This week, we're joined by Claire Bauden, the SVP of Global Product Design at Global Payments, who shares her expertise on embedding inclusivity and accessibility into every layer of design.
Key chapters
Featured Links: Follow Claire on LinkedIn | Global Payments Inc. | 'Six things we learned at the Pendomonium + #mtpcon roadshow London 2024'feature by Louron Pratt
Episode transcript
Randy Silver: 0:00
Hey everyone, it's the Product Experience. I'm Randy, and this week we have something really special for you Just you, no one else. It's very exclusive. No wait, that's not right at all. This week, Lily and I are bringing you our chat with Claire Bauden. She's the SVP of Global Product Design at Global Payments and it's a chat that is for everyone. We sat down at the Mind, the Product and Pendo Roadshow in London to talk about inclusivity and accessibility and why we still don't get it right way too much of the time.
Lily Smith: 0:41
The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:51
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.
Lily Smith: 1:03
Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind, the Product supports over 200 product tank meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you, claire. Welcome to the Product Experience Podcast. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. It's lovely to meet you in person. Same here. Yes, really lovely to meet you. Usually, I'm sat in my pyjamas doing these interviews, but I'm actually, you know, properly dressed. Today, I generally have the top. That works.
Claire Bauden: 1:39
Yeah, exactly.
Lily Smith: 1:39
Pyjama bottoms Don't sell anymore and slippers. Exactly pajama bottoms Don't sell anymore and slippers. So before we get stuck into our topic today, it'd be great if you could give our listeners and watchers a quick intro into who you are and what you do.
Claire Bauden: 1:52
All right, so I'm Claire Bauden. I'm an SVP for product experience for Global Payments, so the longer title is probably product ops and experience. So my team looks after product operation, design, operation, research, operation, accessibility and some design delivery as well. So I have quite a wide range of things. My team is across the world, so I have people in India, I have people in Europe and I have people in the US as well. So that's that kind of a professional. I started with the professional, but personally I have a bit of an accent. I live in Dublin in Ireland, but I'm French. I've left France. In the first time I was 18 and I learned English in Australia, and then the second time was 2006. I haven't been back. Well, I've been back for holidays and families, but lived in the UK and Dublin.
Randy Silver: 2:42
Fantastic and we were talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on and you said your team has faced a couple of big challenges lately, different things than you'd come across before. What are the biggest things you're dealing with at the moment?
Claire Bauden: 2:55
So we've had quite a few things, I'd say, even if I start at a very early stage. I was the first designer at Global Payments, so the maturity in the organization was fairly low at the time. So that was one of the first challenges, which you know. You turn up into a room and go, hi, I'm the designer or I'm the product designer, and everyone was like you do pretty things right. Not exactly. So that would have been one of the biggest challenges and we're still at times fighting against that right Against that perception of beauty and not really the design thinking aspect.
Claire Bauden: 3:30
So that's one aspect, even with product management. So having product operation with me now actually makes it much better, much easier. It's also a very new function. So it's, you know, kind of changing the mindset and bringing people along new ways of doing product. Other challenges that I've had I'm very resilient, so I tend to be given those type of things. Accessibility would have been another one, the digital accessibility aspect. So we know this has been on for a very long time in the world, right, but it doesn't mean that everyone actually think about it, and I think I got my heart broken realizing that I was designing and making product not for everyone and decided to fix it. So that's another big challenge in the organization to bring this along, because you tend to have people that go OK, I understand the case, but what am I getting if I do? Accessibility? Well, you just get more people to use your product and that's not always a strong business case financially, in a way right. So you have to make the empathy level.
Lily Smith: 4:33
And I think, when we think of accessibility, you know, sometimes we think of people who are blind or deaf, but accessibility is much bigger than that, isn't it?
Claire Bauden: 4:42
Yes, it's a lot more.
Lily Smith: 4:44
I imagine, with the global payments and a global audience, there's a lot to think about in terms of accessibility. So where did you kind of start, when you knew that or when you identified that this was an opportunity in an area where you could improve, where did you start?
