rest of the world you know this is the only one that counts or this is the only one I’m willing to talk about this is the only person I really recognize and if that’s not true for you it can feel like a great big lie to both both the person who’s saying that and others who are looking upon that so we’ve got a lot of problems and relationship status isn’t the only one it’s a particularly interesting one it’s very obvious and it’s it it also has a little bit of a little edge enough to it to make it an interesting yeah yeah it’s interesting because I get people coming up to me after this talk and there are some people who inevitably relate to it very personally and typically the two topics on which they really are most sort of expressing gratitude that I addressed it are people who are transgender and people who are in open relationships and friends of both of those groups because those those parts of their lives and their personhood are so rarely recognized not just on apps although it’s a real big problem there but in general so to have someone say we don’t have the right as developers to decide who is valid and not is for them you know that’s been something they’ve ranted about and to finally have one person say we’re wrong as developers they’re not wrong as people is something you know that uncommon enough that they finally got to have their point of view raised at all and that’s really a neat thing to be able to be in that position but it shouldn’t be one person it should be all of us thinking in those terms all the time and it also makes me think about how that you know as developers or social smart those of you the ones who are paying attention to what’s going on yeah and and and aware of what’s some of the ramifications of our decisions and I also just recently learned that there’s even going to be legal changes around this with the new legislation protecting transsexual bisexual and transgender so there’s there’s me more coming out of this and just we’re evolving as a society there’s also going to be you have to be aware of these things so that way when you’re designing your app you may might not need to be want to be in a place where you’re going to be you’re going to have to be aware of these things so that way when you’re designing your app you may might not need to be one to be in a place where you’re going to be you might not need to be one to be in a place where you’re going to be transgressing some law yeah so this is something that’s actually really rapidly changing it in regards to gender just about a year ago New South Wales Australia opened up through a court case a third category of gender so that one a particular person who had pulled this lawsuit get done this lawsuit won the right to essentially not be described as either male or female so that is a officially legitimate way that you can be described on your passport and your driver’s license the larger country overall of Australia then made it essentially a similar law and then this year a couple months ago Germany kind of out of the blue I’m sure there actually was a lot of people lobbying for this but it just sort of showed up all sudden that they passed a law related not so much to transgender people but because they were recognizing that some children are born with indeterminate genitalia which means that whatever gender they’ve been putting on a on a birth certificate may not be how the child grows up and in regards themselves and how their body develops so Germany as of last week it became official is now allowing birth certificates to have a gender either indeterminate or blank so we have right now this reality which is rapidly developing of binary gender it’s not going to work not just from a user experience perspective but from a legal perspective if we want to know someone’s you know legal name legal gender legal address we’re gonna have to be open to the fact that those things are not what we assume they are how do we cope with that how do we how do we remain flexible enough for the world as it’s constantly changing because it is always and this isn’t the only dimension on which it is always so that was that was really an interesting discovery and for me a surprising development I spoke in Australia a couple of months ago and that they were thrilled that I brought up those laws in Australia because there it’s it’s fresh and very familiar it’s been a big topic of discussion and they were excited that anyone else outside of Australia was worried about at all you know thank you for recognizing us yeah you know what’s going on in Australia where are you from they could tell from the accent ah well thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me I enjoyed your talk and I enjoyed our conversation thank you very much I did too all right user groups with lots to say interviews and more no way sharing great ideas in the tech community fascinating conversations a plethora of information find out for yourself today at uktastic.com