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Exploring Design @ Google - Marc Hemeon
February 27, 2012
Introduction: Today’s post is the third in our series on
Exploring Design @ Google
, which highlights the work of the user experience (UX) team at Google. The user experience team is a multi-disciplinary team of designers and researchers who collaborate with engineering and product management to create innovative, usable great-looking products that people love to use. The mantra of the the team is: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." Each week, we have featured a different Googler on the team and talked to them about their role, their background and what they love about working for Google. For today’s post, we sat down for a few questions with Marc Hemeon, a user interface designer at YouTube. -- Ed.
What does user experience mean to you?
Marc Hemeon:
I think of user experience as the emotional response someone has when using your product. A successful user experience tends to reward the user with moments of delight, pleasant surprise and satisfaction. A dreadful user experience makes the user feel abandoned, lonely, unsatisfied and just plain dumb. Great products make the user feel in control. User experience designers are manipulators of emotion. Use your powers for good.
What is your role at YouTube?
MH:
Some have compared me to a muscle car, others a provocateur, but my official title is more like “senior user interface designer of awesomeness.” I pretty much have the greatest job known to man (at least for a designer). I get to take the ideas, problems and thoughts of super smart folks and wrap them in a beautiful design. If my design mojo is flowing then I hopefully not only solve the problem at hand, but end up creating something unique and rad and fully satisfying for my team.
How does your role fit into the larger team?
MH:
There’s lots of different types of designers and styles of working. At YouTube, I have found myself most effective at the beginning of a new project, which basically means I get to throw a million crazy ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Projects range from redesigning the look and feel of all of youtube.com, to new video player designs to seed brainstorming for totally new product ideas. I tend to lean towards working on projects that push the visual design we have at YouTube and imagine what it may look like in the future. We have an incredible user research group at YouTube who provide eye opening data and insights into user behavior, expectations and disappointments. Their findings can provide inspiration for a lot of the design work we do and shed light on where our current design solutions fall short.
Tell us about a day in the life of a designer.
MH:
Before a designer can design for the world, they have to first design for themselves.
Here is a typical day:
Wake at 5:50am
I workout for about 1.5 hours, then cruise home, hang at breakfast with my amazing wife and 3 kiddies, then hop on the freeway for 45 minute commute. During my commute I look for patterns in nature to inspire my day, while listening to NPR.
8:30-8:45 Breakfast 2
I get to work around 8:30am or so and enjoy a delicious breakfast of cage free egg whites, salsa, avocado and cottage cheese coupled with a frothy beverage of Diet Coke.
8:45 - 9:00am Email
I cruise up to my ergonomic standing desk which can also adjust to a sitting desk for hardcore pixel pushing. I open email for about 5 minutes, and skim around looking for any super urgent stuff I need to attend to. I only check email 3 times a day and never at night or the weekends - this is something new I am trying in 2012 to achieve more balance.
9:00am - 11:45am Make Time
After email I open Photoshop or Illustrator or bust out a sketch pad. Somewhere in there I slap on some headphones and crank up some music and let the creative juices flow. During my “make time” I am usually creating high fidelity mocks along with pretty detailed flows that allow someone to click through and understand the UI and interaction I have in mind.
11:50 - Noon - Stand Up for Major Project
If it’s a Monday, I have a brief stand up meeting for one of my major projects. We literally stand up and talk about what we are working on that day and do a quick sync.
Noon - 12:30 Lunch
I then cruise down to lunch. I typically spend about 25 mins. at lunch, usually with other YouTubers or random YouTube celebrities like the
Nyan Cat
.
12:30 - 1:00 Snippets, Internet Surfing and Email
After lunch I cruise back up and do a little internet surfing, email etc. If it’s a Monday I write a quick hit list of all the stuff I did - my snippets - of the week prior along with links to all my mocks. I share these snippets with my close team members and other designers to keep them in the loop with the work I am doing.
1:00 - 1:15 Doodle Time
I will typically draw something once a day, whether its typography or an illustration.
1:15 - 6:00ish Make Time or Meeting Time
The afternoons are either devoted to meetings or more make time, or a mix of both. Throughout the day I will reach out to a product manager, engineer or other designer and have ad hoc five minute design busts to show what I am working on and to solicit some quick feedback, share ideas, etc. I may get up and go work at a couch or down in the cafe or in one of the massage chairs to mix things up a bit.
Do you ever get “designer’s block”? If so, how you get back in the groove of things?
MH:
If I am having a creative block and I don’t really have a strong idea, I will typically sketch till my fingers fall off creating various wireframes, flows and ideas. Once I have a good idea I feel down to my core, I will then return to Photoshop and mock everything up. When I find myself going slow in Photoshop then thats a sign to me I don't really have a clear design solution and need to a step back and go back to paper until I figure out a solution.
How does a designer work with engineers?
MH:
We have a very close working relationship with our engineers, they are deeply involved with the design of the product or feature from the very beginning. Many have a very strong interest in the user experience and strong opinions on how a product should look. A good designer can listen to everyone’s input and provide a strong solution that should leave everyone satisfied (after much debate and mock wrangling).
A typical product or feature cycle may work like this:
Meet to talk about an idea (ideas originate from anyone)
Brainstorming around that idea in the form of whiteboard sessions along with healthy debate, and get to a general agreement around one solution
Mocks and prototype - In tandem, engineers will start building a skeleton prototype to prove out the idea while a designer will create some higher fidelity mocks.
The group meets back up, we run through the mocks and make adjustments and tweaks as needed. Rinse and repeat the mock/prototype process until the group is in agreement on what exactly we are building.
Design then works closely with the Front End engineers on implementation and design, sometimes providing rich html/css/js design prototypes to create a clean example of the UI and interaction.
We then roll out the solution internally and do a bunch of testing, then if all goes well we launch the feature 100%.
The typical cycle take about a week, but can be as short as a daily cycle or a much longer cycle for something large. For bigger features we’ll run usability studies to get insights as well. We tend to have many cycles going in parallel.
What is the most interesting project to date that you have worked on?
MH:
The REALLY interesting projects I can’t talk about yet, but there were three from last year that were really awesome and huge learning experiences - the site-wide redesign of YouTube, the redesign of our YouTube player (both on site and off site) and our new home page. Designing for hundreds of millions of people is an incredible opportunity and a huge challenge when you consider our global audience who consume YouTube on a variety of different devices, languages and accessibility formats.
What was your path to Google?
MH:
I am a serial entrepreneur and have done a bunch of start-ups. I came to Google in January of 2011 after they acquired a startup I helped co-found called fflick.com. I’ve worked on design, coding and all kinds of roles over the years. I’ve worn many hats, but the hat I really love to wear is that of a designer.
What did you study in school to prepare you for work in user experience?
MH:
I didn’t know it at the time, but I would say my minor in humanities prepared me more as a designer than anything else I studied in college, as it taught me how to take inspiration from the rich world around me. I also worked as a web designer/developer in school. I was hired on full time (30 hours a week) to work at a startup during my full class load at school. My work as a web developer and designer in the early dot com bubble days allowed me to learn first hand how to design and code sites, how to cope with unrealistic deadlines and most importantly how to launch new products.
What do you love most about working for Google?
MH:
At the end of the day, and I really don’t want to sound too cheesy and cliche here, but at Google we have the opportunity to work on anything we can imagine, literally anything. Of course, you have to convince others of your ideas and come up with a plan to execute, but for someone like me who has built up products and businesses in the past, I feel totally free to create anything under the sun (or even beyond the sun). Google has the people and resources to make any idea you have into a reality.
Posted by Hal Marz, University Programs Specialist
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