Claire Bauden: 5:00
So a lot of the work has been around the awareness of what you're talking about. As soon as you talk about accessibility, people go blind wheelchairs yeah, well, you know it's like. No, we are talking about much more than that. We're talking about one billion people in this planet that have an impairment of some sort. I generally use, so I'm French. My first language is French. I was 20 when I learned English. Sometimes you native speaker write to me or speak to me and I'm like no, no, not getting it and that's part of that's not. It's not a disability, but it's an impairment. If no one actually speaks properly and writes very simple sentences, I'm not going to get it.
Claire Bauden: 5:42
I had a test done to me at some stage. It wasn't in Global Payments, it was in another organization. I was given a test before being a particular role into that organization and the test was in yards, in the metrics that I don't use yards and gallons, and all of this and some of the math were in English. I'm French, I do math, and it was not possible. I failed the test Just because I don't speak your language the way that you do. So that's the first one bringing the awareness to people that it's just not just the blind and the wheelchair.
Lily Smith: 6:17
It is.
Claire Bauden: 6:18
But there's also a situation If you think about payments, if you carry a baby and you have to go and pay, you suddenly have only one hand. You're not disabled, you don't have a particular impairment, you're just carrying baby or shopping bags. So all of those moments we have to think about them. The population is aging. So I wear glasses, that's my assistive technology. It's massive. It's very important to me. If I don't have that, I can't drive, I can't see myself, I'm really blind, I'm really poor. But I can't write, I can't read. There's a lot of things that I wouldn't be able to do. I'm a designer. How do I design without this on? So all of this awareness in the organization is really important. So I think that was the first step building a business case on the side as well.
Randy Silver: 7:03
So why is this so hard now? We've been doing this for ages. As you said, the financial incentives are there. It's a massive part of the population have something that is officially recognized and, as you said, situationally that's even bigger. You'd think by now that this would just be built into our infrastructure. You know that it's essentially accessibility as a service would be something. That's why is this still so ours?
Claire Bauden: 7:27
You'd think so. Yeah, compliance, it's a compliance problem. So when you start talking about compliance in a business, they look the other way. Just go, another one of those that will not bring value. So you have to kind of show the value of what it is. And if we worry about delivering delightful experience, we're going to have to worry about accessibility as well and bringing our product to the wider audience.
Claire Bauden: 7:52
But the main thing is the business case. It's like financially, what's the benefit and the way to do it. The partner that we use has it all right. Right, we have what we call the shift left. So it's really it starts with the designer.
Claire Bauden: 8:05
About 65% of defect in accessibility originate with us. So if we don't think about the colors ratio, if we don't think about building a prototype with the tab flow and with the speech to text, well, you can't expect developers in QA to build it and test it. So you have to build it from the get-go, and if you do that it's a lot cheaper. So the business case is like if you go forward and go, we need to test and compliance is telling us to test and we have those many defects and that's it. Everyone's like oh, this is going to cost millions. We don't want to do it. If you turn around to what I've been doing for the past four years which is okay I'm going to start and I'm going to make designers build accessible product and you're going to move to development in QA, we're going to shift that. The shift is a lot cheaper, a lot longer, but eventually we get to delightful experience and not compliance and plaintiff attorney and so how do you build that into your workflow?
Lily Smith: 9:02
is it just something that automatically gets done now, as part of you know, whenever a feature is being redesigned or changed or anything like that, there's just almost like a checkbox of like. Have we considered the accessibility element of this?
Claire Bauden: 9:16
Yes, all the way through. So we actually you talk about checkbox we have a checklist for designers to ensure that it's part of their build when they start, and we use Figma. When they use Figma, it's part of the build. They have a checklist of everything. So we train the designers, but it's really it's all the way through.
Claire Bauden: 9:33
So we in the past, when we were saying maturity in design, designers would have expected to give prototype. Now we have a prototype for B2C web, a prototype for mobile, all the different breakpoints and all this. Okay, so for the responsiveness. And then on top of that you have to add the speech to text. So you have a text writer that's coming, a UX writer that tells you how do you tap through this. You have, for the keyboard, a tab flow. So it's a lot more work for the designers. We have to check the colors ratio, but we have a design system in the background. So we've accelerated a lot of that. So we have tools in Figma to help us go faster. And then we have components in libraries that are already coded, accessible on the other side. So it accelerates also the efficiency of the devs. So all of this together makes it a lot more efficient and possible to have accessibility all the way through.
Lily Smith: 10:23
You mentioned earlier, like one of the examples of accessibility being in the copywriting and having copy that's really easily understood by a non-native speaker, for example. Quite a lot of design situations don't necessarily you might not necessarily have a UX copywriter that you can lean on. Are there any sort of best practices or ways to test your copy that enable you to check its level of accessibility and its level of kind of understoodness without having to try to find a non-native speaker?
Claire Bauden: 10:59
The first step, I'll say try to find someone that knows how to write, because I've learned so much since I've had TechWriter and UXWriter on my team I didn't know that it was so complex, in a way, from the language perspective. My team is very, very diverse on all aspects of it. So from interview to the work we do, we have, for example, fearless feedback every Thursday, and this is where everyone gets in the room. Someone presents more than one person. Generally at that time we actually feedback, and some of some of the feedback would be my team being very diverse.
Claire Bauden: 11:32
I have all sorts of nationality and going like I'm not getting this message. I don't understand what that means, so I feel uncomfortable. So it's really bringing it to as many people as possible, because there is language, but there's also, um, the cognitive and those elements, the neurod, that sometimes people are just not comfortable with the language you use. We had a few days ago. We tend to do and say, hey, guys, well, guys is not inclusive, it shouldn't be, and then we had a whole discussion around. Actually, is it, is it not? It depends on the culture and the language and who learns English where that we feel guys is male, always female, always both, so it was very, very interesting, but we can stay on words like this for for a while right my wife is, is Irish and she likes to talk about when she first.
Randy Silver: 12:16
She's a dentist. When she first came to the UK she had a patient and said you're doing all right, you've only got a couple of cavities, and the patient said, oh great, only two. And she said no, five, because an Irish couple can be up to about five. And then I asked her so how many people are in this couple, in this relationship? And she said no, that's not what I meant at all.
Claire Bauden: 12:38
That's exactly that, and language, like culture, is very, very important, and having a diverse team brings this right, bring those discussions and those elements of like. No, that's not what I mean.
Claire Bauden: 12:49
It's a separate discussion, but there's a book by I think she's called Erin Mayer. She's American but she lives in France. She's written a book about culture map. It's fascinating For anyone who wants to read it. Fascinating. I learned that the French are very implicit in their language, in their language, in their way of talking, when the Americans are very explicit, you say what you mean, you mean what you say. So within my team I got the feedback at some stage that sometimes they lack clarity and I was like I'm very clear, I'm not. I'm very clear for a French person, I'm not very clear for an American. I need to be a lot clearer in my communication. All of this comes into accessibility. All of this comes into the design.
Randy Silver: 13:32
This comes into accessibility. All of this comes into the design.
Lily Smith: 13:33
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Lily Smith: 14:23
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Randy Silver: 14:35
Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast. Well, speaking of things, that can misinterpret things very easily. You said one of the other big challenges that you and your team were facing into was AI, and I'm wondering does the use of AI impact your approach to accessibility at all?
Claire Bauden: 14:56
So yes, it does. The first thing that I want to say about AI is I'm really putting the designer hat. I was actually just having this chat before with one of the guys that you'll interview later. Everything that we're looking at at the moment when it comes to AI is based on old patterns and it comes with accessibility as well. We're expecting. We know the patterns in the world today, so we want to layer AI on top of those patterns.
Claire Bauden: 15:21
As a designer, I'm like we're getting this wrong guys. This is not how it works. So the best example I generally use is when Steve Jobs and Johnny Hive came up with the iPhone. Right, the iPhone coming out in the world, all the new vision thing that they have. Now they have to create new patterns to use the technology. So we learn to zoom, we learn to swipe and do all of those elements which sometimes drives me insane now because it's too many of them but the double click on the vision, all of those elements. They are new patterns that we had to think about. That became something natural for us as human beings to use AI for me in every aspect, and a lot more into accessibility I'll talk about that in a second needs new patterns. We don't know what they are.
