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Upcoming Hangout On Air with User Experience Googlers
March 13, 2012
We've wrapped up our
Exploring Design @ Google
series and are excited to give you the chance to hear from these Googlers firsthand during a Hangout On Air, this Friday, March 16th at 3:00 pm PST from the
Google Students page
on Google+.
Kelcey
,
Doug
, and
Marc
will talk about their path to Google, what projects they're working on now, and the opportunities that are available at Google for students interested in user experience.
You can submit your questions for them via Google+ or Twitter using the hashtag #UXhangout. We'll collect your questions up until the Hangout On Air starts on Friday and answer as many of the questions as we can live. If you aren't able to tune in live, never fear. We'll be uploading the video to our
Hangouts On Air playlist
of our YouTube channel.
Posted by Hal Marz, University Programs Specialist
Exploring Design @ Google - Marc Hemeon
February 27, 2012
Introduction: Today’s post is the third in our series on
Exploring Design @ Google
, which highlights the work of the user experience (UX) team at Google. The user experience team is a multi-disciplinary team of designers and researchers who collaborate with engineering and product management to create innovative, usable great-looking products that people love to use. The mantra of the the team is: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Each week, we have featured a different Googler on the team and talked to them about their role, their background and what they love about working for Google. For today’s post, we sat down for a few questions with Marc Hemeon, a user interface designer at YouTube. -- Ed.
What does user experience mean to you?
Marc Hemeon:
I think of user experience as the emotional response someone has when using your product. A successful user experience tends to reward the user with moments of delight, pleasant surprise and satisfaction. A dreadful user experience makes the user feel abandoned, lonely, unsatisfied and just plain dumb. Great products make the user feel in control. User experience designers are manipulators of emotion. Use your powers for good.
What is your role at YouTube?
MH:
Some have compared me to a muscle car, others a provocateur, but my official title is more like “senior user interface designer of awesomeness.” I pretty much have the greatest job known to man (at least for a designer). I get to take the ideas, problems and thoughts of super smart folks and wrap them in a beautiful design. If my design mojo is flowing then I hopefully not only solve the problem at hand, but end up creating something unique and rad and fully satisfying for my team.
How does your role fit into the larger team?
MH:
There’s lots of different types of designers and styles of working. At YouTube, I have found myself most effective at the beginning of a new project, which basically means I get to throw a million crazy ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Projects range from redesigning the look and feel of all of youtube.com, to new video player designs to seed brainstorming for totally new product ideas. I tend to lean towards working on projects that push the visual design we have at YouTube and imagine what it may look like in the future. We have an incredible user research group at YouTube who provide eye opening data and insights into user behavior, expectations and disappointments. Their findings can provide inspiration for a lot of the design work we do and shed light on where our current design solutions fall short.
Tell us about a day in the life of a designer.
MH:
Before a designer can design for the world, they have to first design for themselves.
Here is a typical day:
Wake at 5:50am
I workout for about 1.5 hours, then cruise home, hang at breakfast with my amazing wife and 3 kiddies, then hop on the freeway for 45 minute commute. During my commute I look for patterns in nature to inspire my day, while listening to NPR.
8:30-8:45 Breakfast 2
I get to work around 8:30am or so and enjoy a delicious breakfast of cage free egg whites, salsa, avocado and cottage cheese coupled with a frothy beverage of Diet Coke.
8:45 - 9:00am Email
I cruise up to my ergonomic standing desk which can also adjust to a sitting desk for hardcore pixel pushing. I open email for about 5 minutes, and skim around looking for any super urgent stuff I need to attend to. I only check email 3 times a day and never at night or the weekends - this is something new I am trying in 2012 to achieve more balance.
9:00am - 11:45am Make Time
After email I open Photoshop or Illustrator or bust out a sketch pad. Somewhere in there I slap on some headphones and crank up some music and let the creative juices flow. During my “make time” I am usually creating high fidelity mocks along with pretty detailed flows that allow someone to click through and understand the UI and interaction I have in mind.
11:50 - Noon - Stand Up for Major Project
If it’s a Monday, I have a brief stand up meeting for one of my major projects. We literally stand up and talk about what we are working on that day and do a quick sync.
Noon - 12:30 Lunch
I then cruise down to lunch. I typically spend about 25 mins. at lunch, usually with other YouTubers or random YouTube celebrities like the
Nyan Cat
.
