Google Maps

The team is mainly comprised of engineers, researchers, and product designers. I was the first designated visual designer to join the team in Seattle. As the sole design advocate focused on improving visual principles, consistency, accessibility, safety, etc. I touched almost every project the team was working on in some capacity.

What I worked on:

  • Driver design principles

  • Cross-surface visual design elements audit + revise

  • Incident icons audit + revise

  • Color association + accessibility

  • Restriction zones

  • Hyper-localized map experience

  • No map experience

  • Informal transit

  • Broadcasters app

  • Assisted driving

  • CarPlay

  • Next Billion Users

Visual Design
Audit

Select Case Study:

There is a need to identify visual asset inconsistencies across surfaces because lack of consistency fragments the brand presence and affects visual pattern recognition between platforms.

The audit is a foundation to then plan, execute and maintain visual cross-surface consistency and integrity. It provides a high-level overview and highlight areas for improvement both in execution and process.

Context:

This audit was my project and responsibility under the guidance of a design lead who oversaw all visual designers. I was the visual expert on these surfaces and was tasked with doing and presenting the audit as step one, and of course improving consistency as step two. Here are select pages as an example.

My Role:

Icons

Select Case Study:

Context:

The team wants to ensure that drivers with a range of visual impairments are able to identify and understand icons on the map while driving. With new capabilities and road type/incident detections coming down the line, we need to take a step back and systematically declutter the navigation map to make the most important information easily available at a glance.

I partnered with the research team to evaluate the strength of current and proposed icons, labels and color associations. Following the outcome of this, I presented and helped to implement the revisions.

My Role: