My Role

UX Research Lead & UX Design Lead

Project Type

Collaborated with Google Assistant team for E2E process.

Team Role

👥 A total of 12 students(Grads+Undergrads) assigned various roles.

Timeline

Mar - May 2023 (10weeks)

Client(Sponsor)

Google Assistant

My Role

  • Led UX research UX design team and led communication with a sponsor.

  • Led 65 survey and 24 Google Assistant user interviews.

  • Synthesized insights and turned them into viable design ideas.

  • Led usability tests and iteration.

Goal

  • To improve Google Assistant's initial user experience for 18-24 year olds by providing engaging onboarding from start.

Problem

Throughout research, we discovered the problems of lacking engaging onboarding experience from target user; 18-24 GenZ.

Issues with Google Assistant

  • Not engaging

    • Text heavy & lack of visual elements

    • Not interactive with users

    • Hard to know the value proposition

  • Not easy to learn

    • Not having learning process

Solution

Option to skip the whole onboarding to save users effort.

  • Users can explore "Fast Access" to skip whole onboarding experience.

Key Principles

Easy to use￨Learnability￨Memorability

Engaging onboarding experience with personalized setting.

  • Visualized user scenarios create a connection and make users feel tailored to their needs, facilitating understanding of benefits and functionalities.

  • Some gamified elements will make the onboarding process more interactive and memorable.

Key Principles

Easy to use￨Learnability￨Memorability

Outcome

The usability test was personally conducted with five Google Assistant users, who first used the existing onboarding process and then the newly designed one for comparison, as our team didn’t have time to measure the outcome.

Research

80% of Google Assistant users said, the onboarding process wasn’t engaging.

64 Survey Responses

Interview with 24 Google Assistant mobile users

Secondary Research

How might we create engaging onboarding for the first user to adopt with Google Assistant, making it a must-have tool?

Ideation

  • Onboarding with personalized setting such as showing user’s daily tasks or activities.

  • Emphasizing on visual elements and reduced textual content for better engagement on Google Assistant.

Testing & Iteration

1st Usability Testing with 12 Google Assistant users

My contribution involved conceptualizing a circular design inspired by the Google Assistant logo, as well as proposing content ideas derived from our survey findings.

💡Findings from 1st testing

  • Users want streamlined onboarding to spend less time on onboarding process.

  • Users want personalized feature to explore visual scenarios showing various tasks and activities.

Iteration

I contributed to coming up with card UI component to provide users with personalized user scenarios.

2nd Usability Testing with 20 users

To ensure productive testing, I recommended conducting in-person test for the 2nd round, as the first virtual testing lacked engagement and effectiveness.

💡Findings from 2nd testing

  • Saving user time - They want to skip the whole onboarding step.

  • 60% of users(12 users) were satisfied with showing scenarios, but 40% of users(8 users) wanted more engaging elements on onboarding such as gamification.

Iteration

Then I suggested a single screen incorporating a progress bar and user scenarios, aiming to condense content into fewer pages and save users’ effort.

Hi-fidelity

Developer’s Opinion

What a software engineer thinks about our design

After finishing this project, I personally reached out to a senior software engineer on Google Assistant. I was really curious about what developers thought about our design.

  • “Design outcome is viable and we are going to launch new onboarding features soon you guys created.”

  • “We consistently consider minimizing the time gap between users' initial access and their familiarization with Google Assistant.”

  • Heavy use of animations and high-resolution image assets can make an issue.

Takeaways

  • It is important for us to approach the user's thoughts with a grain of salt, allowing us to contemplate them before defining their problems, which eventually led to a shift in our perspective.

  • Being a leader means, not only asking good questions but also emphasizing and empowering team members.