Google Photos Sharing

In this role, I conducted both hands-on work in designing growth experiments and solutions for Sharing, while also defining UX strategy for the cross-functional team and managing a small team of designers and a researcher to work on our initiatives.  

UX lead and manager

In my role as UX lead and manager, I worked with my PM and Eng lead counterparts to develop the strategy for sharing within Google Photos. A singular focus on sharing was a big shift for the cross-functional team, as we had originally hired the team to work on a portfolio of discrete problem spaces rather than on one shared problem space. To help the team give input into our strategy, I created an internal research program to learn what everyone on the team was looking for in a new team vision and charter. I then designed and drove a week-long Photos Sharing strategy workshop to co-design a series of project ideas with the larger team, resulting in diverse concepts that fed into our strategy and the completion of a comprehensive competitive analysis.

The team was structured to tackle various parts of photo sharing, including up-leveling the app’s partner sharing feature, improving album sharing, introducing memories sharing, and growth design to explore how to increase engagement with shared media. One of the contributions of the team was integrating shared content and sharing controls into what eventually became a new Google Photos Memories section.

Growth design for Sharing

In a hands-on capacity, I established a growth design track for experiments that would lead to improvement in sharing engagement. One outcome from an experiment program I designed was a new “Join album” flow, which appears when someone invites another Google account holder to view an album of photos.  The final design, below, includes setting expectations about how many other people might be in the album before a recipient signs in.

High quality video sharing via text message

Outside of growth experiments, I also worked directly with a designer on the Android Messages team to integrate a means to send videos in high quality to non-Android messaging recipients. According to Google’s announcement on the feature, “Today, the RCS standard lets people with Android devices share beautiful, high-quality photos and videos with one another. But unfortunately, without RCS, they look blurry when you share them with your iPhone friends. Now everyone can watch your videos in the same resolution that you do since we’re bringing Google Photos into Messages. You can send your videos as Google Photos links right inside the conversation, preserving their clarity. Coming soon, you’ll be able to send your photos this way, too.” Below is a video, from the article, highlighting how the feature works.