Transcript

Jill Fairchild 00:00:00 I would've loved to have this in college. I went to school in New York and being an 18 year old who's just getting familiar with the city, who doesn't really know the area, it's dark. I look back and I wish I had this.

Voiceover 00:00:14 Welcome to the Made by Google podcast where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host, Rachid Finge.

Rachid Finge 00:00:22 Today we're talking to Jill Fairchild, who's a product manager on personal safety for Android Pixel and Pixel Watch.

Voiceover 00:00:29 This is the Made by Google podcast.

Rachid Finge 00:00:32 Jill, welcome to the Made by Google Podcast. Great to have you. May I start by asking about personal safety? How would you define that?

Jill Fairchild 00:00:38 Great question. Personal safety is anything that we can do to help keep you safe and make you feel safe on your wrist, in your pocket. Just things that give you peace of mind and help you move through the world feeling confident.

Rachid Finge 00:00:52 So you're a product manager for personal safety on Android Pixel and Pixel Watch. How does one become a product manager on that topic?

Jill Fairchild 00:01:00 So I started out my career in revenue. So I was working for a media company doing product management and revenue, and I really wanted to get into something that kind of gave back and was in the space of things that I personally care about. Being a woman who's lived in major cities her entire life, personal safety really hits home and is really exciting for me because I know how people move through the world and are excited to explore and excited to say yes to opportunities and sometimes have the kind of hesitation and pause to do that.

Rachid Finge 00:01:33 When we say personal safety on Pixel for example, then what are sort of the features you've developed that will enhance personal safety for our users?

Jill Fairchild 00:01:41 We have a full suite. We have some that are more kind of table stakes, so something called ESOS, which is essentially a very quick way to call 9 1 1 or 9 9 9 emergency services in your area. We also have Fall Detection and Car Crash Detection, so if something happens to you, we know if you have them turned on, we get you help. And now we're starting to explore a bit more of this more proactive space. Things that have come out very recently, which I'm really excited to talk about today, are safety check, emergency location sharing and medical info and safety check and emergency location sharing are really exciting for me because they start to explore this space of, hey, we know that not every safety situation has had something happen already. A lot of it is this peace of mind. A lot of it is people moving through the world and trying to feel more safe and not have bad things happen to 'em and feel confident that they will be protected if something does happen. And so exploring that proactive space is something I'm really excited about.

Rachid Finge 00:02:43 Well something like Fall Detection, I guess people can understand what that does. What about Safety Check? Let's explore that a little bit. How would you explain what it does? And if I use it, like how do I use it?

Jill Fairchild 00:02:53 The way I would use it is, say I went to dinner with a friend, it's kind of late at night, I'm walking home alone and I'm like, you know, I just want a little bit more of a safety net. I want to know that if something happens to me, somebody has my back. If you have a Pixel Watch, Pixel phone or an Android phone that supports personal safety, I'll kind of look at my walk home, say, eh, takes about a half hour. So what I do then is I will set a timer for 30 minutes, we'll let you know when the timer's about to lapse, and then you either respond, great, nothing happens, all good, or whether you are unable to respond or you choose not to respond for some reason. Then we actually escalate it and we share your location with emergency contacts. So you get to choose the emergency contacts that we let know you get to choose the reason why you would like the safety check on, and of course the time.

Jill Fairchild 00:03:42 And then there's a bunch of different levers that you can pull of whether you let people know when you've started the safety check. So just, hey, so-and-so Jill is starting a safety check. They just wanna let you know nothing's happened yet, but like we'll let you know if something comes up and we'll send you their location. Or if you just wanna let people know when something happens. And in that case, somebody would get a message saying, Hey, Jill started a safety check. They did not check in. You should call them and see if they're all right.

Rachid Finge 00:04:09 And how do I pick the people that are involved in Safety Check? Do I have full control over that?

