Method Podcast from Google Design

In this special crossover episode, Google Method shares an interview from Design Notes—a show about creative work and what it teaches us. Taped at Google Design's 2018 SPAN Helsinki conference, host Aaron Lammer interviews Isabelle Olsson about her journey to becoming an industrial designer and the intricacies of crafting the design language for Google Hardware. From learning the basics of design from her grandfather (a self-taught industrial designer) to her fascination with materiality and color, tune in as Olsson discusses why it's critical for designers to be inspired by the context in which products live.

Meet our guest: Isabelle Olsson leads industrial design for Home, Wearables, and Color, Material, Finish (CMF) across all Google Hardware. Before joining Google, she was an industrial designer at Fuseproject and OSM.

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.  

From inventing fictitious calendar entries to incorporating personal photos in design mocks, listen in to Google designers' deepest design confessions. In this episode, host Travis Neilson and a panel of Google UX designers discuss and reflect on their peers' anonymous confessions and offer insight on important topics, quirky habits, and design struggles that don't often get airtime.

Meet our panel:Simon Pan is a senior interaction designer at Google working on Google News. Before joining Google, he was a senior designer at Medium, Uber, and Amazon music.

Brynn Evans is a UX lead at YouTube, currently overseeing the YouTube Living Room platform. Evans is also the co-founder and organizer of Hexagon, a monthly meetup for women in UX.

Hector Ouilhet leads design for Google Search and Assistant products. Previously he worked on multiple products at Google, MIT Media Lab, and HP.

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.

From inventing fictitious calendar entries to incorporating personal photos in design mocks, listen in to Google designers' deepest design confessions. In this episode, host Travis Neilson and a panel of Google UX designers discuss and reflect on their peers' anonymous confessions and offer insight on important topics, quirky habits, and design struggles that don't often get airtime.

Meet our panel:Simon Pan is a senior interaction designer at Google working on Google News. Before joining Google, he was a senior designer at Medium, Uber, and Amazon music.

Brynn Evans is a UX lead at YouTube, currently overseeing the YouTube Living Room platform. Evans is also the co-founder and organizer of Hexagon, a monthly meetup for women in UX.

Hector Ouilhet leads design for Google Search and Assistant products. Previously he worked on multiple products at Google, MIT Media Lab, and HP.

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.   

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews two UX designers at Google—Peter Jin Hong and Scott Wasson—discussing the impact of Google Search and how the newly launched Job Search feature is changing the job-seeking landscape. They cover everything from the effect of transactional memory on job hunters to the importance of qualitative research when making UX decisions. Listen in as they talk behavioral science, soft skills, and identity to illustrate how empathy affects the experience of a product like Job Search.

A few highlights:

On fostering empathy"We can truly help humanity if we know what makes us tick, what makes us scared, what makes us inspired, what makes us push ourselves. [Looking for a job] is one of the scariest things in your life—it's about having agency, and dignity, the ability to stand tall, and feed your family." – Peter Jin Hong

On being reliable"We want users to be able to trust the jobs that we're showing them, especially now that we're getting into recommendations. It affects people's psyche." – Scott Wasson

On data-driven design"Good qualitative research is helping our great quantitative research. It's also referred to as thick data, because qualitative research allows depth in really understanding what people are going through." – Peter Jin Hong

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews two UX designers at Google—Peter Jin Hong and Scott Wasson—discussing the impact of Google Search and how the newly launched Job Search feature is changing the job-seeking landscape. They cover everything from the effect of transactional memory on job hunters to the importance of qualitative research when making UX decisions. Listen in as they talk behavioral science, soft skills, and identity to illustrate how empathy affects the experience of a product like Job Search.

A few highlights:

On fostering empathy"We can truly help humanity if we know what makes us tick, what makes us scared, what makes us inspired, what makes us push ourselves. [Looking for a job] is one of the scariest things in your life—it's about having agency, and dignity, the ability to stand tall, and feed your family." – Peter Jin Hong

On being reliable"We want users to be able to trust the jobs that we're showing them, especially now that we're getting into recommendations. It affects people's psyche." – Scott Wasson

On data-driven design"Good qualitative research is helping our great quantitative research. It's also referred to as thick data, because qualitative research allows depth in really understanding what people are going through." – Peter Jin Hong

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.  

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews Margaret Lee, a UX director at Google, about her journey to leadership and explorations of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Lee shares personal vignettes—including the career stories of her immigrant parents, and stewarding the opinionated nature of her young daughter—to discuss her own path to becoming a "reluctant leader." Listen in to hear how Lee found a healthy balance between meeting performance expectations at work and being her authentic self.

On culture fit in the workplace"We talk so much about culture and the importance of culture, but if we have a fixed perspective on what that culture means, then we're just perpetuating the same problem of lack of diversity. When we talk about culture fit, a lot of times what we're talking about is the culture that we're comfortable with… and that doesn't lead to diversity of thought, that just leads to reinforcing what already exists."

On listening to learn "We usually just listen to fix the situation because we're hired to fix things. But when we're doing that, all we're doing is collecting information to hone in on a solution, but you can't do that if you don't understand the situation. And that's where the listening to learn comes in."

On making more team connections "I don't think anybody is just one dimension. We have our dominant tendencies and then we have areas that we should be stretching into. And if everyone is willing to stretch thirty percent beyond their natural abilities, we'll make a lot more connections with each other."

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews Margaret Lee, a UX director at Google, about her journey to leadership and explorations of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Lee shares personal vignettes—including the career stories of her immigrant parents, and stewarding the opinionated nature of her young daughter—to discuss her own path to becoming a "reluctant leader." Listen in to hear how Lee found a healthy balance between meeting performance expectations at work and being her authentic self.

On culture fit in the workplace"We talk so much about culture and the importance of culture, but if we have a fixed perspective on what that culture means, then we're just perpetuating the same problem of lack of diversity. When we talk about culture fit, a lot of times what we're talking about is the culture that we're comfortable with… and that doesn't lead to diversity of thought, that just leads to reinforcing what already exists."

On listening to learn "We usually just listen to fix the situation because we're hired to fix things. But when we're doing that, all we're doing is collecting information to hone in on a solution, but you can't do that if you don't understand the situation. And that's where the listening to learn comes in."

On making more team connections "I don't think anybody is just one dimension. We have our dominant tendencies and then we have areas that we should be stretching into. And if everyone is willing to stretch thirty percent beyond their natural abilities, we'll make a lot more connections with each other."

Do you have a burning question for a designer at Google? Or a story you'd love to hear? Give us feedback in this short survey to help make the show even better.  

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews August de los Reyes, a UX director at Google, about considering a product's cultural equity—its noneconomic and nonfunctional benefits—and how that influences a user's state of being. De los Reyes also touches on everything from game and car design to the Eames' Powers of Ten to illustrate how zooming in and out of designed systems can help bridge the gap between the designer's intent, the functionality of a product, and the user's emotional response. A few highlights:

On the challenge of elegant design"Elegance is complexity described in a simple way... I don't think simplicity is an end in itself. There can be things that are simple but not engaging or valuable. On the flip side, there are things that are just too complex to be meaningful. Where design can add value is through elegance—taking complex systems or complex ideas and presenting them in a very simple way."

On the power of cultural equity"What helps drive a consumer towards one car rather than another? I'd argue that it's neither its functional or economic value, but rather its cultural equity. And what generates that cultural equity is design." On what designers can learn from video games"The interaction of game design is so well crafted, down to painstaking detail at the mechanical level. It's my hope that we can bridge that kind of care and thoughtfulness into other kinds of software."

Handy info and links for this episode:

• Google's G-suite is a collection of cloud-based productivity software, products, and tools developed to enhance collaboration.
• HBO's Silicon Valley is an American comedy series about a computer programmer and his friends establishing a startup company in Silicon Valley.
• Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form published in 1964 centers around the process of design and inventing new ways to "display physical order."
• The best-selling video game series in history, Super Mario was created by Nintendo and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. The iconic games follow Mario's adventures in the fictional Mushroom Kingdom.
• Learn more about the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework, an analytic tool developed by game designers Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek.
• The two Powers of Ten films, written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames, depict the relative scale of the Universe based on a factor of ten.

