In the summer of 2023, I worked as a UX Design intern at Google, where I designed a notification system for an issue management platform to help security officers manage emergency situations.
🎯 Delivered the end-to-end design from MVP to future phases
🎨 Design: Prototyping, Hi-fi interfaces, Animation, Content matrix
🔍 Research: Research plan, Usability testing, Competitive analysis
👋 Collaboration: Cross-functional alignment, UX workshop
To monitor and resolve emergencies, security officers need to react timely and efficiently. With complex information and tools, they're faced with the challenge of tunnel vision, fatigue, and communication hurdles. How might we help security officers respond to emergencies more effectively and knowledgeably?
2 UX Designers (Intern hosts), 1 UX Writer, 1 UX Researcher,
2 PMs, 2 ENGs, 2 Business Partners
Figma, Google workspace
May - Aug 2023 (11 weeks)
🪁 Scalability: Designed the road map & hi-fi mocks for 3 versions (MVP~P2), ensuring early-stage usability & value while maximizing long-term impact.
🍰 Desirability: Created prototypes for UX research & usability testing and iterated project based on user feedback & cross-functional evaluation.
🌻 Visibility: Drove decision making and sparked project momentum through presentation to over 100 audiences in org-wide & director-facing meetings.
🪵 Feasibility: Delivered a multi-faceted design package, built upon + contributed to design system--ensuring that the project works well across different scenarios & facilitating engineers in implementation.
🎼 Alignment: Balanced user needs & business requirements, reached consensus from 10+ stakeholders, and aligned work with other ongoing projects.
Notes: Due to NDA, I cannot share the actual design here. If you're interested in learning more, please contact me for the access to the case study!
I collaborated with a UX researcher to build the research plan and interactive prototypes for usability testing. We tested the designs with 3 participants in semi-guided interviews and 5 think-aloud tasks with interactive prototypes in critical user scenarios.
With positive feedback that the design was intuitive and easy-to-use, the research also validated that the project will greatly help the users enhance efficiency and collaboration at work and reduce chances of mistakes.
The success of a project is not merely determined by the users. Instead, it also involves blanacing user needs and business requirements as well as alignment among teammates from various disciplines.
To achieve success, I engaged these stakeholders throughout the design process, from UX workshops, design critique, research debrief, to org-wise meetings, making sure that a transparent, comprehensive picture of the goals, constraints, and potentials was well-conveyed to all. While I learned a lot from their institutional knowledge and expertise, I also helped drive the decision-making process by creating a strong narrative between the design proposals and research findings.
I was truly lucky to join an extremely supportive and collaborative team! I’ve seen huge growth in myself by learning from others and their feedback to me. Their sincere advice and encouragement will keep me powering up and always taking an extra mile!
The project involved complex stakeholders, and they had different familarity with the progress and details. From this, I learned to make information more digestible, solicit feedback more effectively, and always tailor the presentation to its audience. For instance, starting with meeting goals, making the problem-solution relationships clear, and sending out outlines and references in advance.
We didn’t have resources in the early stage to support explorative research. So I learned to move the design forward with extensive competitive analysis and the institutional knowledge from teammates while documenting research questions and hypothesis.
After a UX researcher joined the project in the middle of ideation, my previous documentation was very helpful in building the research guide. I also quickly converted the design files into interactive mocks for usability testing. While the interviews spanned across a few weeks, I learned to keep iterating on other parts of designs and exploring more solutions to maximize the outcome and efficiency.
As a young designer (and an intern), I had the misbelief at first that I should let others review all the details of my work. However, I quickly learned that it was inefficient for getting constructive feedback and also a huge burden for them. Through close communication with my hosts, I was encouraged to take more ownership in determining the project scope and roadmaps, with great learnings about how to focus on problems of the highest priority when driving the team decision-making process.
The open-mindedness and pursuit for the extra mile in the people surrouding me was the most inspiring thing I got from this experience. I was so fortunate to join an extremely supportive and collaborative team, and I’ve seen how people embrace the unknown, take on more responsibilities, and thrive together.
