exploring career options · but i think the most important thing is to put the knowledge to use and...
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How did a degree in acting prepare you to be a user experience designer?A huge part of good acting is empathy—
being able to put yourself in someone else’s
shoes and understand things from their
perspective. And that is one of the most
important skills for a designer to have. When
we’re designing a product, we are design-
ing not for ourselves, but for other people.
Google products have a huge diversity of
users, and being able to put myself into their
frame of reference is a critical skill.
How did you come to work at Google?For several years after college, I had a
series of interaction-design jobs in Texas—
including for the executive office of the
State of Texas, and for Hoover’s, a Dun &
Bradstreet business intelligence company.
In 2006, when I noticed that Apple was
hiring designers, I talked to a friend who
worked there about applying. He told me,
“lots of companies here in the Bay area are
hiring—Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Apple
as well. You should consider applying to
those companies, too.”
I had never considered applying to
Google. There was this daunting legend
of what it took to get hired there, so it just
never occurred to me that I should apply. But
I followed my friend’s advice, and here I am.
What was the first thing you worked on?When I started, Google was just getting off
the ground with the concept of packaging
a number of its consumer products—like
Google Calendar, Google Docs, and
Gmail—into a suite of products for small
and medium-sized businesses.
My first job at Google was to design the
signup pages for that service. The signup
process is really important: we have to gather
all the necessary information to set up the
service, but it has to be fast so that people
will complete the entire process. I knew I’d
succeeded when, within a day of launching,
someone made a video of the signup pro-
cess, put it to music, and posted it to YouTube.
Do you test things like that with users before launching it?Typically, after we create mockups and
prototypes, we recruit people to come
into our research labs, and we observe
their behavior as they work through the
prototypes. Generally, we look to see if a
user is able to complete the task for which
the software was designed. Did they see
the feature? Did they use it? Was it easy to
use? We don’t actually ask these questions;
we observe the user and see what they do.
occasionally we also do eye tracking to see
where the user is looking on the screen,
so we can match their actions to what they
are seeing. From this user research, we
can tune the products and make sure that
they’re usable, understandable, friendly,
and fast, and that they deliver on the goals
we have for the product.
Do you get any of that information from the way people use Google search?This is one of the benefits of Google search
having so many users: we can see a lot of
different patterns and what types of things
people are searching for. Say that a lot
of people are searching for lasagna, or
lasagna with vegetables, or lasagna with
short cooking time. When we see that a
whole lot of people are looking for these
types of things, our question becomes, How
can we make this easier for them? How
can we make it so that they don’t have to
formulate their query perfectly in order to
get the answer they’re looking for? Now
when you search for something that looks
like a recipe, Google provides tools in the
search results for identifying, sorting, and
filtering the recipes.
Google search works really well, so
we don’t get a lot of people saying, “Hey,
Google, you need to fix this thing.” But
user Experience Designer Interview by Melissa Hartman
exploring career options
Jon Wiley Lead Designer, Google Search Perhaps you noticed a couple of years ago that Google’s search box got a little bigger. Maybe the recently updated Google logo caught your eye. Or maybe you noticed that you were starting to get search results as you entered your search terms. Since joining Google in 2006, Jon Wiley has had a hand in these developments and many others that improve users’ experiences with Google search and apps. A lifelong programmer, Wiley explored the possibilities of the Internet as a teenager when it was still called ARPANET. But some of the best preparation for a career in user experience design, he explains, came from his major in acting at the University of Texas.
38 imagine May/Jun 2011
exploring career options
internally at Google, we’re never really satis-
fied with what we have. We imagine ways in
which it could be better.
What do you do on a typical day?I manage the design team for Google search.
It’s a team of more than a dozen designers
who work on all of our search products, from
places to images to videos. To make sure that
we have a consistent, quality experience with
all of Google’s various search products and
features, I spend a lot of my time making sure
that any enhancements and design changes
are consistent across all those products. To
accomplish this, I coordinate across all the
design teams, product teams, and engineering
teams. We have a couple of weekly reviews
for all of our search products and features, but
I also see them in demos or mockups at my
desk (or on my phone). I also create designs
myself, either through Photoshop or in code.
What keeps the job interesting?one of the things I love about working at Google
is that we never shrink away from a problem. A
good example is Google Instant, which makes
predictions about what you’re searching for as
you type and shows them instantly, making it
easier to get to good results faster.
As one of the designers behind Google
Instant, I created a prototype for search-as-
you-type, and then a team of engineers and
designers ran with it. But when we first started
working on it, our engineering staff said,
“We’re going to have to make the Internet
faster in order to do this.” It’s not just about
Google’s servers; the entire loop, from your
laptop to our servers and back, has to be fast.
Fortunately, at Google we don’t say, “oh,
that’s impossible, we can’t make the Internet
faster.” We just buckle down and figure out a
way to do it. That’s part of why we came up
with the Chrome browser. In order to solve the
problems we wanted to solve, we needed a
faster browser, so we built one. This happens
every day at Google. We get to a point when
we realize that to solve one problem, we first
have to solve another, extremely complex
problem. And we have the resources to do it.
What skills and qualities do you think somebody needs to be successful in a career like yours?A lot of our designers have degrees in
human-computer interaction. Understanding
human beings and how they relate to the
space around them and the objects they use
is important for a lot of design professions,
including industrial design and even archi-
tecture. For my role in particular, you need
a strong understanding of visual design, of
proportion, of hierarchy. You need to know how
to organize information on a page.
You also need to know what is possible
within the medium you’re working in, which
in my case is everything from browsers to
mobile devices. There are tablet devices,
smart phones, desktops with giant screens,
laptops. It’s important for a designer to know
the physical capabilities of these devices—as
well as the technology behind them and the
technology that delivers the services we
create—so that they can create an optimal
experience for the user.
What advice would you give to students interested in working in user experience design?The most important thing is to get some experi-
ence, even if it means building something for
yourself. If you want to be a designer, you need
to design something. obviously going to classes
and getting an academic grounding in all the
things I described earlier is very important,
but I think the most important thing is to put the
knowledge to use and put it into practice.
What user experience designers doUser experience (UX) designers conduct research and design products—whether video game controllers, websites, cell phones, or software—that are easy and pleasurable to use. UX designers may be called upon before a product is created or to redesign products based on user experience and feedback.
Where they workMany UX designers are employed directly by corporations (including tech, retail, financial, and others). Others work for agencies specializing in UX design, and still others work as freelance contractors.
education requiredAccording to the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), most UX designers have at least a bachelor’s degree in human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, computer science, or a related field, with roughly half having a master’s degree.
Salary rangeAn April 2011 snapshot on Payscale.com shows a salary range of $59,018–$100,825. A 2009 UPA survey lists an average salary of $85,283.
for more informationGoogle User Experience Design Principleswww.google.com/corporate/ux.htmlUsability Professionals’ Associationwww.usabilityprofessionals.orgWhat is User Experience Design?www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/05/what-is-user-experience-design-overview-tools-and-resources
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