Using data throughout the process

From what we have discussed so far we have seen that what is underpinning any technical product or service is data!

Developing any new product requires having good data available. A product is developed to focus on solving a problem for your customer. Many questions arise when starting to design your product: “Who is your customer?”, “How does your product solve their problem?”, “How can you create a better customer experience?”

Let us review the development process discussed in the previous step and provide some examples of data sources.

Ideation and Planning

These steps take data from focus groups, interviews, surveys(internal/external), existing data sets such as web analytics, market benchmarks and competitor information.

Building, Testing and Deployment

These steps take data from languages including spoken language; inclusive data sets covering all information for all genders, races, ages etc.

Marketing, Operation and Monitoring

These steps take data from focus groups, interviews, existing data sets, market benchmarks, inclusive language, inclusive data

Data is one area that can be used to combat biases in technology. We look at this more detail in part 3 of this course.

Further resources:

1. Sarah Chander, 2020. Data racism: a new frontier, European Against Racism.

2. Charlton McIlwain, 2020. Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way, MIT Technology Review.

3. Emily Hadley, 2020. 5 steps to take as an antiracist data scientist, RTI International.

4.Hannah Devlin, 2017. AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals, The Guardian.

1. Ian Sample, 2017. AI watchdog needed to regulate automated decision-making, say experts, The Guardian.