Accessibility, so thinking about blind users,
deaf users, all of this,
Google cares about a lot because we do want to try to design for everyone,
which sounds so silly because like in design school,
you always feel like you're never going to design for everyone,
that's not possible, so pick someone.
This is really funny, I just had that realization
because when you ask people about their target audience,
a lot of students will say, "Well,
it's really about for everyone, right?"
Yes.
Then you'll have to say, "Well,
it's maybe not true, right?
It's probably for a certain age or socio-economic part of the,
or certain location even, right?"
But then when you're working on Google search, it's a dilemma.
You basically design for every single person,
at least that's on the Internet.
The few people that are using Bing as their search engine.
But that's quite a different design challenge than most, I suppose.
Another skill that I should mention is just communication.
Presentation skills are pretty important
because you will be in a lot of meetings where you do have to say,
"Present your designs or talk about why you did something this way",
and even presenting to higher level leadership.
So to be able to clearly communicate your rationale is important, and again,
I think that storytelling is so important when you're interviewing. Yeah.
Storytelling, that's really interesting to put yourself into or like
create a narrative for your presentations.
Yes.
So, I have a question about the teams at Google,
could we a kind of segment,
a little bit of what kind of job descriptions
you have at Google which I think will just say
a lot about the interactive web design industry as a whole.
You call yourself an interaction designer, right?
What other designers are there?
There are visual designers who you can equate that to UI designers or graphic designers.
But your job description is a interaction designer, right?
Yes.
That's different from them?
Yes.
What's the difference?
So, visual designers will be focusing more on the final look of something,
so they'll be working with typography, color, icons,
space, texture, whatever, to make sure the final UI is perfectly polished,
and be able to send the specs and assets to the engineers.
Or on teams that it's more specialized,
they might just be focusing more on creating beautiful illustrations for
a product or things like material design where they are creating a visual design system.
So that's that, and then interaction designers which is what I
do is equated to UX designer in other companies.
Thinking more about the user flow,
the whole process from making sure that's the right problem to
solve and coming up with
different iterations and the general structure and layout of the design,
but often you'll find teams here that are just hybrids.
So, designers with both visual and interaction design skills who do the whole process,
so my team is like that.
Even though my title is interaction designer,
I still do everything,
including the final UI.
So you're also, because you're a trained graphic designer as well.
Right.
Are there people on the opposite end that
don't have a graphic design background at all and they do is wireframes,
so all they do is sitemaps or strategy studies or user segmentation,
that kind of early parts of the UX process?
So there are people who don't have
a graphic design background who are interaction designers.
So, I feel like often the popular major now is the HCI human computer interaction.
But I would say,
to work at Google,
you still do have to have a decent level of intuition with aesthetics, and so,
I find it is very rare that they
would have no visual design background at all or experience.
Breaching into the engineering,
are there people at Google that will,
the "unicorn people" that will be designing and then jumping into the code entering,
banging out some code or does that happen or
is there a divide between the visual people and the coders?
Yes, I'd say there's a spectrum.
So from visual design to engineer there's, so,
visual design and then you go to interaction designer and
then there's a role called UX engineer.
I think those are the true unicorns who
have a good sense of design and they are very comfortable coding,
and so, they are often working on things
like high-fidelity prototypes which are
more realistic where I can actually use real data.
So that's UX engineer and that has two lenses.
One is more design focused and one is more engineering focused,
and then that gets into front end engineer and
the back end engineer on the other side of the spectrum.
We do also have motion designers,
but that is different from what you might traditionally think of motion design.
So, it's not so much like motion studios designing commercials and things like that,
but more UI motion. So things like-
Micro motions?
Oh, I said UI?
Yes, no, but I'm wondering.
Is that what it's called?
No, no, no-.
-I'm making it up.
I'm saying like how does, when you click on this thing and it's either that,
what is the motion of it vanishing,
like that stuff, not like 30 minute spots.
Yeah, yeah.
More so kind of transitions,
animations, how a product logo might animate when you open an app. Things like that.
All right, then one last question for you, Melissa.
Do you see any emerging technologies or
tools that might change how you work at Google or how designers approach UX,
and I don't know,
looking to the next years, five years?
Yes.
I don't know, or is there something that you're excited about?
I think if we're talking about technology,
there are software tools that we use.
What I see right now though,
right now, it's 2018, right?
You see a lot of different prototyping tools and there's sketch,
and then other kinds of tools that are more into making it into code,
and I'm seeing more of a convergence in the future.
There's probably going to be a winner,
right now, like everyone uses everything,
but you start to see some companies coming up with
more integrated products where you can design and prototype in the same tool,
or animate and encode in the same tool.
It's more of a you can just like-
It's coming full circle.
Yeah. But things like that,
that might make our lives easier,
and that we don't have to jump from tool to tool,
but maybe one day they'll be one, all-inclusive one.
So that could be interesting, not sure where it'll go.
I think another thing that's emerging is,
I wonder how things like machine learning will affect our field.
You can see hints of it.
I think a couple of years ago,
there was a site, and basically it would
say they use artificial intelligence to design your website.
They just, like you don't need a web design anymore,
and I think that idea is interesting and worrisome for our jobs.
So yeah,
but it can also open up interesting opportunities with AI and that kind of technology,
like what could we do with that is also interesting as a designer.
Things like zero UI, conversational UI,
where things like smart speakers are getting more popular and there's not a screen on it,
but you still have to design those kind of interactions.
It's a lot of user experience,
a lot of design,
just the visual pulled out of it.
Yeah.
Kind of very much reduced.
Right. Yes.
Interesting. Alright Melissa thank you so much for your time.
This was a very interesting conversation.
I wish you well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks Roman.