Claire Bauden: 16:05
So at the moment, the biggest challenge that I have is a lot of people are coming with well, you're a chatbot and it's like really, do you think that's the only power of AI? I think we can do much better than that. I think AI should proactively know when to tell me how much money I'm going to get tomorrow. That's literally as a merchant, that's what I want. I don't want to go to a software to go how much money am I going to get tomorrow. I want you to tell me when is the right time for me to know that. You know, you figure it out.
Claire Bauden: 16:35
The power of AI should be more than visible. Good design is invisible. Ai should be absolutely invisible and a delight to do. Oh, I got exactly the answer that I needed at that time From an accessibility to answer. On the accessibility front, I think it will be tremendous help. There was an example not so long ago on the language where an AI can actually read the sign language and translate straight to the audience in pure language. That allows for communication. I don't understand sign language and was actually looking at should I learn this be great, but I don't know sign language, but having someone that signs in front of me and having my phone that tells me what that person says, it's absolutely amazing it breaks down communication and how are you upskilling your team in?
Lily Smith: 17:23
I guess both thinking more broadly about the possibilities of what AI can bring, but then also understanding what's available and out there now in terms of technologies, but I guess even those like underlying technologies that you're able to play with.
Claire Bauden: 17:39
So I have a team of geeks that's kind of. One of them is coming today. I have quite a good team of geeks that are constantly looking at what's out there in the world and we do every week, like last week in design, and last week in design has what we've delivered, what the team has done, et cetera, and also article things that we've explored in the world and we want people to look at. So this, together with with, obviously, conference and moments where people are going and debating, right, my entire team is remote. So COVID happened. That way we used to have a clutter of two offices.
Claire Bauden: 18:15
From the moment COVID happened it just became totally virtual. So we kept all of the practice. So we meet every day in some shape or form anyway. So that's where we also bring. On the friday we have our virtual hangout and it's just a it depends. We play games, we talk about very serious subject, we have loads of clubs and things to to do that sort of thing, so that's how we bring most of those conversations to the team has the inclusion of ai the possibility of designing with designing for, for designing around?
Randy Silver: 18:44
has it changed the way that you hire? Are you hiring people you know? Are you looking to hire people who have specific experience in using the technology, or are you used to looking for more, for attitude and other aptitude, and say I can teach them, they can pick this up along the way?
Claire Bauden: 18:58
It's a really good question. So I don't think I've seen yet a change in the hiring. However, let me put it this way Five years ago, I had a few designers like I'm not sure if I want to do this. I like UX research. Am I more into the interaction? I'm not sure. I'm like look, let me be clear. You know, if you want to do some coding, do it now, because it's not going to last forever, and I'm really sorry for anyone that does development. If you want to do UX research, we still probably have a long way before actually, ai takes all of it over.
Claire Bauden: 19:29
But I think the main point is the creative thinking. It's really the ability to look at different perspectives, having empathy, all of those elements and using the tools. So officially in the business, we're not to use chat, gpt, open AI. We have our own tools and we have a long partnership with Google, so we're using some of this, but it's still encouraged, right? Figma has AI built in. We have a lot of the tools and it's like start using it, because this is not going to go away and we have to learn to use and build with it and enhance our ability rather than, you know, being down by it. So I'm all.
Claire Bauden: 20:08
I'm a geek as well, I'm a nerd and I'm an innovator, so I'm like trying new things all the time. I play with ganito ui all the time and try to build ui and see what it does, go back to figma after and go not. Okay, still got some time before, but I think we're not far from the world where I can go. Hey, here's my origins, here's the persona I'm thinking about. Here's the kind of big case that I want to build the requirements, the features and, by the way, here is my design system. Here is my Figma. It's built right. There's an element there that's going to go. However, it still needs human to validate. As much as AI is going to be able to A-B test really quickly and know the pattern in the world, we still need to have the feeling that that's not going to go away.
