The Challenge

Assured Workloads (AW) was a highly technical Google Cloud product designed to help customers meet nascent and evolving regulatory compliance requirements from governments and industry bodies. At its inception, there were no established best practices for this space, and the product's scope was in constant flux due to the changing regulatory landscape. The core challenge was to define and prioritize a clear set of capabilities that would meet critical customer needs and establish the product as a market leader in a complex, high-stakes environment.

My Approach & Leadership

As the sole UX Researcher on a 150-person team, I led all research initiatives to guide the product from its initial Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage through to General Availability. To create a stable, user-centered foundation amidst the regulatory uncertainty, I employed a diverse range of tactical and strategic methods, including semi-structured interviews, moderated task analyses, usability studies, expert interviews, and literature reviews. Through a strong, collaborative partnership with Product Management and Engineering, I created the research-backed framework that enabled leadership to confidently prioritize key capabilities, ensuring that user needs remained central to the product's development.

Key Insights & Recommendations

My research revealed that customers lacked confidence in the product's compliance reporting. I recommended a complete redesign of the in-product monitoring system to provide the verifiable evidence necessary for customers to trust and adopt the platform for their most sensitive workloads. Furthermore, I authored a comprehensive vision document and a current-state UX walkthrough that synthesized user needs and market opportunities, resulting in the creation of multiple Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) that shaped the long-term roadmap.

Business & Product Impact

• Horizontal OKR Creation: My work led to the creation of a Cloud-horizontal Objective and Key Result (OKR), which compelled numerous integrating teams to prioritize and improve the user experience for data residency across their services.

• Platform-Wide Program: I led foundational research that established a platform-wide program, which grew to a 100+ person team and enabled new accreditation of regulatory compliance for Google Cloud.

• C-Suite Recognition: The success and differentiation of the product were highlighted by CEO Sundar Pichai as a Google Cloud differentiator in the Q1 2021 earnings call.

• Unblocking Product Delivery: The clarity provided by the research resulted in a dramatically better user experience and "quicker delivery timelines" for both Product Management and Engineering.

• Created Foundational Artifacts: I authored key resources, including the "Compliance Starter Kit" and a foundational report for AW. These documents were highly visible (250+ views each) and are still used years later by new hires, other Googlers, and sales teams to understand customer compliance needs.

Cross-functional Partner Testimonials

"Noël has been vital in product direction for all things compliance and trust in Cloud."

— Cloud Security & Privacy PM Manager

“Noël unblocked PM & ENG to deliver on both launches. Her research for AW led to dramatic changes in the product, resulting in a much better experience for users and quicker delivery timelines. “ 

- Cloud Engineering Technical Lead

The Challenges

There are multiple human review tools for content moderation at Google. However one is used across multiple product areas [name redacted]. 

• User & Product Complexity: The tool's wide application across diverse users, content types, and product areas created a noisy environment. This made it difficult for the engineering team to have high confidence that the features and fixes they prioritized would be the most impactful.

• Knowledge Gaps: There was a sparse understanding of key user groups, particularly the T&S Analysts responsible for configuring human review queues. This user sample was not previously documented, creating a significant blind spot in foundational knowledge.

• Process & Education Deficiencies: The cross-functional team had identified gaps in their collective understanding and application of UX principles; for example, many stakeholders were unfamiliar with Critical User Journeys (CUJs). Furthermore, the team lacked a formal User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process to ensure new features met user needs before launch.

My Approach & Leadership

To address these challenges, I implemented a proactive, multi-pronged strategy to embed deep user understanding into the tool's product lifecycle and establish durable, user-centered processes.

• Foundational Research: I initiated foundational research to map the ecosystem and fill critical knowledge gaps. This included identifying and documenting a previously unknown sample of users responsible for queue configuration and establishing a scalable mechanism to survey them, which significantly strengthened the team's confidence in the resulting insights.

• Process Implementation: I authored and secured cross-functional buy-in for a formal UAT process, bridging a critical gap between development and user validation. Additionally, I established annual UX-centered "Fix-It" weeks for engineering to address small-sized bugs and created a prioritized UXR backlog that served as a direct input into the 2023 and 2024 product roadmaps.

