HECTOR OUILHET: Hi, everybody.
My name is Hector Ouilhet.
I'm the head of design for Search, Assistant, and News
family of products.
DEANA ANGLIN: So I'm Deana Anglin.
And I'm a senior user experience researcher here at Google.
DEE SPEED: I'm Dee Speed.
I am a UX director here at YouTube.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: My name is Kevin Lozandier.
I'm a user experience engineer.
MAGGIE STANPHILL: I'm Maggie Stanphill.
I'm a UX director at Google.
FATIMAH RICHMOND: My name is Fatimah Richmond.
I'm a user experience researcher.
RAMYA MALLYA: My name is Ramya Mallya.
I'm an interaction designer at Google.
HECTOR OUILHET: Three words--
wow.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: In three words.
DEE SPEED: The UX culture at Google is purposeful.
It's inclusive and full of innovation actually.
RAMYA MALLYA: Nurturing, open, and collaborative.
HECTOR OUILHET: Expanding, evolving, and awesome.
MAGGIE STANPHILL: Voice of user.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: Put users first.
FATIMAH RICHMOND: I'd say it was a healthy challenge.
DEANA ANGLIN: I would say it's ambitious, innovative,
and collaborative.
It's ambitious because UX culture reflects
Google culture, where it's constantly
challenging us to think 10x.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: Good isn't good enough
and being able to provide alternate
takes on how to solve a problem with no egos involved.
HECTOR OUILHET: Google is very famous
for its iterative culture and nature.
We have this relentless optimism to drive and to inspire
the right responses or the right solutions
so they can resonate with our users.
FATIMAH RICHMOND: So my favorite thing about Google UX
is the sense of community.
It's something that I haven't really experienced
at any other company.
DEE SPEED: I have other people that I can lean on,
whether it's for management help,
whether it's for discussing the latest trends.
MAGGIE STANPHILL: It's very much where
I've found my tribe at Google.
I found so many close friends and colleagues this way.
DEANA ANGLIN: I came in thinking that I didn't have anything
to contribute to the community personally.
What could I add?
And I found the community to be very encouraging
and say, no, there is something you can add.
DEE SPEED: We start with the premise, focus on the user
and all else follows.
It's about them, not about us.
RAMYA MALLYA: Putting research first.
We design for products for people
who are all over the world.
So going out there in the field to observe and learn
from users in their context is one of the big ways
we put users first.
DEANA ANGLIN: We try to ensure that we're
designing not just for here, but that we're really
designing for all.
HECTOR OUILHET: So it starts with empathy.
So with that culture of moonshots
or trying to achieve the impossible, what design allow
us to do is to helping that processes have
these empathy for the user.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: I think empathy comes into play with everything
we work on at Google.
For example for the next billion users,
we keep that in mind with everything
with the design [INAUDIBLE] we make.
I think that making the world's information more accessible,
that is something that all users, as much as possible,
need to be able to have available to them.
FATIMAH RICHMOND: We really try hard to find opportunities
of magical moments across the different products.
So I work in G Suite, and so we're a suite of apps.
And I think we put a lot of care into finding opportunities
for our apps to integrate with each other,
so that from the user perspective,
it doesn't feel like a large company with different product
areas.
It actually feels like a suite of products.
DEANA ANGLIN: So my favorite thing about the culture of UX
at Google is that I've been able to interact
with people from different walks of life,
so people who come from different backgrounds.
So I came from a computer science background
and I do research.
And there are other people who come from social science
background or there were a lawyer before.
And they're all doing the same thing.
To me, that's fascinating because it
shows that UX is a field that's really
like a melting pot of academic background.
KEVIN LOZANDIER: Well, I'm a [INAUDIBLE] engineer
and I always had a passion for design.
And to me, I learn engineering to be able to appreciate design
better by being able to more realize the intents I had
of the concepts and the visuals of things,
and being able to directly impact how users use products.
Doing it for scale is taking into consideration
the concept at the prototyping phase, as well as
the actual implementation phase, how to exactly approach
the problem for the amount of users
that need to be accounted for.
There's many solution to a problem.
So when working at Google's scale,
we have to take that into consideration
with not taking just the simplest route,
but perhaps an alternate take in order
to accommodate as much use as possible for our products.
