Google

Overview

This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to join Google Daydream - Google’s AR/VR team - as a UX Design Intern. More specifically, I worked on developing compelling use cases, driving user retention and crafting a near-future vision for Google Lens, an app that allows you search what you see.

I’m really grateful for being offered such a great opportunity. I want to thank Rishi for being the best host I could have ever asked for, Pritam for being an awesome co-host and everyone at Google who guided and supported me throughout this journey.

Responsibilities & Process

During my internship, I owned a new Google Lens app experience that is expected to scale to 30 million monthly active users. In addition, working with cross-functional teams, I identified key opportunities for market fit by laying out the 3-year product vision for Lens towards better content delivery. You will find below a breakdown of my process:

Unfortunately, due to NDA I can’t yet share the details of my work. But feel free to contact me if you have more questions or would like to learn more about what I did. In the meantime, however, here’s a few learnings from my internship that I CAN share.

Learnings

Embrace Ambiguity

During the internship, I learned to be more comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing everything. I started by setting a time constraint for myself. Within the limit, I gathered as much research data as I can and explored the problem space through ideation for as long as time allowed. When time was up, I moved forward by overcoming the fear of sharing my sometimes incomplete or scrappy works and starting to gather feedback as often and early as possible.

Think Beyond Design

While it is a designer’s utmost priority to focus on the users, I also actively took other considerations such as product strategy, business interests, and engineering feasibility into account to help ensure successful cross-functional collaboration and product launches.

Just Ask

Taking a leaf out of Randy Pausch and Steve Jobs’ book, I reached out to as many Googlers as my calendar could accommodate and asked if they would like to meet and have a chat. All of them agreed and the conversations we had undoubtably became one of the highlights of my internship. Such experiences reinforced my belief that sometimes, all it takes to make things happen can be as simple as “Just Ask”.

Design Exercise

Click here to check out the design exercise I submitted as part of my application for this internship.