12:30 - 1:00 Snippets, Internet Surfing and Email
After lunch I cruise back up and do a little internet surfing, email etc. If it’s a Monday I write a quick hit list of all the stuff I did - my snippets - of the week prior along with links to all my mocks. I share these snippets with my close team members and other designers to keep them in the loop with the work I am doing.
1:00 - 1:15 Doodle Time
I will typically draw something once a day, whether its typography or an illustration.
1:15 - 6:00ish Make Time or Meeting Time
The afternoons are either devoted to meetings or more make time, or a mix of both. Throughout the day I will reach out to a product manager, engineer or other designer and have ad hoc five minute design busts to show what I am working on and to solicit some quick feedback, share ideas, etc. I may get up and go work at a couch or down in the cafe or in one of the massage chairs to mix things up a bit.
Do you ever get “designer’s block”? If so, how you get back in the groove of things?
MH:
If I am having a creative block and I don’t really have a strong idea, I will typically sketch till my fingers fall off creating various wireframes, flows and ideas. Once I have a good idea I feel down to my core, I will then return to Photoshop and mock everything up. When I find myself going slow in Photoshop then thats a sign to me I don't really have a clear design solution and need to a step back and go back to paper until I figure out a solution.
How does a designer work with engineers?
MH:
We have a very close working relationship with our engineers, they are deeply involved with the design of the product or feature from the very beginning. Many have a very strong interest in the user experience and strong opinions on how a product should look. A good designer can listen to everyone’s input and provide a strong solution that should leave everyone satisfied (after much debate and mock wrangling).
A typical product or feature cycle may work like this:
Meet to talk about an idea (ideas originate from anyone)
Brainstorming around that idea in the form of whiteboard sessions along with healthy debate, and get to a general agreement around one solution
Mocks and prototype - In tandem, engineers will start building a skeleton prototype to prove out the idea while a designer will create some higher fidelity mocks.
The group meets back up, we run through the mocks and make adjustments and tweaks as needed. Rinse and repeat the mock/prototype process until the group is in agreement on what exactly we are building.
Design then works closely with the Front End engineers on implementation and design, sometimes providing rich html/css/js design prototypes to create a clean example of the UI and interaction.
We then roll out the solution internally and do a bunch of testing, then if all goes well we launch the feature 100%.
The typical cycle take about a week, but can be as short as a daily cycle or a much longer cycle for something large. For bigger features we’ll run usability studies to get insights as well. We tend to have many cycles going in parallel.
What is the most interesting project to date that you have worked on?
MH:
The REALLY interesting projects I can’t talk about yet, but there were three from last year that were really awesome and huge learning experiences - the site-wide redesign of YouTube, the redesign of our YouTube player (both on site and off site) and our new home page. Designing for hundreds of millions of people is an incredible opportunity and a huge challenge when you consider our global audience who consume YouTube on a variety of different devices, languages and accessibility formats.
What was your path to Google?
MH:
I am a serial entrepreneur and have done a bunch of start-ups. I came to Google in January of 2011 after they acquired a startup I helped co-found called fflick.com. I’ve worked on design, coding and all kinds of roles over the years. I’ve worn many hats, but the hat I really love to wear is that of a designer.
What did you study in school to prepare you for work in user experience?
MH:
I didn’t know it at the time, but I would say my minor in humanities prepared me more as a designer than anything else I studied in college, as it taught me how to take inspiration from the rich world around me. I also worked as a web designer/developer in school. I was hired on full time (30 hours a week) to work at a startup during my full class load at school. My work as a web developer and designer in the early dot com bubble days allowed me to learn first hand how to design and code sites, how to cope with unrealistic deadlines and most importantly how to launch new products.
What do you love most about working for Google?
MH:
At the end of the day, and I really don’t want to sound too cheesy and cliche here, but at Google we have the opportunity to work on anything we can imagine, literally anything. Of course, you have to convince others of your ideas and come up with a plan to execute, but for someone like me who has built up products and businesses in the past, I feel totally free to create anything under the sun (or even beyond the sun). Google has the people and resources to make any idea you have into a reality.
Posted by Hal Marz, University Programs Specialist
Exploring Design @ Google - Doug Fox
February 16, 2012
Introduction: Today’s post is a continuation of our
Exploring Design @ Google
blog series which highlights the work of the user experience (UX) team at Google. The user experience team is a multi-disciplinary team of designers and researchers who collaborate with engineering and product management to create innovative, usable, great-looking products that people love to use. The mantra of the the team is: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Each week, we will feature a different Googler on the team and talk to them about their role, their background and what they love about working for Google. For today’s post, we sat down for a few questions with Doug Fox, a
user experience researcher
on the
Google Analytics
team.
