Resume2019
Google x SCAD Pro sponsored collaboration
Professors: Jane Zash and Clark Delashmet
Savannah College of Art and Design
If I asked you to come up with the world's broadest and vaguest how might we statement, you might answer with something close to this one. It had us stumped, and it has Google stumped, too. On the surface, this problem seems like an advertising issue. How can Google make cool new ads to rein in the new generation of consumers? Also, users? Do you mean the users of Google? So, 1.7 Billion people????
In December 2019, I was voted to be a representative of the Google Future of Ads team at the Reach UX Leadership Summit at Google's San Francisco office. There, our small group of kickass women advocated for the user in the online advertising space to the literal executives of Google.
Many of the users we talked to, counting myself here, felt like they had no control over their online advertising experience. Everyone has experienced Google guessing things too accurately, like when you're talking about getting a cat and suddenly get ads popping up for cat food. No matter how often I edit my ad personalization settings, I keep getting horror movie jump scares on my YouTube pre-roll ads. If you don't know anything about algorithms, machine learning, digital twins, and online personas, you'll probably feel pretty freaked out by this. Even as someone who knows how those things work and has talked to those who run Google Ads directly, I retain a healthy mistrust of people trying to sell me things.
For this reason, I decided to do this project in the first place, and I flew 2700 miles for a weekend in San Francisco. The Google Future of Ads team was made of designers, but as most of us were under 21, it was also made of people who grew up with Google. It was an invaluable experience to work from the inside on a cause I believed in and feel heard by the people who can enact change.
The Google Future of Ads team was by far the biggest I've ever worked on. This large of a team provided a new and unique set of struggles that many of us had never previously encountered. I worked on this project simultaneously with Huddle, and can't lie that it wasn't a major inspiration for an open communication facilitation table.
When we first got the prompt, everyone jumped on the word "advertising." Those who lived at the advertising and graphic design side of the house wanted to dive right into ideation for cool, hip new advertising formats, like AR lipstick or a holographic bus stop. We could've started there and been done in a couple of weeks with a few cool mockups and a thumbs-up from our sponsor team at Google.
There was a minority consisting of three UX designers and two Service designers who honed in on two other words: "users" and "valuable." What does it mean to be a valuable asset to users and businesses? What do users value anyway? Although the UX designers were probably just there to make some of the aforementioned cool UI mockups, it was this vocal minority that convinced everyone to take a second and think about the user first. Then, we can make all those fun holographic interfaces later.
To figure out how Google can become a valuable asset to users and businesses, we had to first figure out what it was that users valued. We dove into primary research about the concept of "value" in the online advertising space.
User interviews
Small businesses interviews
Survey responses
We created GoogleYou, a new system of Google profiles focusing on the exchange of values and preferences used to create ads that are relevant and useful to people. This platform is built on three pillars:
Change the culture around data collection so ads make bigger impacts
Empowering users is a big part of the “why," because the need for information transcends all borders
Ads should have a deeper lasting impact that users cannot ignore
Google asked us to look at the future of advertising, but our users told us to look bigger than that. We decided to bring in a new world. What if Google utilized values as a driving force, granting users a sense of control over their information? If Google focuses on building customer perception so data collection and privacy is less controversial, the effects will transform advertising from a one-sided conversation into a co-creation of value.
Empathy is one of the most significant tenets of UX design. We used empathy in our mission to gain buy-in from our Google sponsor team. We put the Googlers in the users' shoes and walked them through a dinner theater-style enactment of what GoogleYou might look like in practice. On the left, you can see me practicing my customer service persona in a mockup of a honey business. For the elements we couldn't recreate within the school building, we turned to VR mockups (made by yours truly).
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