Device Assist

Device Assist has a long and storied past. It has actually been around longer than there have been designers within the 3500+ person gTech organization (my team at Google, as well as the team that concieved of the Device Assist concept), as is obvious from the screenshots below.

My relationship with the project began as a Noogler project, optimizing imagery and building supporting assets for a Play Store update to the app.

After speaking with the Product Manager about the App's past and future plans, we got to work building relationships with the project's engineers, performing user testing, and brainstorming concepts we shopped around to various other teams at Google.

UX & UI

From about the 3rd below screenshot onward, I started engaging directly with the Device Assist team, first refining the app's user experience, then tuning it to the newly-released Material Design guidelines with a 2nd visual pass.

Working closely with engineering, I learned to file design changes with engineering and how to navigate Buganizer, our internal bug managment tool. Engineering and I collaborated to ensure the design files I handed off would be accurately reproduced in code.

I also worked with the PM and content writers to improve the formatting of our tips, and greatly reduced bandwidth costs by researching heavily into image and video optimization strategies.

Throughout my work on Device Assist, I assisted various teammates in visualizing concepts varying from training rewards for retail employees in developing markets, to tips in user's Google Now streams, to further interactive diagnostic tests for the app:

Retail training concept

Google Now tips card concept

Device warm welcome concept

Speed test animation concept

Speed test diagnostics, new direction under new PM, Ara, etc (speed test animations).

Branding

As the app shifted focus from support to education, we began thinking about how to encapsulate the idea into an app icon. After researching the space online, I created a number of styleboards, and worked with the Material Design team to build and refine the icon below:

Material Design Icon Grid

Early Exploration

Concept developed with Material Design team

Icon live in the Play Store today

Along with the icon, I produced assets for Device Assist's Play Store listing, along with placeholder elements for tips with missing icons and various other illustrations:

User Research & Testing

During this process, we began working with the Product Marketing Manager in charge of the Google Tips site with the goal of standarizing the Tips experience across Google.

Working with a team of User Experience Researchers from the Google Help Center team, I produced over 10 rounds of prototypes that we tested with real users, both in person as well as at scale with Google Consumer Surveys and other remote testing methods.