COMPANY
Google Education
ROLE
UX Designer
SERVICES
UX/UI Design / Interaction Design / User Research / Wireframing /
User Testing
I spent Summer 2022 leading & executing a design project on the Google Education team, exploring ways to creatively incorporate video experiences into the Google Classroom product. I’m not allowed to tell you exactly what I worked on, so I’m going to tell you about my design process instead. Please reach out to me if you want more ✨ ambiguous details ✨ about this case study.
I collaborated with…
UX Researchers
UX Designers
Product Managers
Developers
& Students (users)
…to develop, prioritize & refine ideas.
Here’s what I did in 13 weeks:
BUILD UNDERSTANDING
I played around in the Classroom platform as an educator & a student, set up 1:1s with my extended team to understand their goals, and perused through infinite Google resources to better understand the product, project & resources I could leverage.
PROTOTYPE
Lots of Figma fun. Used Material Design patterns & components. Built new components. Tried out new Figma plugins for accessibility, layout, etc.
CONDUCT RESEARCH
Primary. Collaborated with UX Researchers to develop a research plan & ran a co-design session with middle and high school students to understand how they learn.
Secondary. Assessed the product landscape. Read reports on education, online & mobile learning, student behaviours, teaching challenges, etc.
SYNTHESIZE & IDEATE
Created journey maps & identified key opportunity areas. Brainstormed a lot of wacky, interesting, boring, and realistic ideas. Planned and ran a prioritization workshop with my team (UX researchers, designers, product manager, developers, etc.) to shortlist ideas to prototype.
TESTING
Design Crits. Got incredible feedback from designers on my team + adjacent teams across different offices.
User testing. Collaborated with researchers to develop a testing plan. Ran individual + group sessions to test concepts, variants of concepts, etc.
EvaluatE & ITERATE
Prioritized the most desirable concepts, identified and addressed usability issues, and developed concepts to a higher fidelity while considering microinteractions.
Final designs & insights were presented in a report to the team. (They got me cake, so I think they approved of it.)
IMPACT
The final report was used to inform the product’s 3-5 year vision & product roadmap.
SKILLS DEVELOPED
A-Zs of planning a research study
Bug bashing
Material 2 & 3
Thinking more about accessibility, responsive design & edge cases
INSIGHTS
Not everything needs to be replaced by technology (be user-driven, not purely technology-driven)
Presenting less information can be more informative