Jill Fairchild 00:04:14 Yeah, you have full control over it. In personal safety, we have a list of emergency contacts that you set. You can pull in anybody from your contacts, you can add people manually. And then when you set up a safety check, when you go through the flow and you pick the timer and the reason you're doing it and when you want to notify them, we essentially show you that list of emergency contacts and you choose which ones you want. It could be all of them, it could be one of them, it could be some of them. You choose whichever ones that you'd like to be notified and then they're notified in the case that it escalates to an emergency share.

Rachid Finge 00:04:44 And can I share more than just at the timer lapse, like a location sharing feature for example as well.

Jill Fairchild 00:04:49 So say you are walking through a park and it's late at night, you just wanna share your location immediately. You don't wanna wait any amount of time. You can immediately share your live location with selected contacts, selected emergency contacts. Our balance here is we wanted to create that safety net without having people feel like they were always asked to share their location immediately and always ask to give up this pretty private information when something may have not happened yet. So we wanted to give people control when they show that pretty private information to their loved ones so that they feel like they're in control of their safety and their information.

Rachid Finge 00:05:23 Then we have a new feature also on Pixel Watch too called Medical Info. What is that for?

Jill Fairchild 00:05:28 So what Medical Info is, it's a list of vital medical information that you have that you can put into your personal safety app. Things like height, weight, blood type, date of birth, allergies, things like that. And then there are a couple settings that if you call emergency services, we're actually able to share that information out to those emergency services so that on their way to you, if something happens, if they're coming to assist you, they have all of that information before they even get to you. So trying to kind of shorten that time til calling to assistance. You also can show that information on your lock screen, whether it's of your phone or of your watch. If for example, something happens in a public space and somebody wants to help you, they can actually access that information if you choose from your lock screen so that they're able to call your emergency contacts, let them know what's going on if they know you have a latex allergy so that before they put on gloves to assist you. So that one's pretty interesting because there are a lot of people in the world who have these underlying health conditions and things that they need to be aware of and they need other people to be aware of and oftentimes wear a physical bracelet. And so we're trying to make that physical metal bracelet a bit more dynamic with technology and screens.

Rachid Finge 00:06:47 Now Jill, one thing I love to ask product managers is that, you know, they probably wanna build a gazillion things, but there's just not enough days in a year to do that. You gotta pick and choose . So how do you decide on, well first of all, personal safety, but then also these specific features like how do you decide that these are the ones we're building and putting our effort in?

Jill Fairchild 00:07:08 Google is extremely committed to safety, personal safety and data privacy and all of the things that keep you as an individual safe, both in the tech you use every day. And in the physical world, we're continuing to look at all the ways that we can help give you that peace of mind, help actually keep you safe. So it's very, very hard to choose because the sky's the limit pretty much. And there's mm-hmm so many groups of people in the world who, again, we've talked about it, move through it and would like a little bit more assurance here. We wanted to start with the individual. So looking at you figuring out what are the main concerns that people have day-to-day. Is it loss of life? So something like a car crash or something like a fall that you're not moving. Um, so looking at ways that we can actually save lives.

Jill Fairchild 00:07:56 And then secondarily or, or kind of in partnership with that, looking at ways that we can prevent bad things from happening and kind of break the cycle of something bad happening, somebody having to go seek help and then the things that come along with that. So I would say looking first to what can save lives and also what can be preventative. And then from there, looking at the individual saying, okay, you are a person. What are your daily problems? How do we create this balance of things that help you save your life, but also keep you safe and prevent bad things from happening? And these features kind of were our first step in that individual direction and now we're starting to think about how those things can kind of lend themselves to kids and parents and elderly parents and start to even go beyond the individual.

Rachid Finge 00:08:48 Is that a factor in bringing some of these features from the Pixel phone and Android phones into Pixel Watch too? So how are the features different or maybe even better on a watch compared to a phone?

Jill Fairchild 00:08:57 There are two pretty different form factors. The phone is great because it's a large screen, you can do a lot of things on it, you can input, it does so many things. The watch is amazing because it's discreet, it's always on your body, so it's always accessible and it also benefits from being on body because it has all the sensors and it has all those things that are kind of more of that tech that you just can't have in your palm. Looking at both of those form factors was extremely important. Bringing things over from the phone to the watch, especially when it comes to those more proactive features was really important because of that discretion factor, the discreetness of the device. So if we're looking at proactive features, oftentimes it is maybe not a situation that is escalated to the point of needing immediate action, but there's likely a situation that has made this person feel unsafe.