• Stakeholder Education & Alignment: Recognizing the need for a shared language around user experience, I proposed and led a cross-functional workshop for the Tool team. This session educated product managers and engineers on Critical User Journeys and how to apply them, which was instrumental in putting usability at the forefront of product priorities.

• Metric-Driven Improvement: I identified that the low CSAT (reviewer satisfaction) survey response rate was undermining our ability to make data-driven decisions. I took leadership of the Q4 2022 OKR to fix this foundational metric, creating and executing a communication strategy that tripled participation and transformed CSAT into a statistically reliable signal for roadmap prioritization.

Key Insights & Recommendations

The key insight was that our "power users"—the T&S Analysts configuring queues—were an invisible and underserved population. My research illuminated their critical role and unique pain points for the first time. My recommendation was to elevate their specific needs as a design priority, leading to a dedicated roadmap for configuration tooling that moved us from reactive bug-fixing to proactive, foundational improvements for this essential user group.

Business & Product Impact

This leadership in research and process directly translated into tangible product improvements and measurable business outcomes:

• Feature Launches: The research directly informed the launch of three significant improvements to the configuration experience, a new "draft queue" feature for testing, batch look-up capabilities, reviewer custom image settings, and improved instrumentation of Critical User Journeys.

• Error Reduction & Efficiency: The increased statistical confidence in our CSAT data directly led the team to prioritize and launch "Review Service," a critical infrastructure improvement that reduced review submission errors by an astounding 80%.

• Roadmap Influence: The research insights directly shaped future product strategy, leading to the creation of specific 2023 and 2024 OKRs focused on reducing onboarding complexity and improving the tool's overall user experience.

Cross-functional Partner Testimonials

“Noël organized the CSAT presentation and adapted it to the audience by making sure the feedback from the reviewers could be turned into actions. She is also very responsive and proactive in supporting engineers on usability improvements. The result was high quality in the user experience for new delivered features for [Tool name] such as [NTK feature]”

— Engineering manager

“Noël synthesized the breadth of UI/UX requests from the multiple workflow owners, and her own research findings. This had very significant business impact since [Tool name]'s initial priorities didn't include aspects to make the user experience optimal for the job.” 

- T&S Operations Lead

Several core challenges necessitated a new, more scalable approach to user research across the both the Trust & Safety and Cloud ecosystems. This case study covers work done while in both organizations:

The Challenge

• Organizational Scale: With stakeholders distributed across functions and teams, there was often a lack of clarity on the most important user issues and, critically, who was responsible for addressing them.

• Resource Constraints: Significant recruiting constraints and time-consuming manual processes, such as heuristic analysis, limited the speed and scope of traditional research projects. This meant that many important user questions risked falling below the priority line.

• Proving Value: It was essential to demonstrate the business impact of horizontal efforts like design systems (for content moderation) and to develop methods for rapidly answering high-priority questions from leadership and key customers with robust data.

My Approach & Leadership

To overcome these obstacles, I created and championed a portfolio of innovative strategies and tools designed to democratize user insights and scale the impact of the UXR function.

• Creating Scalable Frameworks: I authored UX Responsibility Models (UXRMs) and  User Archetypes. These foundational resources synthesized research from across multiple studies and product areas to create a shared, prioritized understanding of user issues and needs, clarifying ownership and aligning distributed teams.

• Championing AI-Powered Tooling: I pioneered the use of AI to create novel research tools that dramatically increased efficiency. This included creating a NotebookLM for rapid gap analysis, which was leveraged to address questions from a top Storage customer in hours instead of weeks. I also developed a Gemini Gem for automated Heuristic analysis (reducing a multi-day process to minutes) and co-organized the first AI-powered one-day sprint to ensure these new capabilities were immediately put into practice.

• Developing New Measurement Methods: I led one of the first A/B experiments on a new experimentation platform and delivered a comprehensive measurement framework to prove the business impact of the content-moderation design system. The expertise gained from this pilot is now being used to shape future projects.

• Fostering Collaborative Research: I established the "Sandbox Sessions" program, a collaborative method for identifying usability issues by involving large, cross-functional groups—including senior leadership—directly in the research process.

Key Insights & