Let’s Build a Better Future for Tech — Intentionally
Our new Build with Intention Toolkit helps to identify ethical risks and drive opportunities to include and advocate for all people.
Ethical and inclusive tech can’t wait. We, at Salesforce, don’t have all the answers, but we know that changing the tech industry to be more intentional about inclusion and ethics can’t be done by one organization alone. That’s why we are sharing our learnings publicly in the form of our Build with Intention Toolkit.
As the content and enablement lead for the Ethical and Inclusive Product team, I get requests every day from customers, employees, partners, and community members for help in understanding how to build ethics and inclusion into technology products. I know that it matters to a lot of people. But many often don’t know where to start.
This kit is an important entry point — a way to start thinking proactively about how we approach innovation through a lens of ethics, inclusion, and accessibility. It is also a framework for collaboration with guidance for leading workshops that will prompt discussion and deep thinking across teams and diverse perspectives.
Why would designers use a Build with Intention Toolkit? Designers have a unique opportunity to create products with a far-reaching and profound impact on users, communities, and society.
“In the past, design has generally been accountable to the individual,” according to my colleague Rob Katz, Senior Director of Ethics by Design and leader of many past Build with Intention workshops at Salesforce. “What if we thought bigger and considered societal implications from the get-go? We can harness design to help identify and mitigate ethical risk and drive opportunities for positive impact.”
This toolkit offers a lot of opportunities. Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, shared her perspective: “The process is the product. It’s really about looking at how processes like this scale across tech. This becoming the new normal is what I see as our purpose. If you change the fundamental steps, on the other side, you get some amazing results.”
Let’s get to know the toolkit:
Our Build with Intention Toolkit is a free digital package that you can use to lead workshops with your teams to proactively anticipate the intended and unintended impacts of technology and make a plan about how to mitigate those risks. Some of the components include discussion questions, sample exercises and templates, an interactive Google Jamboard, and more. These are tools that can be woven into the day-to-day work of tech creators to guide ethical awareness and thoughtful inclusion of diverse perspectives throughout the product design and development process.
The reason we published this first version of our toolkit is to receive feedback, learn from users, and iterate. It’s important to get perspectives from the folks using the tools and that’s why we’re interviewing designers to get their take on the tools. For this article, I spoke with senior director of design Denise Burchell, and writer Nic Dimond about which features or aspects of the toolkit they find the most helpful and exciting for designers.
Who is this kit for?
Nic believes this kit is for everyone. “Anytime anybody’s building anything, from urban planners to UX designers, and not dedicating time to this kind of thinking, they’re making a mistake. The risks these days are too great.”
Denise said, “Regardless of where people are on the designer spectrum — self-identify designers or have been working in the field for decades — we want to give everyone the tools to improve the outcomes of their design work and their design thinking.”
When should we start using the kit?
“One mistake teams make is they don’t start the interrogation process until something is built, which can be a costly oversight,” says Denise. “Using the toolkit in the brainstorming phase and your early concept and design phases help you interrogate your work both as you’re coming up with the ideas and as they’re becoming real.”
Let’s see what features Denise and Nic are most excited about:
When thinking about ethics, inclusion, and accessibility in products, there is a lot to consider. At times, it can be overwhelming. The Salesforce Ethical & Inclusive Product team has compiled some themes and questions to help you on your journey.
What is the Considerations Guide?
A Quip document consisting of questions designed to prompt deeper thought and consideration. The groups of questions are broken up into five themes, including topics like preventing harm and misuse, increasing access and inclusion, upholding human dignity, and more. Within each theme, some questions can help you think through a product’s positive and any negative impacts.
The questions are organized into different levels of specificity, going from more general to specific. Depending on factors like what stage of development your team is at, different regions, or the type of organization you’re in, there will be questions that apply to you, your team, and/or your product(s). The guide is there so you can pick and choose what’s most relevant to the problems at hand. Ultimately, we want to spark conversations and interrogations that may not typically happen in product development.
