Google Gallery Go: UX & UI Mobile App Design

A light and fast gallery app designed to work offline on your Android Go phone.

UX Design, UX Research, UX Strategy

Leading the UX of a project that makes a difference. Working alongside a team of Product Mangers & Engineers we launched and grew a gallery app that was meeting the needs of users with over 100M+ app downloads

UX Strategy

This project had many strategic milestones and required a deep understanding of the tech limitations of low-end devices, industry trends and our changing business goals at Google.

Some themes which I had to tackle to help prioritise or deprioritise to shape the product included things like defining beauty and image compression.

I would hear from an overwhelming amount of users about the desire to have face whitening and beatification effects in our filters which lead us to take a hard stance against this. We did not want to venture in the space of defining what beauty is and wanted to keep the features encouraging healthy usage.

We also had to make some tough decisions on image compression. Device storage is a very important issue on these devices and we had the opportunity to significantly reduce the space taken up by images. This came with a risk of reducing the visible quality of the images which we knew wouldn’t be ideal for all users, so had to approach it in a way where we were very careful of our defaults, allowing users to opt in IF they have a clear understanding.

UX Research

Understanding the needs of people from a very different culture and geographic location requires an open mind and a willingness to throw what you know away.

I travelled to India with members of our engineering and product team multiple times over this project. I conducted 1:1 interviews through translators while sitting in the homes of people in many different living situations in India, while also running workshops with the local community members to better understand and help them shape the product.

UX Design

To design for a different market you have to be open to forgetting what you think you know. Information density, use of colour, white space, sound, animation and language are at times polar opposite to what it considered ‘good design’ in most developed markets.

By understanding the market, cultural sensitivity and using the resources at hand I designed many features to add value to Gallery Go.

One of my favourite projects was a design sprint I ran on expression, gathering expertise from across Google to help create design patterns that can enable anyone to express themselves in a reasonable manner with ease.