Lavinia, a student from Brazil, doesn’t put a photo of her face on social apps out of fear that it will be copied and circulated in men’s private groups. In fact, 68 percent of women in our research across seven countries (compared to 49 percent of men) don’t use a profile picture that shows their face. Online threats—like cyberstalking, malicious editing and the fear of strangers sharing personal content without consent—can result in destroyed reputations and even physical harm. Because of these safety threats, women limit their participation online.

The internet isn’t gender equitable. Estimates show there are fewer women online than men in two-thirds of countries worldwide. Stories like Lavinia’s begin to tell us why. To understand why these inequities exist and how to address them, we conducted interviews and surveys with nearly 4,000 participants in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan over the course of a year. We spoke to people across the gender spectrum, including cis women, trans women and men. We wanted to represent diverse voices and experiences in our research. To protect participant identity, we use pseudonyms in this blog post.

In a new report published today, Towards Gender Equity Online, we’ve identified four areas that need to be addressed to move us toward a more representative internet: access, content and community, privacy, and safety.

Each of these areas reveals deeper insights. Women can’t get online when, where and how they want even if they do own a personal device. Many don’t have enough free time; others don’t have permission. If women are able to access the internet, many aren’t discovering relevant content and online communities, and many don’t feel comfortable creating content or participating either. Women don’t often feel fully in control of their online identities, and they regularly experience privacy and safety issues.

Online services tend to be designed with “one device, one user” in mind, but this principle doesn’t hold true for all women. Many women that we spoke to share their devices with family members. For example, when Shaina, a woman in her late thirties from Kanpur, India, watches a video that she thinks is a “little bit not nice,” she searches for five or six more to change her recommended video list. Since she shares a phone with her family, she doesn’t want the next person who uses the phone to guess what she was watching. Women like Shaina also delete their searches or use special applications to hide files. But these workarounds aren’t perfect, and as a result many women avoid using apps or seeking out content because they don’t feel in control of their privacy.

We identified steps that technology creators can take to help create a more gender equitable internet:

• Gather metrics, like 28-day active users, and break them down by gender to identify and address any gender gaps

• Conduct interviews with people across the gender spectrum to understand their user experiences

• Analyze existing data, like surveys, and look for gender-related themes and correlations

Based on this research, many Google products are already adapting. Neighbourly is an app in India that allows people to tap into local, community-based knowledge to ask and answer questions. The Neighbourly team built additional privacy features into the app experience, like preventing profile photos from being enlarged or copied through screenshot, not allowing one-on-one direct messaging and only sharing the account owner’s first name.

Our commitment is to continue to look for ways to help ensure that our products represent everyone—men, women and gender non-binary people equally. As a billion more people come online, we see a great opportunity to be fair and equitable to all gender experiences.

Files helps millions of people around the world organize their media, share files offline, and free up space on their phones. And by making the most of limited storage, Files helps users keep their phones running like new.

However, we've heard that it's a challenge to keep phones looking as clean on the outside as they are on the inside. Grease and fingerprints can stick to screens throughout the day, creating unsightly smudges and streaks.

Screen Cleaner is a new feature in the Files app that uses geometric dirt models, combined with haptic micromovement pulses, to dislodge what’s stuck to your screen. Screen Cleaner then generates a thin magnetic field around the surface of the phone, actively protecting against impurities—with a sweet scent to boot.

Set aside old covers and cases and activate Screen Cleaner. Give it a try at g.co/getfiles.

Last December, Google launched Files Go: an app to free up space on mobile phones, find files faster and share them with others easily and quickly—even without an internet connection. Files Go was built to solve file and storage management problems for the next generation of smartphone users in countries such as India, Brazil and Nigeria. It helped people make the most of limited phone storage, enjoy their favorite videos and music, and send apps to each other at blazing speeds without using mobile data.

In less than a year, Files Go has grown tremendously to serve over 30 million monthly users. We’ve noticed that people across the globe are using it, no matter what type of mobile phone they have or how fast their internet connection is. We often find that products designed for the Next Billion Users work just as well for everyone—including people with a fast 4G connection and a top of the line smartphone who want to organize their files and save on storage as well!

Today, we’re rebranding the app to Files by Google. We’ve also redesigned the user experience to make sure that the content of your mobile phone is the focus when you use the app, all while keeping the same functions and playfulness that people love. When you clear out files you no longer need, we now celebrate how much you saved by telling you what you’ve freed up room for—whether it’s enough to take a few more selfies, or to download a whole movie!

You can download Files by Google here. We’re keen to hear what you think.

