Zoom had grown at an unprecedented rate, but the design team was still very small. I joined in 2021 to lead new types of projects and help the company innovate faster.

To help create new products, I introduced design sprints to the company and led a series of them with product teams. These sprints would take a team through the design process from early inspiration to functional prototypes they could test with customers (often built by Adam Spooner, a hybrid designer and developer). The end result was a set of decisions and a strategy for their product, along with the first version of an interface design their team could implement.

I also worked with the corporate strategy team to visualize the company's potential future products, and to understand the design implications of their strategic direction. I led design sprints with company leadership to understand their vision, and worked with Matt Wesson on day-in-the-life videos for the board of directors and CEO to help them discuss the future. Some of these future visions led to new product offerings and acquisitions, including: Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Frontline, Zoom Huddles, and the aquisition of the Zoom Docs team.

As the product portfolio grew, it became clear that we needed to evolve our design system strategy to support the new products. While the design team specs were looking good, those designs weren't making it into production consistently. I worked with design system lead Chongchi Zhang to develop a plan for integrating the design system directly into the engineering team codebase. Karen Quach joined to take over this role and successfully implemented the new system, leading to more consistent designs and faster development speed.

I led multiple aspects of the Zoom Workplace release, the largest interface change to Zoom ever. I designed a simpler, more powerful navigation system for the Workplace app; invented and designed the Multi-Speaker view, an intelligent layout that automatically highlights meeting participants; and contributed to the visual design changes, including the in-meeting tab system, color theming, and meeting wallpapers.

While doing user research for Google Chat, I noticed that most companies were focused on just two tools in the Google suite: Gmail and Calendar. All of the other apps, including Chat, were helpful once companies were used to Google services, but email and calendar were the foundation that no company could go without. The calendar in particular dictated what many knowledge workers did all day.

So I was excited about the opportunity to build a calendar from the ground up with Tim Campos and Burc Arpat, who had built most of Facebook's internal tools. From the backend to the frontend, we set out to help people spend their time on what matters most, to them and their teams.

We started with research into the lives of the world's most advanced calendar users--executive and administrative assistants. We learned how they navigate and schedule complex meetings, with significant resource and availability constraints, all with a deft touch and professional attitude.

We chose 1:1 scheduling between people at different companies as the core experience, and independent consultants and small businesses as the initial market, and launched Woven (the product and company) in November 2018.

On iOS, we focused on ultra-fast interactions with as few taps as possible. For instance, every editable event could be immediately adjusted without switching into a separate “editing” mode. Directions, ridesharing, and joining calls for your next event were available with a single tap on the home screen. The calendar view could be swiped, pinched, and tapped to instantly change views.

I also chose a more friendly visual design and tone than many business apps, so Woven would feel like your friendly assistant helping throughout your day.

On desktop, I focused on efficiency and speed. We highlighted keyboard shortcuts throughout the app for all major features, including natural language typing to jump to specific date ranges. The calendar shifted automatically to the right range based on window size, and from light to dark modes based on the time of day.

Over time we developed lots of unique features across both platforms, including analytics, iMessage integration, templates, scheduling links, and group polls.

This was powered by a Figma design system that used simple components and styles to build a variety of interfaces.

In our final version, I simplified the design and focused on native experiences, as well as offering more assistance and intelligent summarization.

Our guest experience featured powerful scheduling collaboration that also felt more personalized and simple.

At Google, the success of Gmail had hidden a hole in our product suite. Group (or “team”) chat had been dormant at Google while several other companies were innovating. We weren’t even part of the conversation. Many people saw a future where they didn’t even need email to get their work done.

At the same time, Google had incredible investments in AI, collaborative creation software, and enterprise security. What would a uniquely Google take on modern team communication look like?

We visited events where companies were adopting Google products for the first time, to understand the environment we were going into. We also did user research on our existing products and prototypes to understand how people used them.

Then we started building. I led the design of the compose experience and app integrations, and collaborated with Raph and Addam Winsenburg on visual design, accessibility, and more. Together we worked through lots of layout and interaction ideas.

I worked with engineering teams to spec and implement the final designs for composing, app integrations, presence, and privacy, across web, iOS, and Android devices.

We demo’d Hangouts Chat live at the NEXT conference in March 2017, almost exactly 1 year after I joined the project.

After launch, I led design for the Chat platform, which allows any developer to build interactive experiences in Chat. I designed the flexible platform components as well as the integration experience for developers and customers.

