Google
2021—2023
Work created while at IBM for Google.#Product Design
#Intranet
#Design systems
Role
UI/UX Designer on a large team
s. 01
Intro
Through IBM I worked with Google as a UX Designer, joining one of many internal design teams to essentially “lend a hand.” Internally we call it staff augmentation. I joined as we were growing our account with Google after a few fruitful years of partnership. Specifically, I joined to help with an enormous and multi-faceted effort as they looked at overhauling their performance evaluation process. It might not sound like much, but keeping the biannual cycle running without a glitch for all 182,502 employees while transitioning them away from both their old habits and the previous software was not going to be easy. The performance evaluation cycle is what is responsible for determining bonuses, salaries, raises, and promotions so you can imagine the sentiment if we messed up. As part of this overhaul we considered the process itself, which was of course determined by corporate leadership, and most importantly for our team, the myriad software being used to facilitate the cycles. From the beginning our team saw an opportunity to bring together the simultaneous design effort on MyGoogle, which at the time of joining was nothing more than a help content link farm but was to become a fully fledged employee dashboard with features like monitoring tasks and notifications. There was clearly huge potential to enhance the MyGoogle platform (for which there was already political will) to use it as a sort of connection point to help route employees through the new evaluation tasks and to monitor their status in real time. For the first major effort these ideas were acknowledged and dismissed, as fearing a half-ready solution for the next cycle, leadership decided to purchase the rights to two third party apps, Betterworks and Workday. Both are ubiquitous in the tech world and Workday in particular has become something of an industry standard in employee management, however our team quickly pointed out that given the idiosyncracies of performance evaluation at Google and the lack of customizability in both thrid party apps, we would not be successful moving forward with them. Fast forward to a year later, after two extremely clumsy and unpopular evaluation cycles have gone by using the third party solution leaving behind a sickly bureaucratic taste in the workforce’s collective mouth...the announcement is made that we will be...doing what the design team origianlly suggested. That is, we will build the tools in house and aim for an ideal experience, rather than the quickest one available. Truly a satisfying moment for us designers working down in the fields all day.
So essentially there were two phases to this project.
First, we were designing to work around the limitations of the third party apps and mitigate the negative aspects of the experience using whatever we had available (which was often just good copywriting.)
Second, we were vindicated by history and got the opportunity to design an ideal experience using many of the same screens we had pitched a year earlier.
s. 02
A quick description of the problem
The impetus for this overhaul was simple. The incentives with the old process were such that employees were spending weeks creating an enormous packet to present to managers during the two week cycles. The requirements were abstruse and expectations in general were considered unclear in sentiment tests with employees. Many felt that there was entirely too much writing and preparation involved and the tools that were used in the process were unreliable and slow. s. 03
a quick note on betterworks
Betterworks is a cloud-based human capital management software that allows employees to create Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and link them to organizational goals. Managers and employees establish goals in Betterworks and then track them in real time over the course of a quarter or a year, while keeping the goals aligned with their team, manager and organization.s. 04
a quick note on workday
An extremely common piece of software, Workday helps companies better manage their staff, information and processes through real-time reporting, analytics, integrated workforce scheduling and a centralized HR database.s. 05
My google
A sort of side-problem that merged into this was the status of MyGoogle. Despite it being supposed as the go-to for policies and employee resources, most Googlers did not even recognize the name when asked. Brand recognition was low, and the proposed benefits of using the site were even lower. A link farm full of corporate help content with no search capability. Fun illustrations though! We saw an opportunity to augment MyGoogle and bolster recognition and trust by weaving it in as an essential part of the evaluation cycles. This aligned perfectly with the political will at the leadership level to make this application something useful and an integral part of working at Google.Time off and leave screen
Demonstrating pop-ups including notifications and UI tour for first visits.
The value add for managers was huge as they would now be able to track task completion directly for each of their reports.
s. 06
My contributions
Manager Responsibilities InsightsIn its most basic sense the tool serves as a data visualization for the survey results provided by a managers reports biannually. The idea is to read and respond to the feedback you have coming in, with the obvious goal of improving your performance. While the content of the app is unlikely to interest you unless they are your own scores your reading, the little social engineering tricks involved in survey writing and the challenge of gathering honest, un-biased feedback proved to be an interesting and unexpected consideration. I was the UI lead on this product for a few months before we moved on to the next tool.
Creating expectations is a key part of the process that we were happy to bring into MyGoogle. This was temporarily patched by Betterworks, however the software was clearly not designed for our specific use case and fell short. Users consistently complained about the formatting and text errors they encountered when referencing the OKRs and Role Profile details and requirements, which must be clearly referenced as you plan out your time until the next cycle. With a 1P solution we were able to place that data right where it was needed.
“People Discussions” are meetings amongst managers and leadership that determine the success or failure of a promotion ticket. Reports can either put themselves up for promotion by self-nominating, or they can rely on the regular cycle of consideration every few years (given a certain baseline performance.) The dashboard we designed branches off from the Managers page in MyGoogle. Managers of a single team will see a customizable table with data regarding promotion nomination for their reports, those with multiple nested teams will see a slightly different interface that compensates for this extra complexity. The “Discussions” are scheduled through this tool as reports are easily grouped and added according to status, job role, and other factors. Integration with Google Meet and Google Calendar make for a seamless handoff from scheduling to the meeting itself.
s. 07
creating and managing the design system
Google is well known for its design systems. Their design language is ubiquitous, determining the patterns that for many of us are now as natural as anything. I was excited to get a glimpse into this world that determines so many small things in our daily technological lives. What I found was that there are differences in the systems used for internal products and the public facing, industry standard documentation on Material 2/3. Often the requirements for internal products and the tech stack that supports them require specific functionality and componentry that is not found in the existing libraries, of which there are many used internally. In cases like these we had the chance to contribute to the living system with the use cases unique to our product. What we ended up with was a series of components used for MyGoogle and the discrete, nested applications we designed to facilitate different parts of the evaluation process.
s. 08
Final considerations
I spent a total of 18 months working on this account. For that 18 months I was, for all intents and purposes, a Google employee, complete with company laptop and building credentials. The interesting part of this project for me was not so much the design itself, but the opportunity to see what the company looks like from the inside, how the org is structured, what kinds of resources are available to employees, how they set up design teams, what the culture is like, etc. It doesn’t even bear mentioning that the company is among the most recognizable names in the world. Naturally I was curious. The mundane details of the project aside, there were plenty of opportunities here to learn about how large scale design organizations approach projects like this. The intricacies of the work we were doing were unique to this project, I learned about the challenges of integrating with third party apps to pass data back and forth, I learned that even though I, and the other talented designers I work with, can design incredible interfaces that work wonders for users, it doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t align with the business’ priorities and market incentives. Sacrificing usability and aesthetics in the name of budget is a pattern one quickly gets used to in the world of corporate design.
Next Case study
New York State Department of Health
Toyota North America
Nomenclature typography
EIA Africa Geo-Portal
Discount Tire
New York State D.O.H.
Shell Polymers
Alex Sweet
Available for full time + Freelance© 2024 All work created and owned by Alex Sweet
Typography Site