What does user experience mean to you?
Doug Fox:
I think our Google Analytics UX lead defines it best with the notion of “wow, delight, and love”. For any given product, it is important that the first impression has that wow factor. Something that makes you take notice and want to use it. After the wow factor, it is important that it is designed well enough to be delightful. Meaning that the product is designed easy and effective enough that users enjoy it and want to keep using it. Finally, the true measure of a good user experience is love. After using it for a prolonged period of time, users should cringe at the idea of the product you designed being taken away (like how I feel about
Google Maps for Mobile
!).
How does your role fit into the larger team?
DF:
Simply put, my job is to help the Google Analytics team understand how to design for our users. Web analytics products such as Google Analytics have a wide range of users with varying needs. It is my job to make sure we are meeting those needs. To do this, I conduct research using different techniques and then inform other members of our team (project managers, designers and engineers) what parts of the design are working well and what could be improved.
Tell us about a day in the life of a researcher.
DF:
There is no typical day in the life of a researcher, especially at Google. In any given day, I could be working on a variety of projects. At its core, my days are filled with two agendas: learn and communicate.
I am constantly talking with team members to learn about projects, investigating the latest research findings in my field or interacting with our users to see how they are using our product. Never in my life did I think I would know about Customer Lifetime Analysis or Cookie Churn. As a researcher, you do what it takes to better understand a topic of interest that will make the user experience better.
Your learnings are useless without the ability to communicate them back to the team. I communicate research findings back to the team or company through meetings, presentations, reports and visuals. To be an effective communicator, my reports have included everything from a comic strip to show how users interact with each other to highlight videos from user sessions that reveal frustration or satisfaction in our products.
How does a researcher work with engineers?
DF:
The great thing about Google is that teams are formed with people across multiple roles (engineers, project managers, designers, etc.). Couple that with the fact that we have an open work environment and it is very easy to work together and collaborate.
Many of the engineers on the team are stakeholders on the research projects that I conduct. Thus, they attend research planning meetings or presentations of findings. Based on these findings we then work together as a team to determine how to best design the product.
What is the most interesting project to date that you have worked on?
DF:
I recently conducted a project for the
Google TV
team to help define future remote designs. You know it is going to be a fun project when your job is to observe how people watch TV! Part of the project had users designing their own TV remote through a participatory design. It involved all members of a household, so it was interesting to see the differences and similarities between a teenager’s remote and that of a less tech savvy parent. This showed us just how challenging it is to design a remote that is meant for such a diverse population of television viewers.
What was your path to Google?
DF:
My path was fairly direct. I did two
internships
at Google as a graduate student. After getting my master’s in experimental psychology in 2009 and before I started my PhD, I interned at Google. I worked on projects related to small to medium business advertising and Google TV. In 2010, I did another internship at Google working with the Google Analytics team. The Google Analytics team was a great fit for me, so I decided to rejoin the team after graduating with my PhD in 2011.
What did you study in school to prepare you for the world of user experience?
DF:
I earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology as an undergrad, and a master’s and Ph.D. in experimental psychology with a focus on human factors. The specific lab that I worked in as a graduate student commonly contracted usability work with companies like Dell & Motorola. It was a natural fit for me to work in usability at a tech company like Google.
Members of the UX team have a wide range of backgrounds. Most people don’t think of a psychology major working at Google. However, my social science background coupled with my Human Computer Interaction background has really helped me with the most important part of user experience research, and that is knowing how to effectively learn about the people using your product.
If you were able to go back in time and take a class that you wished you took in college, what would that be and why?
DF:
I wish I had taken more classes in computer science. I took a few, but not enough to have a deep understanding of the field. This sometimes makes it difficult to learn or communicate technical findings to engineers or designers. However, Google’s open culture makes it easy to learn from each other so I am quickly becoming more knowledgeable in this subject.
What do you love most about working for Google?
DF:
I love the freedom of choice at Google. They hire people expecting that they are highly knowledgeable in their respective field. I don’t feel as if I am being micromanaged, and I have the freedom to work on projects that fit my capabilities. You’re encouraged to think outside the box and push your limits. I get to determine the best methodology and have had opportunities to conduct research that I would have never dreamed of doing when I was a student.
Also, it is pretty cool knowing that you work on products that impact millions of people. As a user experience researcher that makes your job more demanding, but it also makes it more rewarding because you actually feel as though your research matters. Working hard as a team to put out a new feature and then watching watching the internet blow up with praise when we have done a good job is pretty exciting.
