Turning User Hacks into Product Insights
The hack that inspired Google’s Tap to Translate & Gboard
There are two divergent product schools of thought:
#1: Users don’t know what they don’t know
#2: Users know what we don’t yet know
In less tongue-twisting terms, we as product thinkers have a choice: we can lead the user, or learn from the user. But maybe, there’s a third option that’s not an either/or, but instead, a cycle. This third school of thought poses an important question — where to start?
Heather Luipold and I (my creative partner and better half) believe the best product ideas stem from learning from the user. Once you’ve uncovered the insight, only then you can lead the user to new features, benefits and use-cases that evolve behavior over time. It’s a cycle.
So, what does learning from the user look like?
Our approach is to look for “the hacks” — the things users are already doing in attempt to solve a particular need or problem — and turn those hacks into insights.
Recently, we had the opportunity to apply this hack-centric design thinking to Google Search and Google Translate, two of Google’s most used and loved products built in the pre-messaging, pre-mobile era. Working with the Search and Translate teams, we asked ourselves, how can we reimagine these highly utilized products in a way that keeps their core value intact, while evolving them forward to work within the rapidly changing mobile computing environment?
Like any product team, we started by looking at the data. The challenge with data though, is that it often tells you what is happening, but not why something is happening. To figure out the why, we had to dig a layer deeper.
Take Translate — Google’s most international product, with 9 out of 10 users living outside the U.S. — it’s growing like crazy in emerging markets, with Brazil topping the charts.
One interpretation of this data is, that like lots of other tech products, Translate’s growth is simply a result of the millions of new users coming online everyday in emerging markets. While definitely a cause of growth, it wasn’t the cause of growth. Or not the cause we were looking for that would tell us how to make Translate work better for these users. Only when we dove into qualitative user research and spoke with lots of users in India and Brazil, did we discover the answer we were looking for:
Our most active users in these markets are copy-pasting to and from messaging apps to Google Translate multiple-times-a-day, and sometimes, multiple-times-a-conversation.
It’s not that these users are turning to Translate to chat with foreign friends all day long — that’s an edge case. They’re translating content from the web and other apps that’s being shared within messaging apps like Whatsapp (further proof that messaging has evolved to a platform for content and services). With more than 50% of content on the web in English, and minimal knowledge of English in many emerging markets, this copy-paste behavior makes a lot of sense.
Once we identified the “user hack” — copy-paste — and understood not only where users were copy-pasting, but what they were copy-pasting, we were able to design the right solution to make translating within apps a faster, more seamless experience. We worked with the amazing Google Translate team to build a new feature called Tap to Translate that lets you instantly translate any text — a message, a photo caption, comments, song lyrics, just about anything — within any app on your Android phone.
Rather than creating a new behavior that users had to learn, we strategically leaned into the hack we knew users were already doing.
Just tap the text, copy it, and your translation pops up right there. You can translate and send your reply too. No more app-switching, just instant translations — anywhere on your phone, right when and where you need them.
Interestingly, we saw a similar “app-switching” pain point with Search. We’ve all had that moment when you’re in a messaging app, chatting about dinner plans with a friend. You switch to another app, find the address, copy it, switch back, paste it back into your conversation, and finally, hit send. Just like with Translate, we zeroed in on this copy-paste hack, and used that as a springboard to come up with a better way to search and send stuff on your phone. From this hack-turned-insight, we worked with the Search team to build Gboard, a new keyboard for iPhone with Google Search built right in. Gboard lets you search and send things like restaurant info, flight times, GIFs and more, within any app on your iPhone.
Two different products built on two different platforms, both born out of a shared user hack: copy-paste.
So, what can we learn from this? User insights based on quantitative data are a valuable first step. But the more nuanced hack-turned-insight is a needle in the haystack with real potential to propel a product forward. To get to that single insight that matters, you have to dig and dig, ask why, then why again.
By learning from the user, then leading them with new, additive functionality, we can evolve our products forward, while staying true to the core product value our users know and love.
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P.S. In the spirit of hacks, we’re hacking Medium — and in doing so, making an explicit request for a new feature — co-authorship ;) Huge thanks to Heather Luipold & Anthony Tripaldi, and to everyone from the Creative Lab, Search and Translate teams that helped bring these products to life.
P.P.S. You can get Gboard for iPhone here on the App Store and Tap to Translate as part of the new Google Translate app for Android here on the Play Store. Let us know what you think!
