What I learned from a UX internship at Google Hardware
Last summer, I had an opportunity to do a 12-week internship at Google as a “UX Engineering (Design) Intern” with the Hardware UX team (HWUX).
Situated in a “secret design lab” (according to Fast Company) in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, the team is responsible for the UX design of the company’s consumer hardware products, specifically wearables, in both aspects of hardware user experience and their companion software.
In this article, I would like to share key takeaways that I have learnt over the summer from being a part of this awesome team!
[Note: due to the Non-Disclosure and Confidentiality Agreement, the details of this work are only available to Googlers with permission. Please contact Google Hardware UX team for more information.]
My roles during the internship
At Google, the primary role of a “UX Engineer (Design)” is a prototyper of the design team while also being involved in the design of a product. Since my internship was with the wearables Hardware UX team (HWUX), the main focus of my internship was on prototyping hardware interactions for one of Google’s future products in the wearables product family. My role and responsibilities included:
- exploring novel interaction techniques for the wearable hardware to improve user experience under challenging form factors,
- building working prototypes as a proof-of-concept for those ideas, and
- conducting user testing on the prototypes to evaluate those designs and present the findings as possible design directions to the design team.
The tools and the skills that I have exercised during the internship included:
- Formative Research: Stakeholder interviews, document reviews, hands-on testing
- Design: Brainstorming, organizing, and prioritizing design ideas, user flow
- Prototyping: Arduino, Processing, SolidWorks, 3D printing, Principle (to communicate design concepts through animations)
- Design Evaluation: Usability testing
That being said, here are the key takeaways that I have learned from working with talented people in this internship:
Takeaway #1: User Experience isn’t Just About Users and Designers
In schools, UX is usually thought of as the design teams’ job toward the user groups they are trying to design for. You talk to the target group, learn about their needs and pain points, then solve that through design. Simple! Right? (Well, not quite, actually.) But, in an industry setting, I’ve learned through this internship that it’s quite a bit more complicated than that.
Stakeholders and constraints come in all shapes and forms
Since we are now working on a product that is going to ship to real customers, there are a lot more stakeholders and constraints involved in the whole process of product development. Those include, for instance:
- Industrial Design:
The form factor of a product is a constraint the UX team has to work with. The choice of sensors, for example, is directly affected by the form factor. - Technical constraints:
For instance, more robust interaction might mean decreased battery life. The UX team also has to make these decisions in collaboration with other teams for what to prioritize to achieve the optimal user experience. - Engineering:
A UXE’s job is to make sure that the design is technologically feasible and could be reliable enough for actual day-to-day use while maintaining good user experience. This is done through proof-of-concept and prototypes. Integration and compatibility with the existing engineering platforms also usually pose as constraints that the design team has to work with. - Legal:
Compliance with the regulations is also an important constraint that the design team and the legal department have to work closely together on. - Marketing and Branding:
Brands need cohesive narratives to strengthen their ecosystem. Not only that mapping out user scenarios are crucial to interaction design itself, but those that you prioritize in the product say a lot about who the company is and what do you, as a part of it, want it to be. - The Press:
One part of the life cycle of a product, especially for a company like Google, is being featured on headlines. These headlines are also usually the result of the design in some ways. UX teams need to also keep this in their minds while designing the product.
Good products are a whole-organization effort
Having seen how a UX team worked at Google, I have observed that these considerations are commonly and frequently discussed in the team. These are to make sure that we, as UXers, design products that give the best experience within those constraints, are reliable enough for real-world use, and are well-understood by the consumers and the public.
What I have learned from this is that designers need to keep in mind that the best products are not the result of the UX team alone, and others aren’t to be blamed when a product is not doing great as designed. Therefore, it is a valuable skill to be able to understand these constraints as well as other stakeholders in the process.
Takeaway #2: There is No “Ultimate Product”
Once the constraints are considered, it’s also worth noting that such constraints are sometimes ephemeral. In the same way as to how a new color of paint might enable artists to create new types of artwork, the ever-evolving technology as well as changing user needs do the same thing to product designers.
The designer’s toolbox is ever-growing
As technology advances, it adds to the designers’ design toolbox broader possibilities that can be implemented in future products. Interaction techniques that were not feasible a few years ago might become possible today. For example, Pixel 4's Motion Sense-style interaction would not be in designers’ serious considerations years ago just because it was not feasible to implement at scale. Now that the technology is ready, designers have more in their toolbox that they can creatively utilize.
Then why not just wait for the technology to mature and design “the ultimate product” that will be perfect when launched? The short answer is: you can’t.
Right time, right place, and adequate preparation
We have seen a lot of products that failed only to see other versions of the same idea become successful years after their initial launch. Think Windows Mobile and the iPhone, Apple Newton and the iPad. What we can learn from these failures and successes is that technology products need the right time, right context, and adequate preparation to become successful. Radical changes can hardly succeed without being somewhat familiar. It takes time and familiarity for novel technologies to be adopted by users in their daily lives. Therefore, I have learned from this internship that it is important for the design team to strategize about balancing the essentials, the new, and the bells and whistles in their new products. Putting all the radical new things in one product at once doesn’t usually lead to the product being successful.
