Assistant Personality | Design Lead | 2020 - 2021
Building the tools, templates, and experiences that brought delight to 100M+ daily users across 46 locales.
In 2020, Google Assistant had 100M daily active users across 46 locales. But Personality responses (fun facts, seasonal campaigns, interactive features) were visually inconsistent and engineering-intensive to update. Every new visual experience required custom templates, creating a bottleneck that slowed the team's ability to ship delightful, timely content. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 crisis created an urgent new need: families at home needed Assistant to show up as more than a utility.
The background
The solution
Two interconnected work streams. First, VisualBox, an internal design system that gave the Personality team the ability to add visuals to any Assistant response with very little engineering support, built on 13 flexible templates and a new cross-functional content process.
The second work stream, The Animal of the Day, an educational experience for kids that proved Assistant could be a meaningful presence in family life, and an early signal of what this kind of tooling could unlock.
How we got there
Animal of the Day was an early proof of concept, but it took a long time to manual code. VisualBox was the solution for reducing the implementation process through scalable templates and tools.
We had a quick turnaround because of COVID. I led the UX for Animal of the day, an interactive daily experience, teaching kids about a new animal through sounds, fun facts, images, and an offline creative challenge, across smart speakers, smart displays, and mobile app.
A curated sequence of 100 animals created a reason to return. It launched as part of Google's Back to School campaign and became the #1 CSAT-rated feature on Assistant in Q3 2020.
The impact
VisualBox came from a recurring friction: every visual response required an engineering ticket. I led the system architecture across design, engineering, and content, with 13 flexible templates supporting Personality responses across 100M+ DAU in 46 locales, with a new content process that let the team ship independently.