How can designers use it?
- You can use the toolkit in the context of a workshop and as a single designer. Denise uses the toolkit throughout her entire design process. She says, “I pull relevant questions from the consideration guide and add them to my job tasks in Asana, or on my Figma sketches, or in shared Miro boards with my teams.”
- Nic believes, “When you’re tasked with visualizing your way through the development of a product, it can be hard to blue-sky the considerations because they are so abundant and varied. Every product is going to have its own set of considerations. Having a set of questions, like these, helps inspire the conversation by pointing it at different aspects of the design.”
Nic said that in almost every workshop he’s attended, participants end up talking about a real-life problem they are currently facing even though we provide example situations. This makes him think that perhaps these questions and considerations are already swirling in designers’ minds, and they find relief in having a safe space to share and discuss.
This process is about intentionally involving as many diverse perspectives as possible, so it’s important to have tools to create a framework that sets everyone up for success. This workshop template is just one more space for your teams to imagine, think, and collaborate together.
What is the workshop template?
You can use this template with your teams, whether in-person or remote, to add structure to your workshop and be on the same page (literally). On the board, you’ll find spaces for collaborative ideation, mapping, sorting, and reflecting.
The toolkit is designed to accommodate different learning styles. By creating various types of tools, we aim to set everyone up for success. For instance, if you’re a visual learner this Google Jamboard might be more engaging. It’s about creating a diversity of ways for everyone to engage with this important process.
How can designers use it?
- Denise says, “I keep the considerations guide and mapping slide on hand at all times. I flipped back and forth. It helps me think through my day-to-day design decisions.”
- This benefit is less specific to designers, but I have found that the Miro board also provides an easy record to reference when you need to look back at your brainstorming and workshop output.
Here’s how you can share this process with your team:
Designers are excited about scaling this process and inspiring new ideas and perspectives on their teams. But changing the status quo is hard, and at times scary. In your organization, these types of considerations may be new territory. Furthermore, expanding a process is time-consuming and can be difficult to justify if your teams are moving quickly.
To tackle some of these obstacles, I asked Denise, What advice would you give to a designer who wants to share this toolkit with their team but is unsure of how to frame it? How would you like to support them or impart some courage on their journey?
“You have to be user-centered about it. Build on what they believe because in the business world there can be a broad misconception that what is good for society is bad for business. I believe it’s incumbent upon the designer to show the connection between increasing a market size by being more sensitive around audiences you include.”
A few tangible tips for getting started:
- Volunteer to run a Build with Intention workshop for your team the next time you kick off a project.
- Raise questions from the considerations guide in meetings and planning sessions with your teams.
- Give leadership and stakeholders the insight they need to understand that leaving these considerations and processes out early on is a costly mistake. There is opportunity for greater innovation and customer success.
- “We get complaints that all this design thinking stuff takes too long,” according to Denise. “But there is compelling evidence that proves, if you build the wrong product and you have to build it all again, that’s slower than building the right project, or more inclusive product, the first time.”
- Communicate the value of this work with evidence from reliable resources like the 2020 Ethics by Design report from the World Economic Forum. The report argues that the future of tech is ethical. Organizations can either start getting on board now or be forced into ethical practices by consumers.
We’re in this together
At Salesforce, we don’t have all the answers, but we do want to do our part to keep moving the conversation forward. We believe technology has the power to change the world, and we have the power to change technology.
As I mentioned earlier, lasting change is a group effort. There are other organizations that are further along in this process and they are driving this shift alongside us. Here are several incredible civil society organizations that have inspired and guided us in the development of our toolkit: Consequence Scanning by Doteveryone and the EthicalOS Toolkit by Omidyar Network and the Institute for the Future.
Our toolkit is a living and iterative document that relies on your feedback for improvement. Once you use the kit yourself, tell us what you think, positive or negative, by emailing us at BuildwithIntention@salesforce.com.
We can intentionally build a better future — together.
Learn more about Salesforce Design at www.salesforce.com/design.
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