Exploring The Evolution of UX — The Brazilian Perspective
I’ve been invited by Suj Premachandran from Digital Influx to talk about the Evolution of UX from a Brazilian Perspective with Bruna de Castro and Guilherme Skinner. So, I decided to put their questions into a context and write about it, also showing a little bit about the Brazilian scenery.
What is Brazil in first place?
Let’s understand a little bit about what means to be in Brazil. I believe that many people outside Brazil, don’t understand here as it is, actually see our country as a bunch of Amazon forests with some native indians.
About the territory
The Brazilian territory is continental, multi cultural and diversified. Just take a look at the image below that compares it sizes with other countries:
About the distribution of population
So, most of the people in Brazil don’t live in Amazon, they actually live in east coast, highly populated on southeast area (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo).
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How huge is São Paulo
São Paulo is the biggest city in Brazil in terms of population, actually the 4th biggest in the world, considered a megacity.
We also have high technological places, with many unicorns startups and
skyscraper buildings.
Violence reality
But don’t panic. Probably it won’t reach you if you have enough money to live in an elite neighborhood (sad, but true). Actually, most of the Brazilians can’t avoid violence, because they can’t afford a secure place to live. Police and government tries to make violence bubbles into slums places to make peaceful and expensive areas where the richer people can live. If you are an Ux designer in Brazil, probably you will get enough salary to live in a nice place and work on a cool startup at the most beautiful places of São Paulo or Rio.
The Ux design Scenery in Brazil
The best reference to synthesize a panoramic vision about Ux in Brazil is this study: Panorama de UX lead by Carolina Leslie.
I took some insights from this awesome report:
The following one is about the roles of design and the differences of income salary:
Brazil is a very wide country with many different cultures, the most part of the population are afro-descendant, but white people is the majority in UX, also with higher salaries.
Another great insight is about the differences between gender. Women is actually getting less money and lower leadership level roles.
The same difference happens with LGBTQ+ people, sadly:
Now going to the questions about brazil :)
How has the Pandemic effected the way you work & your UX process?
I believe that Ux professionals would be the least impacted by the pandemic situation. Most of them already use digital processes to work and can easily adapt to work remotely. Obviously, many companies fired a huge quantity of employees because of the financial crises caused by COVID. But, at the same time, there are many “Real Digital Companies” that are surfing the wave as an opportunity, hiring many design talents as fast as they can.
The way we design has changed, everything has changed and now we have a “NEW NORMAL”, with less physical contact and much more digital habits. We design based on people behaviors, so now we have to quickly adapt the design subject, where digital isn’t optional anymore.
How can better UX help industries survive the pandemic?
As the “stay home” culture settles down, many other problems increase. One clear example is about the number of domestic violence against woman; it grown 50% in Brazil since quarentine has started. Magazine Luiza, a great e-commerce here in Brazil added a hidden panic button inside their app for women in risk, helping report this kind of violence.
This is a good example of how ux design can help people to go through this hard situation, considering the systemic consequences. Of course there are many other situations that designers can act to improve customers life quality, security and prosperity.
Do you feel the impacts of the pandemic will drastically affect how we interact as human beings both digitally & personally?
Many companies have been forced to be remote, a large part of the population lost their jobs because they couldn't adapt their activity into digital, the way we consume goods and buy stuff has drastically changed. Behind every caos there are opportunities. It's never been so urgent to migrate to digital and evolve.
Do you feel teaching UX in schools would benefit society?
I really believe that teaching design would help Brazilians. But the problem here is even worst. Almost 60% of the populations gets less than $200 monthly income; most of them have just this amount to take care of a whole family. Almost 7% are still illiterate, not been capable to read and write. It means these people also don't understand their rights, their financial perspective and probably doesn't understand what is actually going on about this pandemic situation.
Educational systems are just depending on the internet connection quality. Sadly, 30% of the Brazilians still doesn’t have internet connection, or even a good computer/tablet/smartphone. So the problem is even more challenging just 5% of the populations speaks english, it’s even harder to other countries help Brazilian educational programs.
Conclusion
The situation isn't about the Ux situation, it's about human survival. If you want to help, help as a human being, not as the professional you have became. Many artists are building donation campaigns to help nonprofit organizations that can direct feed poor people and have the right logistics to doing so. As designers, we have to forget a little about about the interface perfection and look directly to the delivered value that really changes people lives.
