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Google Experience

Jeff Veen interviews Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google. (Which I could catch their followup discussion at Adaptive Path's conference, "Managing Experience through Creative Leadership," in San Francisco tomorrow.) Interesting brief perspective on Google's approach to development and design. [Link]

JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?

IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it. So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.

jon posted this at 7:55 PM
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