August de los Reyes is a UX director in the search and assistant organization at Google, where he leads an effort called Ecosystem UX. Before joining Google he was head of design at Pinterest and Microsoft Xbox.

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews August de los Reyes, a UX director at Google, about considering a product's cultural equity—its noneconomic and nonfunctional benefits—and how that influences a user's state of being. De los Reyes also touches on everything from game and car design to the Eames' Powers of Ten to illustrate how zooming in and out of designed systems can help bridge the gap between the designer's intent, the functionality of a product, and the user's emotional response. A few highlights:

On the challenge of elegant design"Elegance is complexity described in a simple way... I don't think simplicity is an end in itself. There can be things that are simple but not engaging or valuable. On the flip side, there are things that are just too complex to be meaningful. Where design can add value is through elegance—taking complex systems or complex ideas and presenting them in a very simple way."

On the power of cultural equity"What helps drive a consumer towards one car rather than another? I'd argue that it's neither its functional or economic value, but rather its cultural equity. And what generates that cultural equity is design." On what designers can learn from video games"The interaction of game design is so well crafted, down to painstaking detail at the mechanical level. It's my hope that we can bridge that kind of care and thoughtfulness into other kinds of software."

Handy info and links for this episode:

• Google's G-suite is a collection of cloud-based productivity software, products, and tools developed to enhance collaboration.
• HBO's Silicon Valley is an American comedy series about a computer programmer and his friends establishing a startup company in Silicon Valley.
• Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form published in 1964 centers around the process of design and inventing new ways to "display physical order."
• The best-selling video game series in history, Super Mario was created by Nintendo and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. The iconic games follow Mario's adventures in the fictional Mushroom Kingdom.
• Learn more about the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework, an analytic tool developed by game designers Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek.
• The two Powers of Ten films, written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames, depict the relative scale of the Universe based on a factor of ten.

August de los Reyes is a UX director in the search and assistant organization at Google, where he leads an effort called Ecosystem UX. Before joining Google he was head of design at Pinterest and Microsoft Xbox.

In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews a trio of Google illustrators creating images to inform and delight millions of people around the world. Designer Mat Helme shares insights from his work creating the guidelines for Google's product illustrations. Motion Designer Laura Dumitru talks about her creative process and the animations she designed for the new Pixel startup sequence. Doodler Hélène Leroux shares the story of her illustrations for Back To The Moon—a Google doodle about filmmaker Georges Méliès, and the first doodle to be nominated for an Emmy.

A few highlights:

On what makes a good product illustration"Immediate comprehension." — Mat Helme

On the hierarchy of words and images"It's a bit of a competition sometimes, between illustration and copy. We've learned that a lot of the time, if you have an animation, people just don't read the copy. It's something we always need to be careful with." — Laura Dumitru

On the magic of Google doodles

"The logo of a company is normally something untouchable. If you have the freedom to replace the logo with, oh, a dragon who's burning the letters, it's something that you've never seen before. It brings a lot of fun to the brand." — Hélène Leroux

Handy info and links for this episode:

• "Principles Not Platitudes" is an essay written by Google UX Researcher Jess Holbrook, arguing in favor of measurable and meaningful design principles.
• Back To The Moon is the first Google doodle to be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Original Interactive Program. Honoring French director Georges Méliès, the short film was directed by Hélène Leroux and Fx Goby. It was produced by Nexus Studios.
• Go behind-the-scenes of Back To The Moon in this video by the doodle team and Google Spotlight Stories.

Mat Helme is a Palo Alto-based visual designer and the lead designer of Google's product illustration rulebook.

Laura Dumitru is a Google motion designer based in London. Her current work includes illustration and animation for the Pixel phone.

Hélène Leroux is an animator, designer, art director, and film director based in San Francisco. She is currently on Google's doodle team.