I joined the Glass team very early, when there were just a few hardware engineers. Working with Tom Chi and Ricardo Prada, I prototyped and tested dozens of interactions, hardware configurations, and visual designs--including the first wearable display. These early designs weren't very slick, but they taught us a lot about what experiences really worked, led to important product decisions like weight distribution and display position, and contributed important IP.

After stepping out to start the emerging markets design team (below), I returned in 2012 to lead the interface design for the initial product launch. Starting with a team of two, I borrowed ten additional designers and engineers and led a one-month design sprint to decide on the interface strategy. We prototyped five complete options and tested them with our target customers, leading to a clear design decision.

I led the creation of design specs for both the core Glass interface and the supporting mobile and desktop interfaces. I also restarted recruiting for the team, building to 15 full-time designers and prototypers by the launch date in May 2013.

After the launch, I continued to support new features as well as documenting and evangelizing our design work through public presentations.

Among several other projects, I led the design and prototyping for a communication product, codenamed Megaphone, which allowed people to record, share, and listen to audio messages with people around the world by simply placing a local phone call. This project aimed to bring some of the power of the internet to people without data connections. It also gracefully extended functionality to people who were online.

I also led the concept and product design for a game about managing a street football (soccer) team based in emerging markets cities. By playing matches, recruiting sponsors, and training your team, you could build a dominant local team and take over your city. I managed contract game designers and illustrators to create this game.

I started by taking the design and engineering teams up to San Francisco for a day of interviewing people. We stopped and talked to lots of people on the street about their YouTube experiences--the good, the bad, the funny. We learned that regular people's behaviors were much different than our own; very few people were ready to rely on the internet for entertainment, instead turning mostly to their televisions.

For the visual design explorations, I crafted a survey that we gave to both internal and external people (via the YouTube blog and Facebook page). I clustered the feedback into five major categories, and led five visual designers in an exploratory process around them. For example, one designer focused on what a "Friendly, Cheerful, Inviting, Playful, and Bright" YouTube would look like, while another tried the direction of "Packed, Dense, Rich, Immersive, and Vibrant".

After reviewing all of these possible directions with YouTube leadership, we decided to focus on a "Simple, Clean, and Light" theme. This put the focus on the content, not the interface, and made YouTube suitable for both cat videos and presidential announcements. Starting with the Watch page redesign in 2010, these themes became the core of the YouTube design philosophy.

On the product side, I created a set of 18 unique product opportunities that YouTube could focus on over the next year. These covered YouTube's three major audiences: creators, viewers, and advertisers. I led the YouTube executive team in an exercise to prioritize these opportunities, and then wrote, filmed, and edited a concept video that showcased what they might look like.

One surprising discovery was the importance of TV, touch, and social interactions in the YouTube experience. The YouTube Remote app was developed by an internal team after they saw the vision video, and the team's TV efforts given extra emphasis. The iPad was released 6 months after our work, and tablets have become a significant portion of YouTube traffic.

After 4 years as an online service, AdSense was due for a refresh. Publishers struggled to manage their ad inventory and couldn't make sense of their earnings reports. The design team tried to build features and interfaces equally suited to professional publishing companies and novice bloggers, which led to unfocused and complex designs. To build a strong foundation for the future, I pitched and led an effort to redesign the product.

I worked with our research team to do publisher visits, phone interviews, and usability studies. We found that our most engaged publishers were also the happiest. They worked hard to learn our features and optimized their ad choices for their sites. However, our site wasn't designed for them and they constantly encountered roadblocks in doing so.

My design mantra became "Empower the engaged, and develop the disengaged." My goal was to give those engaged publishers the tools they needed, and train novices until they were experts--we didn't want them to remain unskilled forever. We focused on four areas: Trust, Information Needs, Publisher Development, and Control. I led the creation of new features for each of these areas, including detailed interactive reporting (with charts), individual ad approvals, and integrated help content.

I developed an interactive prototype in HTML, JS and CSS, which we tested using the RITE method (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation). Research lead David Choi led near-daily usability studies where the entire team observed and took notes. Between studies, I led design discussions with the team and implemented changes to the prototype. In the span of just two weeks, we evolved the product tremendously.

Finally, I worked with the engineering team to build the redesigned app in GXP, a new templating language Google was developing. This later became the foundation for redesigns of AdWords and Analytics.