HECTOR OUILHET: The way we design inclusively
is an important thing we do at Google.
It's important because the products that we do
are at scale.
And I think I'm going to sound like a broken record,
but it's all about empathy.
Empathy of understanding that user need, that I said earlier,
they don't change.
That user need and how other people are going about it.
For example, we know that people in China or India
and the way they consume information is different most
of the work that we did from the beginning
are just based on one language but guess what.
Many people that want to speak more than one language
and actually just alternate it really quickly.
So we have a deep role into helping
translate and contextualize such content so that people that
want access can understand it's important that we design
and we're inclusive of a global audience because we do
aspire to help as many people as we can empathy
has to be at the heart of everything
you do because it proves that you understand
the person or the people that you're talking to their needs
you can relate to their needs,
which means you can address them more thoroughly
and in a more complete way as a leader Google
my design philosophy is very much informed by my values
many of those centered around inclusion
and we believe deeply in inclusion
it is one of the broader principles of Google
I think the some of the wonderful work
that the NBA team is doing working
with users in different markets in emerging markets like India,
Indonesia to just learn and see how people interact
with technology in those areas I think
the important thing about when we design
for different cultures is to again empathize
with different cultures understand where they're
coming from and use the design language that we have Google
material in an appropriate way.
So whether that means tweaking the color palette
to match someone's cultural sensitivities
or even just using specific language that we
use in our products to make sure that we're
speaking the same language as the person who is using
the product, not in just the same the literal language sense
but also using the same phrases using the same sense of humor
is different than between different cultures.
So just being sensitive to all of those different nuances
and designing with them keeping those things in mind
designing for accessibility is part of our fundamental process
there are so many resources available internally at Google
from experts who have done research
in this field for so many years and so many tools
as well on how to design all for keeping in mind
various different accessibility needs
that people might have we have some really
awesome accessibility stars they create these principles.
So that throughout your entire process.
You can look at these principles and gauge how accessible
your products are they also connect you with Googlers who
may be a part of the disability community who can help test
your products so I really see the future of design heading
in a space where or design team reflects the people who are
designing for as a black user experience practitioner
at Google I start took the initiative to start a community
called black UX network and I believe like there is a need
to address representation and UX at every angle so it helped
to merge all the things I like technology doing research
and talking to people and working on hard challenges I
think it's going
to be loss of actual input mechanisms
that we've traditionally had things
like the keyboard and the mouse we're
moving further ahead with things like voice
being able to recognize different voices.
So the input methods are definitely
going to change I think the next big thing in design
will actually be consumer design trends making
its way an enterprise design products it reminds me
of a talk by Katherine courage Amy Loki
and some of the other US design leaders at you
where we talked about what are some trendy consumer
experiences that are making it into enterprise design
software I think over the next few years
we'll see a lot of those data visualizations
and delightful experiences making it into enterprise
design products the future of wax and design
is really around empathy we had data we could measure data.
But what we're really finding is that some
of the more qualitative measures are in some regard
a better indicator for user satisfaction designing
experiences that actually help us detach ourselves
away from technologies the joy of missing
out thinking about creative ways to let people know that you're
taking a break from technology right now designers
and you ex practitioners across the world
being more and more responsible and feeling that responsibility
for designing interaction with technology
as more and more technology enters our homes
and we use it in very many different ways
today we start seeing designers thinking
about not just their one on one interaction with that product,
but also the broader implications
of how they're what that might mean for that human's life
the discipline per se of designing
is expanding we're going in these people are shifting
from a more declarative or more predictable
way of creating to something is more learning and adapting
wait m.l. and I the way, is changing that these courts are
from all of the dialogue is fascinating the way
I see it is how my daughter learns
and the way she learned how to ride a bike
was not by riding the bike she with learning this concept
balancing.
And then she learned this notion of pedaling
we'd had different object things think
from the kitchen for my wife and then she
was able to put those things together when we gave her we
put pedals to her bike.
She never used the training wheels
she was able to learn and adapt constantly for the situation
in order to produce the outcome that she wanted that learning
on that thing is how we are shifting in the way we create
products and then what people where consumer products.
And we have an amazing set of inspiration,
which is humans people technology is for the people
right and we're there to build that.
So that's where the sign is heading.