CLIENT: Google | Google Lens

TIMELINE: April - June 2020

TEAM: Natalie Salaets, Michelle Reamy

SERVICES: UX designer / Visual designer

TOOLS: Illustrator, Photoshop, Google Slides

Case study

For this internal project for a Google user research team, my goal as a designer was to develop a series of digital postcards. We called them “Postcards from the field”. These cards were based on insights from product research accumulated during the couple of months prior to the project. Small and witty, they were meant to fulfill the important role of bringing valuable insights about users into the minds of those who build relevant products - engineers, designers, product and project managers. 

The project goal was to increase empathy and engagement among the product creators.

In collaboration with a user experience researcher Natalie Salaets and a user research team on Google Lens, I ideated and created a series of 21 digital postcards. We’ve also explored UX around card delivery and viewing by internal Google users. 

UX Design

The internal stakeholders across various cross-functional teams were at the heart of the UX process. We started off by brainstorming what content ideas they would find useful when looking at a card. In addition to a user image (we used stock images to protect users’ privacy) and a user quote, what other information do they want to see? This opened up room for some exciting design challenges we encountered on our way.

1. Presenting content in an engaging and useful way

After brainstorming content components with the research team, we created a list of design elements, which included a user image (a stock photograph matching demographics of a real user profile for privacy considerations), a quote from the research and a link to the research, a user icon (eg. Shopper), names of the researchers, and a name of the collection along with the card number. 

What’s left at this point was to figure out how to make this content engaging. Just reading a quote seemed to have an impact but would it be entertaining enough to keep someone browsing the collection? If these cards were printed, they could potentially transform into a card game. Unfortunately, this was not possible due to Covid-19 work-from-home situation. So we decided to make them more interactive by adding a challenge question, a short “quiz”, “fill in the blanks”, and more.

2. Content delivery and groupings

Since print was not an option, which delivery format would suit best for the postcards? The cards contained sensitive information, so we couldn’t use third party products. Users should also be able to comment on them and have conversations about the content. We decided that adding cards to Google Slides and sharing with the relevant stakeholder groups will be the best solution. The postcard collection would live in a live document, and every new collection will be added on top of it.

The next challenge was deciding how to group each of 21 postcards into collections. Each collection could be either grouped by user persona or by a common theme, and we went for the second option to diversify the collection. We ended up with 5 collections each containing 4 cards, which we believe to be the right amount of cognitive load. Each collection was planned to be shared with the stakeholders on a weekly basis.

Visual design

The final visual design deliverables included iconography, typography and branding colors, which resulted in a design system below. We made the decision to explore colors other than Google brand colors to allow more versatility for the card templates.

1. Creating the design template

One of the main visual design challenges was to create a postcard template and a process around creating future collections that will make it easy for any researcher without graphic design knowledge to follow. At the same time, each card in a collection should look a bit differently for the project to be fun and engaging!

To solve this challenge, we created 5 distinct card layouts that can be used for a different type of content. For example, some layouts accommodated for a user quote with a follow-up question, some had a screenshot of the user's screen, and others for the case when the viewer needed to guess the words in the quote. We also added enough colors to the design system to make each card in a collection look different. The card creation process was documented in details in the Readme file which was later shared with the team.

2. Choosing the icons

Since we had 6 different user types, each of them had to have an icon representing their user group. We already had a user image, so an icon needed to illustrate the concept behind product usage. Some icons needed more work than the others. For example, for the user type who used a product to discover food options, we had to reject many great concepts because they were either too generic or too specific.

3. Creating Branding guide

Our explorations resulting in the Branding guide below.

Project Management

The whole user research team was involved - researchers were excited to contribute to the content by providing and polishing user quotes. It was crucial to make sure the collaboration process is managed correctly, and the designs are reflective of the latest updates. To manage this process, we created a document with the list of all the user quotes and related information. This way we could see in real time what information needs to be updated, what layout a card is using, user demographics, new comments, and the design and content progress for each card. After each card iteration had been designed in Illustrator, it was added to the “Draft” presentation where the team could see the actual layout and give feedback.

Final Notes

The first digital cards collections were met with enthusiasm. It was our hope that the internal stakeholders would find value in them by getting to know their users better, and we believe this mission was successfully accomplished. We believe that similar user-centered design practices will be valuable for any user-centered product as they let us view products through the eyes of our customers.