Rapid Research for Google Search, Assistant, and News

Currently, I’m a UX Research Associate through Adecco on the Google Travel team, since February 2020. I first joined Google in June 2019 and was part of the Rapid Research team for Google Search, Assistant, and News for 7 months. I can’t share specific projects or findings from my work, but I can share about my process and approach.

Google developed “Rapid Research” as a way to support product teams in answering both in-depth, formative and tactical, evaluative research questions, through methods such as usability studies, interviews, literature review, and survey analysis.

To meet the high volume of research needs, the Rapid Research team acts as an internal consultancy at Google, offering one-week-long research sprint.

Teams from different products and services submit their research questions that need answering. At the end of their interaction with Rapid Research, they walk away with synthesized findings.

As a member of the Rapid Research team for Google Search, Assistant, and News, I helped inform product decisions, evaluate concepts, and assess usability through:

• In-person and remote usability testing

• Semi-structured interviews

• Concept testings

• Intercept and cafe studies

• Literature reviews

• Focus groups

• Surveys

One of the unique methods developed out of Google’s rapid research team is the touring research van. We road trip across the country to ask all kinds of people what they think of Google’s products.

In October 2019, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, to conduct research. We parked outside of an apple farm, a community college, a farmers market, and a high-traffic downtown area to conduct 15-minute intercept studies from our mobile UX lab.

Assistant Privacy Research

In Rapid Research, my most significant project was to lead an evaluative research project for Google Assistant.

Previously, users can delete their Assistant conversation history in My Activity, but cannot issue a deletion request by voice. To increase user trust and ease to control their privacy, the team developed a new feature where users can control privacy settings with their voice in the Assistant.

The iterated version of the feature based on findings from this round of evaluative research was launched in October 2, 2019, as part of a Google-wide set of privacy product improvements that had landed well with the press. Read more on Google’s blog.

✉️ Contact me to learn more about my experience.