Jill Fairchild 00:09:45 So being able to ask for help and get help in a way that doesn't potentially alert another person to this person asking for help or seeking help is really important to those proactive features. You also can do things on your watch and keep your eyes up as well, which is also extremely important. And something else we've thought a lot about when moving things from the phone to the watch, but finding that cross device experience play between this large screen and the small screen discreetly always on your body, but you can input information into it. They're almost two halves of the same whole. And looking at the full experience across both of them is something that we try to do in every feature.

Rachid Finge 00:10:22 We do a lot of user testing just to see whether they understand the features? Is it helpful for them? Are there things you learned from speaking to people who maybe saw an earlier version of this and thought like, Hmm, maybe we should change something here.

Jill Fairchild 00:10:35__ One thing in particular, when we were looking at bringing safety check to the watch, we looked at what we were doing on the phone, we looked at the pros and cons of each form factor of the watch in the phone and really had to redesign what it meant for the watch. So taking cues from the phone, but it's just such a different screen, it's different controls. So it was kind of net new in the design department. One thing that we found was when that timer was going off, we had haptics, which are the vibrations on your watch and the vibrations on your phone. You're like, cool, that alert people, we had an alarm going off on your phone, we wanted to add an alarm on your watch. We were like, yes, it's gonna be the same across. People wanna know when this timer is ending.

Jill Fairchild 00:11:15 They don't wanna miss it so that their location goes to somebody when they're actually all right. What we found through user testing was that people actually didn't want the sound to come out of the watch. They didn't want to be that alerted because they were worried that that would actually alert somebody else potentially causing this situation to them trying to get assistance and turning on tools that would help them get help. And so we actually took out the sound from the watch specifically because of that feedback. So making sure that we are constantly listening, constantly saying, Hey, what does this need to be? Especially on the watch in these situations where people are trying to do things under the radar. That was one particular example of when we did research and a very tangible change came out of it.

Rachid Finge 00:12:01 That's interesting. So the feature had to be a lot more discreet perhaps than you imagined when starting to build this?

Jill Fairchild 00:12:08 Yes, completely. When you go to use your phone, you pull it outta your purse and you pull it outta your pocket. It's pretty big in your palm, you're looking at it. The phone doesn't necessarily lend itself to that discretion. And so when we're thinking about building things for the watch, when we were just doing the things that the phone already did, it didn't quite translate over exactly one-to-one because of just that difference in the way that people use phones and watches. There were a lot of ways that we had anticipated the desire for that discreet way of using the feature, but there were other ways that we hadn't really anticipated and it needed to be even more discreet than we initially thought.

Rachid Finge 00:12:44 So what are some other scenarios where Safety Check could be useful? So we mentioned maybe running, maybe you're late at night on the streets. What are some other examples of where you know, people used or maybe should have used Safety Check?

Jill Fairchild 00:12:57 Safety Check is great for families as well. I have a bunch of nieces and nephews who are getting a little bit older and are really excited to explore their own independence and autonomy and walk home from school or walk to school and safety check would be a great way to give parents just a little bit of a safety net, set a safety check when they leave the house, they can turn it off by the time they get to school so they know, hey, I've gotten the message that they started it, I've gotten the message that it's been canceled, so we're okay just providing that peace of mind. But again, preserving the privacy of kind of watching them bob along to the school feels like a really great balance of protection. But making sure it's done with trust and encouraging that independence and that autonomy and in kids, as we know, they are always excited to explore the world a bit more and kind of forge their own way. And so this safety check feels like a great way to do that.

Rachid Finge 00:13:53 Yeah, it's offering sort of guardrails I guess while they're exploring the world. I imagine just thinking of my own mother for example, it could also be helpful for people maybe a little bit older. Uh, something like Fall Detection could be useful or Safety Check as well. Are you aware of any examples where this is used this way?

