I'm a design lead of accessibility apps at Google. I live in Seattle with my wife and dog. I'm generally interested in art, design, culture, food, and human behavior. If you would like to chat or collaborate, reach me at danfarra@gmail.com. (LinkedIn)
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My design philosophy
My design philosophy
The goal of my design work is to elevate the quality of life for underserved beings (I would say "people" but I wouldn't mind designing for dogs or other animals too).
I want the accessibility products and services I work on to be free. A big reason is: According to the US Department of Labor, people with disabilities are excluded from the workforce or are unable to work, with 22.7% employed, compared to 65.5% of people without a disability. In developing countries, 80% to 90% of persons with disabilities of working age are unemployed, whereas in industrialized countries the figure is between 50% and 70% (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs).
I have designed using AI (more on this below). AI is impressive and useful, and I am a user of it. It has accessibility benefits. I have it format responses in a way that suits my brain (e.g. putting data in a table). However, I am very concerned with the inhumane military and environmental effects of AI. I commit to being responsible in designing AI interfaces, and speaking loudly when it's not being used responsibly. We have to prioritize human life and the environment above all else, including a lucrative and effective AI solution.
I wrote an article for Design.Google recently where I describe how we should go beyond compliance for accessibility apps. (Evolving Lookout: A progressive approach to designing accessibility apps)
A part of what informs my philosophy is what I read. I'm currently reading:
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook by Dori Tunstall
CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It by Ruben Pater
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Lookout is an app for people with visual impairments. Mostly, people use Lookout to point the camera at text, and Lookout reads it out loud; documents, food labels, and currency.
Lookout also describes photos using AI, and can help users navigate to bathrooms, open seating, vehicles, and more. I've been working on Lookout since May 2022.
I designed Image Q&A in Lookout: an accessible way to capture photos with guided framing, have photos described using Gemini, and it even answers your questions about the photo.
Sorry the GIF is blurry. I can only share public assets, and I found this in an article about our launch, and I felt it was too good to not share.
Images mode
Images mode
Summary
Before the redesign I led, Images mode required users to upload or share a photo, so they could extract the text in it or get a basic description.
Now, Images mode opens to a photo-capturing experience with assistive audio framing guidance. People with blindness can line up their shot, snap a photo, have AI describe it, and ask follow up questions.
Problem
Images do not typically have a description or alt text, which excludes visually impaired people from engaging with a critical media format used in the world today.
Design
We wanted our visually-challenged users to know what's in the frame and have help lining up a selfie (a common desire we heard in our research). So we reused some of our tech from other parts of Lookout. The selfie camera can tell you how to adjust your camera ("face cropped on bottom").
Once the user presses the shutter button, we should immediately send the AI prompt to describe it. The description text is read out loud with word highlighting, followed by other metadata such as the text it recognizes. Then users can ask follow-up questions about the photo, share the image and/or description, download, etc.
I wanted the buttons to be as large as reasonably possible given our users base's disabilities, while knowing that many users have to maximize their system-level display/font size.
I led this design process which included
Overall UI/UX including the capture experience, description page, chat page, prompt menu.
A tutorial video which the app opens to
Marketing materials for Google I/O
A workshop with the Deepmind team
Video description: Introduction to Lookout (2024) tutorial video I helped produce which we show in the app onboarding. I give most credit to a great team of designers and producers, I just think it's the most accessible way of explaining the app in-detail, so I share it here. I initiated the idea of redoing our previous tutorial video based on users' learning preferences, secured budget for the video, defined an outline, tweaked our UI mocks for the video, and helped edit the final script and video.
Lookout design system update
Lookout design system update
Lookout was growing in the number of capabilities it had, which users needed to navigate easily. It was using an older design system, and when I joined the team, I was asked to develop a point of view on whether we should upgrade to a more modern design system. I concluded we should because of many reasons, namely better dark mode support, to provide internal feedback to the design system team, and updated look-and-feel. I then worked with my report/mentee to audit the UI, decide what needed to be changed, and design all the assets. I wrote about this experience on Google's Design site. Evolving Lookout: A progressive approach to designing accessibility apps
Press
Press
I was featured on Google's LinkedIn for World Arabic Language Day for our launch supporting Arabic in Lookout, and building out support for all right-to-left languages.
Inside Google’s Image Q&A On Android And Using AI For All (Forbes)
Android can now analyze any image and describe it to you — here's how it works (Tom's Guide)
AI Principles Case Study - Responsible Development of Lookout (Google) (This was taken down recently. I am trying to find out why.)
My past roles
My past roles
Before this role, I was on the Cloud Inclusive Design team where I helped design improvements to the accessibility of Cloud products:
Product design (Cloud Console search experience, keyboard shortcut helper)
Compliance (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates or "VPATs") and design system work
And then way before, I was designing ads products, where I began my accessible design journey as a subject matter expert.
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