Sitting in her apartment in Mumbai a few years ago, Radha wondered if there were activities nearby for her two-year old son. She had recently moved to the city from a small town about 300 km away in search of better education for her children. Since then, she’d slowly built up a network of acquaintances, mostly from chance meetings traveling up and down the lift. But there was something missing. Back in her hometown, it was easy to ask Shanti Aunty across the way about local dressmakers. And—along with the keys to the family cupboard—she had inherited many business relationships from her mother-in-law; the local baker, the nearby mobile repair shop. But in such a big city, finding answers to simple local questions was more difficult.

A kernel of an insight

This kernel of an insight, gathered by Jeannie Foulsham while studying local search in India in 2014, led to the development of a product we call Neighbourly. Neighbourly is a mobile application that provides people with an easy interface to ask and find answers to neighborhood questions and is available in seven cities in India so far. And we built it in direct response to conversations with users like Radha.

This is just one example of how user experience (UX) research can build an understanding of people’s context, behavior, and comprehension to inform the design of products or services. There are hundreds of researchers across Google who gather insights to inform all of our product offerings. This research is especially key to how we approach products for the next billion users—people coming online for the first time, usually on mobile. To ensure we're living up to Google's mission of universally accessible information, we must deeply understand the similarities and differences in how these people look for and use information in their day to day lives.

Diving deeper to understand the role of technology

In the early days of developing Neighbourly, Muzayun Mukhtar, a UX researcher based in our Bangalore office, would spend hours walking the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur and many other smaller cities conducting intercept interviews, stopping people for a conversation to get a glimpse into their lives, their impressions and their relationships. She spent time in small communities called societies, where she learned about the social dynamic between neighbors. For a deeper look at how they lived, Muzayun worked through locals to meet people in their homes for contextual inquiries to see how they solve day-to-day problems. She met people from different stages and walks of life: mothers, homemakers, those new to the community as well as neighborhood lifers. She would then take these insights back to our product teams for incorporation into the product roadmap.

Discovering a core user value

As the team iterated on ideas in late 2016, Muzayun met Divya, a mother of two, for an interview at a children’s park in Borivali. Divya told her, "I’ve been struggling to find a good physiotherapist in this area for six months. People in my locality are isolated—so busy. Other than a hi or hello once in a while, we don't reach out. But that wasn't how things were when I was growing up. We used to know each other. We used to help each other.”

Delivering thoughtful, usable design

Learning through immersion

Product team members routinely join UX researchers in the field to ensure  they fully internalizes the needs and context of the people they’re building for, and ground product decisions in real user insights. As Ben Fohner, a product manager on the Neighbourly team, says: “There’s no substitute for sitting down with somebody in their living room and watching them use (or try to use!) the product you’ve built. It’s a combination of incredibly exhilarating when you see an ah-ha moment—and incredibly humbling when something just doesn’t work. Spending time face-to-face with our users was essential in building Neighbourly, and a great source of motivation for the whole team, too.”

Putting it all together

Neighbourly is one product among many, developed to address a specific need. However, we’ve often found instances where addressing local needs can grow to have global impact. For example, Files Go, an app that helps you free up space on your phone, was built from insights gathered primarily in India and Brazil, but it’s resonated with audiences globally.

Google aims to build products that improve the lives of as many people as possible. And from the initial insight to the finishing pixel, UX research helps product teams stay connected to the pulse of the user. By staying focused on the needs, behaviors and concerns of the people for whom we’re developing our products, we can more effectively build for everyone.

We launched Google Go last year as a lightweight, faster way to search the web on devices which may have less space or less reliable internet connections. Today, millions of people around the world use Google Go to learn, stay informed, and explore the web more easily than ever before.

Despite the rapid growth of audio and video content online, the web is still predominantly made up of lengthy, text-based pages which aren’t always easy to read on the go. So it's not surprising we’ve received consistent requests for Google Go to make it more convenient to access web content.

Today, we’re launching a new feature which will let everyone using Google Go’s browser listen to webpages out loud. Powered by natural language processing and speech synthesis AI, this technology can read aloud billions of webpages in 28 languages smoothly, and in a natural sounding voice, even on 2G connections. It also uses minimal cellular data. This technology relies on AI to determine which parts of a page to read, and which to leave out, so you only listen to what is important.

Using this technology, consuming long-form text becomes as easy as watching TV or listening to the radio. It’s also helpful for multitasking, like following a recipe while cooking a meal, listening to articles while exercising, or catching up on news on your commute.

People using Google Go come from many different backgrounds, and some might want extra tools to help read and pronounce new words—for example those with visual or reading impairments, people studying a foreign language, or those less comfortable reading long text. Today’s update makes it easier for anyone to access the richness of the web. For those learning new languages, each word is highlighted as it is read, allowing you to follow along and helping accelerate your learning.

In the future, we’d like to bring the ability to listen to webpages to more Google products. Long term, we hope this is just one way we can use AI to make accessing the web easier for everyone.