Lily Smith: 20:58
I keep reading things around how AI is doing all of the fun creative work so we can do more of the mundane admin jobs. Is there, you know? You say there's always going to be like a human element of sort of checking the work that the AI is bringing. But do you think that there will still be room for that creative thinking? And like how do we make? You know, continue to make space for that creative thinking. And like how do we make?
Claire Bauden: 21:23
oh, you know continue to make space for that. Absolutely. I actually think it's the other way around. I think it enhances, it will do all the mundane like. Ask any designer. Some designers are really detail orientated and love doing the prototype. That wasn't my case. I love the whole, like who I am. How am I going to make this very a good journey and very easy? But then the this can be taken over by AI, no problem. I think the power and the mindset that we need to have is how is this going to enhance me? We've all watched Marvel, right? I want to be that whatever Iron man, right? Hey, how about this? Can you show me this Some more and just bringing it to me faster, so that my brain can really think creatively and go further, rather than the other way around. I think it's us first, but that's my view.
Randy Silver: 22:14
Claire, most of the people who listen to this podcast. I mean, I'm sure we've got plenty of designers listening as well, but we're mostly product-oriented people. What's one thing you wish product people did better in working with designers?
Claire Bauden: 22:26
Working with designers. Good answer. The thing is that there's a little bit of I think. If anyone has watched that, what's his name?
Randy Silver: 22:34
Brian the Airbnb kind of CEO Chesco yeah.
Claire Bauden: 22:38
When he said in the Figma conference like hey, product managers out of the door and all the designers like yay, that's not what he meant. It's like we have a very, very distinct work and I would add, product marketers. So if you put a product manager, a product designer and a product marketer in the same room working together and technology, it's not a three, it's a four stool, legging stool. You have extremely powerful product at the end of it. Someone is going to look after the markets and how we're going to make money with this thing and the feature and the requirement of the true thing that needs to happen. Someone will be the voice and the creation of the delightfulness of the experience. Someone's going to worry about how we're going to go to market with this and what is strategically the value proposition that we need to have, and someone's going to build it. So if you have all of those people in the room, it's amazing.
Claire Bauden: 23:27
Very often what I see is a product manager want to do most of it by themselves and it's like we're here to help. We want to be with you, we want to build it with you, not so? I constantly type of that conversation. I am not a service to product managers. I'm not consulting for you guys. I am a product function. I just look at things slightly differently.
Lily Smith: 23:49
One of my favorite things to say to product managers is like everyone's a product manager, You're just the only person who's not a designer or a developer.
Claire Bauden: 24:00
Well, I tend to have. I used to have a talk a long time ago where we're all designers. If you think about this, any email, this podcast, anything you do has been designed. Someone has thought about the audience that we're going to talk to. We've thought about the microphone that you hold in your hand. We've thought about all of those elements have been thought about. Right, You're a designer, you're a designer, we're all designers. The difference is we have the empathy and we bring the intent. We really, really want to do it towards someone, not just.
Claire Bauden: 24:30
I think it's the best thing to do. I'm a little bit of a neuroscience geek. This is the way our brain functions. There's no way around it. All I see is all areas, that's the think fast, think slow or something. It's like. This is all I know. But if you only design by that, you're only going to do it for yourself. You're not going to do it for the person that actually needs to use it, For anyone that gets frustrated in this world when using a UI in any sense of form, or a service for that matter. Go to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and try to walk from A to B and you'll see how service design is somewhat challenging. It hasn't been intentionally designed. Someone was missing in the process somewhere or they did a bad job. That's a different story.
Lily Smith: 25:15
Claire, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today and, yeah, thanks for joining us, my pleasure.
Claire Bauden: 25:21
Thanks very much for having me.
Lily Smith: 25:32
The Product Experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.
Randy Silver: 25:39
And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith: 25:48
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver: 25:52
And our theme music is from product community legend Arne Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track.
