Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - May/June 2011 - (Page 38)

exploring career options user Experience Designer 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. 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 designing 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. Interview by Melissa Hartman 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 process, put it to music, and posted it to YouTube. 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 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. 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 38 imagine May/Jun 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - May/June 2011

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - May/June 2011
Contents
Big Picture
In My Own Words
App Quest
Become a Citizen Scientist with Your Cell Phone
Media Arts and Technology at the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards
The Accidental Animator
The New Media Explorers
Learning by Design
A Generation of Criminals
Digital Storytelling
Drama and Duct Tape
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - May/June 2011