Method Podcast from Google Design

Latest Episodes:

Fiona Yeung & Alison Boncha of Hexagon UX Mar 27, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, Aidan Simpson interviews Interaction Designers Alison Boncha and Fiona Yeung about impostor syndrome, the importance of mentorship, and how they developed the bold, inclusive new brand for Hexagon—a supportive community of women and non-binary UXers. The trio also discuss great career advice, hard lessons, and why everyone should have a “Yay Folder.”

A few highlights:

Alison on why you should leave your first job

“A friend in college told me, never stay your first job more than a year… or you're going to always be viewed as the junior person on the team.”

Fiona on the hardest lesson she’s still learning

“Even if you're the juiciest peach on earth, not everyone likes peaches. Remember that no matter how hard you try, there are still going be people you can't please. You have to like accept yourself for who you are.”

How Hexagon got its name

“We came up with three names that we thought had potential: Thrive UX, We UX, and Go Boldly. Turns out Go Boldly already exists. But We UX and Thrive UX felt too literal. I wanted something that was more symbolic, with a deeper metaphorical meaning. So I was brainstorming more and came across an article on beehives and why you’d want to structure your team culture like a bee hive. I was fascinated… beehives are also symbolic of great collaborative environments because you have organization and structure and leadership. And worker bees are all female. So we explored more bee imagery, and the shape of honeycombs is a Hexagon.“

Alison Boncha is an Interaction Designer on Google Express within the Shopping team. Allison works alongside engineers and product managers to take a product vision and deliver the best experience possible.

Fiona Yeung is a creator, artist, and Interaction Designer on Google’s Material Design team. She’s also the new head of Hexagon, leading an all-volunteer effort to foster supportive UX community.

Josh Lovejoy from Google Clips Feb 27, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, Aidan Simpson interviews UX Designer Josh Lovejoy about the design of the Google Clips camera, building user trust in ‘magical’ products, and ways of using UX to help people feel more in the moment. Learn more about the journeys and creative decisions of designers at Google by subscribing to the Method podcast.

A few highlights:

On overcoming the myths of magic, neutral AI, 10:22

“We can use technology to connect better with the self that we aspire to be. If we can get over some of these myths… I think we are capable of unlocking a renaissance of personal expression and human connection.”

Why the Clips camera still has a photo-capture button, 6:35

“It was a fun internal debate for a long time. We hemmed and hawed and ultimately decided the initial version would not have a button. ...But then as we iterated over time, we found [a button helped build] trust—that bonding relationship between user and a new technology.”

On the beauty of imperfection, 8:26

“When we tried to get things perfect, it actually was really problematic. Even when we hit that goldilocks sweet spot… users still believed that we must have missed something. [Showing more images that users could delete] made a huge difference in confidence level because the user got to be there. They got to be the curator and have the final say.”

On taking an empowering approach, 5:20

“We wanted to build intentionally toward answering the question ‘What is memorable and how can we use technology to help people feel more in the moment?’”

Handy info and links for this episode:

Google Brain: A team at Google working to advance artificial intelligence through research and systems engineering, part of the overall Google AI effort.
Google Clips: A wireless smart camera that captures images of familiar people and pets.

Josh Lovejoy is a Seattle-based User Experience Designer in Google’s Experimental Design Group, where he works at the intersection of product design, ethics, and artificial intelligence. Josh also leads UX for People + AI Research (PAIR), a Google initiative to conduct fundamental research, invent new technology, and create frameworks for design in order to drive a humanistic approach to artificial intelligence.

Margaret Urban from Google Assistant Jan 30, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, guest interviewer and Google designer Travis Neilson talks with Senior Interaction Designer Margaret Urban about the magic of language, the importance of considering cognitive load, and the future of voice user interface design.

On making computers sound human, 2:35

“How language is used in the social context is really important in creating something that sounds natural. Because we want the computers to talk like people. We don't want to force the people to talk like computers.”

On the magic of language, 3:15

“I've been fascinated by language all my life. I think it's magical. It's like telepathy—that simply by the vibration of a sound wave, I can put an idea in your head.”

On the science of speech, 7:50

“One of the roughest, cheapest ways we used to do sentiment analysis was by checking the amount of profanity that we were getting in the user data. We were literally running scripts to check the recognition logs for profanity—because when people are swearing, it tells us they're unhappy.”

On how the brain processes language, 14:30

“It turns out that cognitive load is physically real. If you've got an electricity-measuring cap on somebody’s head and you say something like, ‘the birds that I saw in the swamp was white’—the minute you get to the word ‘was’ the brain kind of spins up in a little extra cycle. It's not that the meaning of the sentence is totally lost, but your brain works harder in parsing and understanding that meaning.”

Handy info and links for this episode:

VUI: voice user interface.
Sentiment analysis: The use of natural language processing to identify and study affective states and feeling.
Arrival: A 2016 sci-fi drama about a linguist trying to communicate with aliens to understand why they’ve come to earth.

VUI I/O playlist: A handful of talks from Google I/O 2017 on conversation design and voice user interfaces.

Ayan Daniels from Android Messages Jan 04, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, Aidan interviews Visual Designer Ayan Daniels about her work on Android Messages, her debate-sparking illustration for the Pixel phone, and what it’s like being a woman of color at Google.

Ayan Daniels is a San Francisco-based Visual Designer hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio. Currently working on the Android Messages team, Ayan has been at Google for more than two years and previously worked on both Android and Pixel.