Jill Fairchild 00:14:09 Yeah, Fall Detection I think kind of goes without saying. There are a lot of, sure my parents aren't at that age yet, but I do have a lot of friends and a lot of coworkers whose parents are at that age that having that peace of mind for them actually to make sure that their parent has that autonomy is really important to their parents. It's really important to them to be able to encourage it. And so Fall Detection gives them that peace of mind that if something happens, they will know about it. But otherwise everything's all right. Same thing with Safety Check. A lot of folks wanted to just know that their parents, if they left the house to go get groceries and came back or went out to get the newspaper and came back, that peace of mind again, making sure that they just got back to the spot that they were supposed to be at at the time that they roughly were supposed to be at just allows everybody to feel comfortable and feel like they are living their lives and encouraging each other to do so.

Rachid Finge 00:15:01 Have you heard back from some of our users, maybe they've shared stories about how personal safety in one way or another has been really useful to them?

Jill Fairchild 00:15:08 Yeah, it's interesting. Um, and already we have quite a few stories of people leaving work just wanting something to make sure that the transit goes smoothly and they send the messages to their partner. There are people like you who are doing training for half marathons or marathons and want that peace of mind when they're going running that somebody knows, Hey, I'm going on a new trail. Just keep an eye out for me if I don't reach back out when I'm supposed to reach back out. We've heard stories of parents being really excited to get their kid a Pixel Watch 2 for this exact purpose. We've kind of seen initial feedback from the spectrum, people using themselves, people using it for others, and personal safety is really important, but also that family unit, like it takes a village, applies to so many things in life and it especially applies to safety.

Rachid Finge 00:15:56 That's amazing. You definitely built it. For me, I'm trying to train for half a marathon and just the thought of maybe something happening along the way and not being back in time. So that definitely helps, you know, just having Safety Check on there while tracking my whole run on Pixel Watch 2 as well. Oh yeah. It's a device that does everything for me. That's

Jill Fairchild 00:16:12 Absolute fitness and safety. Absolutely amazing. When people talk about why they use watches, fitness and safety inherently come up together. It depends on who you're talking to, but it's one and two.

Rachid Finge 00:16:21 Makes sense. Yeah. Now Jill, we like to offer our listeners a top tip, something that they should try with the feature we discuss during each episode. So when it comes to Safety Check or one of the other personal safety features, what should our listeners do you think?

Jill Fairchild 00:16:35 Ooh, first pro tip, set up your medical information, go to your app, can go to the personal safety app, put in your medical info. That is half the battle. I know it's not the most fun thing, but in a situation where you want people to have this information on you, doing it in advance is so helpful. So that would be my first pro tip. Go check it out. And then my second pro tip is just see how Safety Check and Emergency Sharing fit into your life. What we're trying to do also is make sure that safety doesn't feel like this scary thing. I think a lot of times, you know, when people get into situations where they need help, oftentimes it is kind of paired with trauma or paired with something bad happening. And so what we're trying to do with these proactive features as well is create less fear around it. So my pro tip is find ways that you can integrate these preventative measures into your daily life so it doesn't feel like a chore, it doesn't feel like a scary thing, it just feels like part of your routine. So that's also a thing I love about the proactive features. It feels like it doesn't have to be tied to something bad to be helpful.

Rachid Finge 00:17:38 Definitely. So those are two great tips and yeah, definitely the first one, I wouldn't even say a chore, but it's just something you need to set aside some time. Yes. Uh, enter your medical info in the personal safety app and then, then just check out Safety Check before uh, anything happens just to make sure you, you're sort of familiar with it. Yes. Uh, thank you so much Jill for joining the Made by Google podcast and uh, as you mentioned, it's just the beginning for personal safety, so looking forward to see what you come up with next.

Jill Fairchild 00:18:02 Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. And if you wanna check out any of these features, Safety Check, Emergency Sharing, Medical Info, Fall Detection, everything. They are now available on the Pixel Watch 2, also Pixel Watch 1.

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