Accelerating 0 to 1 with strategic design
0 to 1
Research
UX / UI
Design System
Role
UX Lead or Co-designer
Collaborators
Founders
Engineering
Research
Responsibilities
Research
Concept testing
Wireframing & prototyping
UX & UI
Visual design
Design system
Context
Google Area 120 was Google's in-house incubator for experimental projects, giving small teams of startup-minded founders the space to explore bold new ideas. These ventures are often early-stage, high-ambiguity, and aimed at identifying new product opportunities for Google.
Challenge
Teams struggled to graduate not because they couldn't build great things, but because they didn't know how to properly de-risk and validate hypotheses about users' true needs.
DesignMap partnered with them as an embedded strategic design team — helping founders clarify vision, test concepts, and build thoughtful user experiences. My work included rapid discovery, design, and execution to help teams take bigger risks on ideas that generate true value for their users.
Impact
73%
of teams supported by us progressed to the next stage
+160%
graduation rate
Teams experienced increased innovation
by shifting to a more user-centered focus, examining problem spaces rather than just solutions, and evaluating their assumptions
Teams Supported by Me
How I Helped Teams
Management of Discovery Scope
Ambitious founders could get overwhelmed by their chosen problem space, and feel compelled to solve everything for everyone, making the scope unattainable.
Through tailored workshops and discovery activities, I helped teams evaluate different facets of the problem space and move forward with compelling ideas that fit within their timeline.
A market landscape exploring hypotheses derived from team’s domain expertise
Journey maps visualized where the real pain was happening and revealed the complex dependancies generating that pain
Tailored workshops helped teams articulate problems clearly and connect them to compelling value props
Mitigating Bias for Effective Concept Validation
Teams were under pressure to get real traffic into their apps before graduation, so it was critical they validate their concepts with users.
But users’ words don’t always translate to numbers, so I developed concept tests in collaboration with Google’s researchers to mitigate bias and uncover what users truly value.
The approach consistently surfaced the stronger offering, with users more openly sharing their hesitations and the tradeoffs they were weighing.
Taking our existing ideas and breaking them out into distinct concepts that interviewees could weigh against each other
Concepts were presented in the form of narratives based on use cases given in previous generative research
Rapid Execution and Visual Development
Founders could build great technology, but didn't know where to start taking their ideas over the finish line into a product that enabled users to understand and access it's benefits.
I created visual design systems that both appealed to intended audience of the product and supported user understanding.
For products with complex, automated features, exploration and testing of different layouts to ensure intuitiveness and rapid realization of value for users was critical.
Visual test concepts and example validated layout for a product that automatically organized video clips for content creators
