Designing for the entire human race

Hello Internet people,

    Lately I've been watching several TED talks. So, 2 days ago I watched this TED talk called "How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)", by Margaret Gould Steward. This designer worked, along with a few others, in one of the last design changes on Facebook. The thing that got me was the simplicity needed to work with this giant websites: humanity-driven design. After talking about some of her project she said (about designing for Facebook and Google):

    "When you set a goal to design for the entire human race(...), at some point you run into the walls of the bubble you're living in. (...) we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phone to navigate to the next hipster coffee shop. (...) What if you had no access to public library? What if your country had no free press? What would this products start to mean to you? This is what Google, Youtube and Facebook look like to the most of the world. (...) If you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are."

    This didn't quite resonate with me until yesterday. Yesterday I was posting my second post on my Portuguese Blog and I was sharing on the Facebook account linked to that Blog. This Facebook account is public so while I was on Facebook I noticed I had one friend request, and then another, and another. Yes, all three of my new potential online friends had an app called "Facebook to all phones". Soon I was talking to a guy  from Ghana, let's call him One. Now One, who was talking to me trough that app, wanted to know if I'm dating anyone... I don't know why that was one of the first questions he did, maybe it's hard to date in Ghana? I don't know, maybe. Of course I told him that I don't date over the Internet (because I don't).

    But the point I wanted to make was that this was the moment the TED talk resonated with me because I realized Margaret is right: we live in our little "rich" (compared to some) bubbles, troubled by this tiny problems of ours (like temporarily having a slow internet connection) when in that moment another person in a less richer country is struggling with little or no internet connection, no electricity, often not even reliable and easily reachable clean water, no decent free press, and probably not a lot of freedom to date or relate with people the way they maybe want to, ... We never think about this, don't we? I mean, there's nothing we can do, that I know. But I guess it gave me a little bit of perspective and I finally understood what scale design really is (designing for giant websites like Facebook, Google and Youtube). This kind of apps can very well be a free pass to information, free, unaltered information;  free, unsupervised, careless human interaction (however restricted by writing speech it may be); free entertainment content also.

EDIT1: I'm not saying everyone who uses the app "Facebook to all phones" is the same.  I don't mean that everyone who uses this app has little resources, of course !

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And this everything from me, for now :3 

Enjoy the rest of your day,

Fawlin