Handy info and links for this episode:

RCS (Rich Communications Services): a universal communication protocol designed to replace SMS with its more feature-rich system.
Android Messages: The default RCS messaging app on Android devices
Duo: Google’s one-to-one video calling app.
Allo: An expressive, AI-infused messaging app made by Google.
The first Pixel Welcome screen designed by Ayan and animated by Remington McElhaney

Sydney Hessel from Design Sprint Team Dec 05, 2017

Show notes

UX Researcher and Sprint Master Sydney Hessel talks about her unconventional research background, the ins and outs of the sprint methodology, and getting people out of their comfort zones to generate creative ideas.

Rachel Been from Material Nov 08, 2017

Show notes

Material Design Creative Director Rachel Been on creating a design system at scale, emoji, and the creative power of curiosity.

A few highlights:

On the challenge of making a design system at scale, 1:23

“To create a system that potentially works for thousands of products to use. To define and spec a button that thousands of different product teams could functionally use. It’s a challenge to make that work.”

On becoming a designer, 7:18

“I have a really atypical background. I studied art history in college. I was a photojournalist. I was going to be a photographer. Thought I wanted to be a war photographer.”

On the surprising power of anxiety and curiosity, 14:11

“The anxiety of persistent imposter syndrome—as uncomfortable as that is on a daily basis—has led me to expand my capabilities and feel empowered in many ways. Not coming from a super traditional design background, curiosity was the only way that I could survive in this world and teach myself the skill set needed to do my job.”

Handy info and links for this episode:

Material Design: A design system, created by Google, for crafting digital experiences
PgM: Program Manager, the person tracking the day-to-day progress of a project
Unicode Consortium: A non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard, including emoji
Roboto: The standard typeface on Android
Eng: shorthand for “engineering”
Holo: The design system released with Android 3 and 4, which directly preceded the creation of Material Design
IC: Individual Contributor, a non-management member of a team

Rachel Been is a San Francisco-based Creative Director currently working on Material Design. Initially hired to be Google Play’s first Art Director, Rachel now works across multiple product teams to implement and evolve the Material Design system.

Roman Nurik from Firebase Oct 11, 2017

Show notes

In this episode, Design Advocate and host of the new Design Notes podcast Liam Spradlin speaks with Senior Interaction Designer Roman Nurik about Google’s Firebase mobile development platform, the unique challenges of designing for developers, and his approach to building design tools. Subscribe to the Method podcast on Google Play, iTunes, or RSS.

A few highlights:

On designing UX for developers, 18:00

“We really want to make sure that if you come into Firebase not having ever built a database, or not ever having done any sort of analytics, that you have a good experience.”

On the question of density in Firebase and Material, 21:30

“Density is one of those things that depends on what you're looking at, so we focus a bit more on the content… We make choices at almost an individual page level of what is the best way to present this information. Should it be dense? Should it be sparse?”

On building digital tools for designers, 29:15

“I love building tools that empower the designer to tell a computer how to do something rather than doing it themselves. Time is a very precious resource for everybody. Literally anything that can save time for designers, I try to do.”

Handy info and links for this episode:

Firebase: Google's mobile platform for quickly developing high-quality apps.
Android Asset Studio: A collection of tools to easily generate assets such as launcher icons for Android apps.
Sketch: Digital design tool built for product designers.
Figma: Collaborative interface design tool.

Darren Delaye from Daydream Aug 24, 2017

Show notes

In this episode, Aidan speaks with User Experience Designer Darren Delaye about the unique challenges of designing for VR, the future of Daydream, and Darren’s work across many products over his 12 years at Google.

“A new challenge is not knowing exactly what versions of your platform, your hardware, and the future, to design for. The easiest projects are the ones where you know the goals and you know the parameters. But sometimes, working on the Daydream team and in VR, we don't even know what hardware and capabilities we should be thinking about.”

Darren Delaye is a San Francisco-based UX designer currently working on Daydream. Google’s third-ever design intern, Darren has been with the company for nearly 13 years and has designed across a wide range of products and services including Google Maps, Google Ventures, and Google Docs.

Handy info and links for this episode:

Google Expeditions: Educational virtual reality tours designed for classrooms and using Google Cardboard headsets.
HCI: Human-computer interaction.
Doug Bowman: Google’s first dedicated visual designer.

Rita DeRaedt from Google Voice Aug 03, 2017

Show notes

In this episode, Aidan speaks with Interaction Designer Rita DeRaedt about rising to challenges, crafting a new onboarding sequence for Google Voice, taking risks, and much, much more.

A few highlights:

On getting coffee with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 2:44"The other design interns and I had this ongoing joke that we were going to get Larry and Sergey to have a one-on-one with us . . . and because I wanted to make it happen, I kind of volunteered myself."

On becoming a television presenter, 11:50"If something's just intimidating enough, or just scary enough, I have a tendency to throw myself into the situation.”

On getting unstuck from sticky design problems,12:52 “Call it imposter syndrome, but sometimes you don't want to ask for feedback on something until it's perfect. It's about being a little humble and knowing that for the sake of being productive, happy, and not in a rut, [you do have to] loop in other designers on the product.”

Jay Wong from Project Fi Jul 11, 2017

Show notes

Aidan interviews UX Design Lead Jay Wong about her experience working as a designer with a computer science degree, some of the design decisions and challenges her team tackles on Project Fi, and much, much more.

A few highlights:

On why designers should learn programming, 9:35 “Learning to code forces you to get better as a designer because it forces you to think of everything as a system.”

On education and knowing your design tools, 15:00 “The faster you are at the tool and the quicker you are at doing things that are boring, the more time you can spend on real design problems and actually innovating and solving the things that the computer can’t solve.”

On the future of UX design in a world of fast-changing tech, 20:46 “There's always going to be room for problem solving when humans interact with technology.”

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