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 design-

ing 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.

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.

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 pro-

cess, put it to music, and posted it to YouTube.

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

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

user Experience Designer Interview by Melissa Hartman

exploring career options

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.

38 imagine May/Jun 2011

exploring career options

internally at Google, we’re never really satis-

fied with what we have. We imagine ways in

which it could be better.

What do you do on a typical day?I manage the design team for Google search.

It’s a team of more than a dozen designers

who work on all of our search products, from

places to images to videos. To make sure that

we have a consistent, quality experience with

all of Google’s various search products and

features, I spend a lot of my time making sure

that any enhancements and design changes

are consistent across all those products. To

accomplish this, I coordinate across all the

design teams, product teams, and engineering

teams. We have a couple of weekly reviews

for all of our search products and features, but

I also see them in demos or mockups at my

desk (or on my phone). I also create designs

myself, either through Photoshop or in code.

What keeps the job interesting?one of the things I love about working at Google

is that we never shrink away from a problem. A

good example is Google Instant, which makes

predictions about what you’re searching for as

you type and shows them instantly, making it

easier to get to good results faster.

As one of the designers behind Google

Instant, I created a prototype for search-as-

you-type, and then a team of engineers and

designers ran with it. But when we first started

working on it, our engineering staff said,

“We’re going to have to make the Internet

faster in order to do this.” It’s not just about

Google’s servers; the entire loop, from your

laptop to our servers and back, has to be fast.

Fortunately, at Google we don’t say, “oh,

that’s impossible, we can’t make the Internet

faster.” We just buckle down and figure out a

way to do it. That’s part of why we came up

with the Chrome browser. In order to solve the

problems we wanted to solve, we needed a

faster browser, so we built one. This happens

every day at Google. We get to a point when

we realize that to solve one problem, we first

have to solve another, extremely complex

problem. And we have the resources to do it.

What skills and qualities do you think somebody needs to be successful in a career like yours?A lot of our designers have degrees in

human-computer interaction. Understanding

human beings and how they relate to the

space around them and the objects they use

is important for a lot of design professions,

including industrial design and even archi-

tecture. For my role in particular, you need

a strong understanding of visual design, of

proportion, of hierarchy. You need to know how

to organize information on a page.

You also need to know what is possible

within the medium you’re working in, which

in my case is everything from browsers to

mobile devices. There are tablet devices,

smart phones, desktops with giant screens,

laptops. It’s important for a designer to know

the physical capabilities of these devices—as

well as the technology behind them and the

technology that delivers the services we

create—so that they can create an optimal

experience for the user.

What advice would you give to students interested in working in user experience design?The most important thing is to get some experi-

ence, even if it means building something for

yourself. If you want to be a designer, you need

to design something. obviously going to classes

and getting an academic grounding in all the

things I described earlier is very important,

but I think the most important thing is to put the

knowledge to use and put it into practice.

What user experience designers doUser experience (UX) designers conduct research and design products—whether video game controllers, websites, cell phones, or software—that are easy and pleasurable to use. UX designers may be called upon before a product is created or to redesign products based on user experience and feedback.

Where they workMany UX designers are employed directly by corporations (including tech, retail, financial, and others). Others work for agencies specializing in UX design, and still others work as freelance contractors.

education requiredAccording to the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), most UX designers have at least a bachelor’s degree in human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, computer science, or a related field, with roughly half having a master’s degree.

Salary rangeAn April 2011 snapshot on Payscale.com shows a salary range of $59,018–$100,825. A 2009 UPA survey lists an average salary of $85,283.

for more informationGoogle User Experience Design Principleswww.google.com/corporate/ux.htmlUsability Professionals’ Associationwww.usabilityprofessionals.orgWhat is User Experience Design?www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/05/what-is-user-experience-design-overview-tools-and-resources

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