Google

I was a UX Research Assistant on the Core UX team in Corporate Engineering. I started in Research Strategy — a UX research horizontal — and spent my final two months with People Operations. Because most of this research was on fellow Google employees, the detail here stays high-level.

01 Impactful Moments: Inclusion at Google

The biggest project I worked on explored Google employees' journeys at the company and how they navigated their careers. We analyzed each account through a lens of inclusion: how did employees fight feelings of impostor syndrome or exclusion? How did a sense of community relate to success in the workplace?

Probes

• Pre-work forms and 1:1 interviews where participants identified the chapters and characters in their careers
• A list of three pieces of advice for future employees

Outcomes

The probes produced rich qualitative data we analyzed in several ways. In my analysis I identified a "Google career cycle," applied "explore vs. exploit" themes to employee behavior, and mapped the general categories of employees' day-to-day work — surfacing where each carried unique vulnerabilities to impostor syndrome and exclusion. As a horizontal team, we tailored many analyses to the specific product areas we reported into, focusing on implicit themes that linked everyday behaviors to inclusion at work.

02 Community Finder

After the main Impactful Moments report, we brought our insights to an annual Corporate Engineering hackathon. Because the research highlighted the importance of finding communities, networks, and mentors within the company, we joined forces with business analysts and UX designers to build Community Finder: an app that helps new employees find groups within Google based on their interests, locations, and roles.

Community Finder went on to win the Social Good award at the hackathon.

03 Chrome OS Collaboration

Designers on the ChromeOS team reached out for research insight to inform their next generation of products. They were specifically interested in incorporating wellbeing into future versions of ChromeOS — an interesting challenge in thinking through how physical and mental wellbeing could be built into an operating system.

Knowledge audit + literature review

I first curated the ideas, inputs, and discussions from our meetings with the designers and engineers, organizing the notes into distinct themes. I then ran a literature review of wellbeing work happening within Google, at other companies and research firms, and in academia. With my manager, I presented key findings and considerations back to the ChromeOS team for each major theme.

Outcomes

That fed an ideation session where researchers, designers, and engineers generated possible OS-level features for each theme — roughly 80 ideas and five opportunity spaces in all. ChromeOS chose four to pursue further, and we designed storyboards showing how each OS-based feature could improve users' wellbeing, presenting them and the research to upper management as they set objectives for future work.

04 Performance Evaluation Pilot

My final project was a study testing a new tool for performance evaluation. I was involved in planning and execution but left the company before it concluded. It was a large-scale effort spanning several stakeholders and multiple phases, run with UX researchers, designers, content strategists, PMs, and the legal team.

Research activities

• Surveys
• A two-month diary study
• Interviews
• A prototype tool

My contribution

I owned participant onboarding — introducing the study timeline, objectives, and prototype. Because it was our one chance to address the entire participant pool, preparing onboarding forced us to clearly define the full schedule, protocol, and logistics, which got me into the nitty-gritty of running large-scale research. I also built a participant-facing website that consolidated the overview, research objectives, tool tutorials, deadlines, FAQs, and data-privacy details into a single resource.