Building For Everyone

CHAPTER 9Starting Your Own Dogfooding and Adversarial Testing Programs

Cats don't like dogfood. How do I know? The only way I could know for certain—by offering a variety of dog foods on a variety of cats (just kidding! I would never do that). But the same is true of human subjects—you cannot assume you know what people need without asking them and having them try products. Just as a dog's preferences differ from those of a cat, what works for one user may not work for another. Individuals are all different and need to be treated as such. The only way to find out what appeals to and works well for an individual or a community of users is to ask, listen, and test…repeatedly throughout the product design and development process.

Talking to users and having them try products are crucial for creating relevant and inclusive products. Unless you interact with real prospective users and have them interact with your products, you risk creating something that some people cannot or will not use. Being able to build for everyone means that you must actively seek out perspectives of historically underrepresented users across dimensions of age, race, ethnicity, ability, and more.

We practice various research methods at Google to develop a better understanding of historically underrepresented users. Our team prioritizes the following two research methods:

• Dogfooding: At Google, we believe that we need to “eat our own dogfood” before releasing it to users. Dogfooding involves internal discussion ...