There will always be unknowns
Another reason against the notion of the ultimate product is that there will be a lot of unknowns in the design process. This is especially true for emerging platforms such as wearables. Yes, these unknowns can be addressed to an extent with user research. However, it’s still not the same as an actual launch when many more factors come into play. These launches, though can be highly risky, will give the design team very rich learnings which could lead to major improvements in the following iterations of the product. Long-term strategy of a product line is needed and it should always takes into account learnings from the previous iterations.
Having learned about this nature of ever-changing technology and iterative product strategy from working at this cutting-edge company, these are the reasons why I came to the conclusion that “there is no ultimate product.” Each product is a result of the technological, societal, and other constraints at the time. As a UXer, my takeaway is that revolutionary innovations are never a one-off. Long-term planning is crucial and radical product needs to be carefully designed to be helpful, yet still feel familiar enough with all the basic user needs covered.
Takeaway #3: Communicate and Socialize Your Work
Aside from those takeaways about design considerations, another key thing I have learned is the importance of socializing my work with other people in the organization.
You’ve done some good work. Share it or it will fade away!
Throughout the internship, I have learned that socializing my work can be as easy as casually showing people design ideas and discuss them, conduct pilot user testing with a teammate, to holding a meeting to discuss project progress. These communications with team members and other colleagues did not only keep them in the loop but also are great sources of feedback to my design. This, I found, is not only a great way to keep the team excited about the progress, but also a way to learn more about people as well as your own designs which will help strengthen them in later iterations.
Communicate more = understand more
Communicating about my projects and getting feedback from other people also helped me learned about all the considerations I have to keep in mind. Working in industry settings means that there are many more people involved in a product. These people have different roles, objectives, concerns, and points of view. Discussing my work with them helped me look at my own design from standpoints that I alone would not be able to think of, ultimately improving the experience for the end-user by acknowledging such latent constraints in the design process.
It was also helpful to spend time understand and dig deep into the narratives and reasoning behind the product that I was working on. This also gave me a chance to practice storytelling skills for my work. By thinking more about the bigger picture of how the product fits with users’ lives as well as the ecosystem, I understood more about how to communicate more effectively with the product team with this shared understanding.
This internship has greatly sharpened my communication skills. Not only I learned that it helped strengthen my project, but I also learned how to plan the communication to best serve my audience through this experience.
Takeaway #4: When in doubt, prototype.
… and when you think your idea would definitely work, also prototype.
Clarifying thoughts and managing ambiguity
Prototyping is an essential way to evaluate your design before investing your time and resources in building the actual product. However, I also found from this internship that, prototyping also serves another important purpose: clarifying my thoughts. Making a functional prototype forces a designer to materialize their often vague ideas into definite ones. Ideas that are perfectly sound in sketches might not work as well as expected in real life.
Prototyping is also a great way to deal with ambiguity in the design process. For my intern project, it helped me address unknowns and assumptions hidden in the design process. Ambiguity can be managed in this way by listing assumptions that are proven or disproved, and surfacing unknowns. Since prototyping inevitably includes a lot of decision making, it also made apparent that parameters that can be tweaked in the design, helping me lay out possible ways to improve the design that I have not considered during idea conception.
Prototyping for hardware UX
The emphasis on prototyping is especially crucial for hardware and wearables UX design. It is used extensively both to evaluate the interaction design (with “feels-like” prototypes) and technical robustness (with “works-like” prototypes). Since there are no concrete “platform guidelines” in designing interactive hardware products, there are potentially more unknowns than traditional software applications. This is where prototyping comes in. Every unknowns, including physical characteristics of a product such as human factors, or even appropriateness for public use is hard to know precisely in the conceptual process without prototypes.
Depending on the aspect to be tested, prototypes do not have to always be full-fledged. Rich insights can be gained from the lowest-tech prototypes. Though richer prototypes could usually elicit richer feedback, it could also distract testers from the actual focus of the evaluation. These are the decisions that a prototyper has to make. Thanks to this internship, I have honed my skills in rapid and physical prototyping to make design ideas testable within a short time.
In conclusion, I feel that the experience I gained from this internship helped me grow significantly as a UX professional. There are now design considerations that I take more into account in current projects to reinforce my design ideas alongside with both hard and soft skills I have developed during this valuable summer.
Special Thanks!
Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to…
- Frank Li, my intern host who always helped me navigate through the project, answered all the questions I have, and gave helpful advice for my future careers.
- Basheer Tome, my co-host who also shared with me his experience with hardware UX design and always giving me suggestions for my work.
- Jenny Hu, my fellow hardware UX design intern who had exchanged with me interesting viewpoints of the design world and help ease me into thinking about design more conceptually. (Also, shout-out to fellow hardware UX and Industrial Design interns!)
- And to the awesome people in the HWUX Design team who hosted me and helped advised me throughout the summer.
It was a great summer for me and I am very grateful for the opportunity to be in this team. Thank you all again for the amazing summer!
One More Thing! (edit: Oct 15)
Now that the product from the team I worked with during this internship was announced during this morning’s #MadeByGoogle event, here’s the first look of the All-New Google Pixel Buds. Congrats to all the people involved in the project!