Posted by Hal Marz, University Programs Specialist
Exploring Design @ Google - Kelcey Rushing
February 6, 2012
Introduction: Today we’re launching Exploring Design @ Google, a new blog series highlighting the work of the user experience (UX) team at Google. The user experience team is a multi-disciplinary team of designers and researchers who collaborate with engineering and product management to create innovative, usable, great-looking products that people love to use. The mantra of the the team is: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Each week, we will feature a different Googler on the team and talk to them about their role, their background and what they love about working for Google. For our first post, we sat down for a few questions with
Kelcey Rushing
, a
visual designer
in
Seattle
.
What does user experience mean to you?
Kelsey Rushing:
Understanding who the user is and what they need, and designing a product or feature that best fulfills that need. It sounds simple enough but the path from need to solution has a bajillion forks in it. The challenge lies in making the best decisions with the help of research, competitive analysis, team brainstorms and feedback, multiple iterations, learning from past missteps and sometimes instinctive leaps of faith. Add in deadlines, limitations and stakeholder requests and you have yourself a pretty fun puzzle to solve that makes the work that much more rewarding.
How does your role fit into the larger team?
KR:
I’m one of three designers on my team, and we’re involved with every phase of a project from planning to polish. For large projects, the whole team works on a strategy and then engineers and designers partner up to implement the ideas. Then we’ll help marketing spread the word with interesting visuals, and make any necessary improvements once the user feedback starts rolling in.
Tell us about a day in the life of a visual designer.
KR:
Most days at Google go something like this:
9:00 Arrive at work and grab a healthy, tasty breakfast
9-9:30 Catch up on email while eating breakfast, then head to the micro-kitchen with my fellow designers to get coffee and talk about what we’re working on
9:30-12:00 Work and/or meetings until lunch
12:00-12:30 Eat an amazing lunch with my team and top it off with fro-yo
12:30-5:00 Work and/or meetings until it’s time to go home
When the sun comes out in Seattle, we take walks down on the canal next to the office, and once in awhile I’ll stay late for a massage or to work out in the gym down the hall. It’s a pretty rough life.
How does a visual designer work with engineers?
KR:
It varies a bit from project to project but generally we’ll start by brainstorming and sketching together to make sure we’re on the same page. Next, I’ll make low-fidelity storyboards of the flows while the engineer starts coding the initial framework. After, I’ll move on to mocks that we use to get approval from stakeholders, do rough usability testing and find out where we need to make adjustments. Once everything is fairly close to final, I’ll start polishing the visuals and making sure the engineer has all the information and files they need to get the project ready for launch.
What is the most interesting project to date that you have worked on?
KR:
All of my projects have been interesting—that’s why I love my job! Even the ones that seem mundane on the surface turn into fun challenges once I’ve talked with the team that’s passionate about them. That being said, there are two projects that stand out as the most interesting and/or exciting for me: traveling to the
Zurich office
for a product re-design and making custom Google+ profile photos for celebrities last Halloween.
What was your path to Google?
KR:
After college I worked for a year in real estate, where I discovered a passion for designing flyers and building web sites. That led me to the
Seattle Central Creative Academy
and I was hired by a Seattle startup right out of design school. After working there for about nine months, we were acquired by Google and I’ve been here ever since.
What did you study in school to prepare you for work in user experience?
KR:
At the University of Washington I double-majored in communications and French. Then I went back to school for two years to get an Associate of Applied Science degree in graphic design & illustration. That’s a fancy way of saying that the program’s main focus was teaching us skills that would apply directly to a job in user experience.
If you were able to go back in time and take one more college class, what would it be and why?
KR:
My design program was incredible when I attended a few years ago, and the teachers are constantly updating the courses to keep up with the ever-changing tech world. There are new classes cropping up every year that I wish I could take. But if I had to choose just one, I’d like to take an HTML5 course because those skills would be useful in my current role at Google.
What do you love most about working for Google?
KR:
It’s really hard to choose just one thing so I’m going to be tricky and say the culture, which covers almost all of it. Googlers are a friendly, good-hearted bunch of rock stars and the company treats its employees so well it’s hard to believe most of the time. There are opportunities to travel to Google offices all over the world, and the work is challenging, impactful and rewarding. All of these things are encouraged as part of the company’s unique culture. There’s also a strong design community here so there’s an opportunity to learn and collaborate with hundreds of other designers.
Interested in the role of User Experience Designer? Apply
here
today!
Posted by Hal Marz, University Programs Specialist
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