Adaptive Path Blog

Irene Au (IA) and Jeff Veen (JV), Google.

JV: Tell us about your background.

IA: Electrical engineering background, but it wasn’t for me. Wanted to focus more on the impact of technology and people. Made way to human-computer interaction. A lot of the research at the time was about web, web technologies. Went from University of Illinois to Netscape. Netscape Communicator 4. Then went to Yahoo. The really fascinating projects were the stuff that was going on inside the viewfinder (the browser). Yahoo had just acquired 411 and realized what they were doing was going beyond the directory of the web. Was a small group of graphic designers there and producers would come a week before a product launched and wanted graphics and layout. I wanted to improve the experiences earlier.

JV: How long have you been at Google now?

IA: Four months.

JV: And how has that been going?

IA: It’s like Disneyland. Tremendous opportunity to bring in design thinking into the organization. Great breeding ground for ideas. How do you take it to the next level.

JV: All the difficult user experience decisions often happen in the algorithm level.

IA: The kind of strategies Google employed in the past might have worked for search, but not for more complex experiences. Traditional designer was an HCI generalist who had a good eye and could build products as well. Need a different set and range of functions and skills and backgrounds and focus now. Changing the hiring structure now.

JV: How do you optimize the recruiting process to find the type of designers we’re looking for?

IA: Need to set up a set of skills: anthropologists, HCI, visual designers, best-of-breed people. Don’t want silos though. Want T shaped people: specialization but broad skills too.

JV: How on earth do you prioritize all the projects at Google?

IA: We don’t have the bandwidth to cover everything. Need a strategy for this, so we don’t just come in at the tail end to work on a mock-up. We need to be more thoughtful in how we engage. We need to do fewer things really well. Is the design group a shop, or a really strategic group? Can we get involved early is one factor. We can upsell into strategy sometimes.

JV: Does this happen at an organization level?

IA: It’s like managing a financial portfolio. You need stuff you can turn over quickly, then other stuff that is infrastructure. Over time, people understand what it is we do. The mock-up is the key at Google. But we need do more and find out what people do.

JV: We need to speak the right language to the right people. Speak the language of finance to business people. But at Google, it’s speaking the languages of engineering.

IA: For the projects we do engage in, we need to set ourselves up to succeed. If we don’t, nobody wins.

JV: Some groups are very metrics driven, some aren’t.

IA: It’s important to be adaptable to the micro-cultures within the organization. Some places are top-down. If we try to apply the same kind of management to both, it won’t work. But we do need to take what works well in one area and apply it to others if we can.

Q: What level of management brought in this type of design and what sort of support are they going to give you?

IA: No deliberate decision from the top. No clear vision for how this will play out.

JV: Everyone says we’re very user-centered. But we don’t do certain techniques.

IA: The question is how do you carve out that space to do those things. Everyone needs to be part of the analysis of the research and brainstorming as well. It’s very transformative. At Google we focus on the rigor (GPA, SAT scores), but there is also this other side with the softer skills like communication we need to focus on more.

Peter Merholz: We need to better facilitate meetings. Should the design group be centralized (rest of company as client) or instead be decentralized (part of the product team)?

IA: Early in a company’s life, really important for designers to be centralized. It helps to have a group to share best practices and standards over time so teams can stop re-inventing the wheel. But it’s best when the designer is merged into the product teams. But it is good when there is some sort of combination: connection to a team and to a group of designers. At some point the UX team gets so big, you have to address this question. It depends on the organization. At some point, you get diminishing returns on decentralization.

JV: Google has amazing centralization especially for engineering. One way to write code at Google. How do you go about making a style guide and keeping it up to date?

IA: Universal look and feel. Build consistency without uniformity. Design pattern library: best practices around interaction design. UI code library. Consistently implement models.

Sam Felder: I’m curious if Google’s new hiring practices were affected by designers and how will it affect the company?

IA: I think the changes have been more subtle. The changes have been about clarifying what we want (expectations). And gives the interviewers more confidence about evaluations.

JV: How many of you use design exercises in hiring? [a few hands raise] I go back and forth on that myself.

IA: It’s really important to come up with an exercise that fits everyone–interface designers to design strategists. We need people throughout that range. Need exercises that allow for that flexibility.

JV: You need to see what people are good at. I have a lot of new people on my team. How do you approach mentoring?

IA: It is important to set aside time to do it. Learn from things like pair-programming. Pair designing? But how do we facilitate across teams so that people learn from others?

JV: Office hours at Google. What a great idea. All managers have them. And designers office hours. Time for unstructured feedback and communication.

IA: I have an open door, but it’s nice to have time blocked out.

JV: Everyone has office hours, so it’s great to just go somewhere and answer the question.

IA: Testing on a toilet is also great. When you go into the bathroom stalls, on the doors are code. It would be great to have that for design too.

Q: How do you go about creating consistency between mobile and web?

IA: There is consistency in look and feel and then there is consistency in interaction and you have to find the elements that communicate as one family, but not to be exact.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Conference commentary, Conversations, Design leaders, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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