During the summer of 2018 I interned at Google as a UX Design Intern in California
on the Next Billion Users team, a team at Google focused on developing products for emerging markets. I worked on a connectivity feature for Datally, a data saving and management app primarily used by users in Indonesia, India, Philippines and Mexico with limited data packs and frequent device sharing.
This was an incredible deep dive into the nuances of designing for emerging markets and thinking about internet connectivity, device type, load time and data speed considerations. Over the course of 14 weeks, I worked closely with PM (learned how to write a PRD and spec myself!), Eng (learned how to estimate and understand feasibility of interactions) and UX Research (led 2 research studies of my own, carried out in Indonesia).
PROJECT TIMELINE
DESIGNING FOR EMERGING MARKETS
I started the summer project reading up on insights gathered from previous research by the NBU + Datally teams and learning about the nuances of designing for emerging markets (specifically areas within India, Indonesia, Philippines and Mexico). For Datally, these were some of the critical considerations to have in mind while designing and thinking through potential solutions.
Understanding Users
For Datally, we didn’t have specific user persons to build off (considering it’s a new product with only 1-2 years out in the world!), so we focused on two distinct cases for user behavior and research subjects.
CONTEXTUALIZING the user journey
As part of gathering research and building off of previous studies, I collaborated with the Datally UXR to design and illustrate this lifecycle journey map of behaviors and challenges for a typical user in Indonesia on a pre-paid mobile data pack.
We blew this up and pinning in the team space, and shared with other NBU teams as a way to visualize life cycle journeys without overlooking the emotional side to user challenges.
At the end of the summer, I produced
3 sets of storyboards, wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes for the feature, a PRD and design spec and led 2 UX research studies - an incredible learning experience with ownership over the end to end process that I presented to the entire NBU group at the end of the summer! The final MVP of the feature will be shipped sometime in fall of 2018 - until then I can’t share specifics on the feature or research studies but free to chat about it :)
Cool Stretch projects and intern excursions!
Part of the learnings from this summer came from the cool side projects I worked on and intern activities - these are some I particularly loved + helped craft a truly ~googley summer experience :)
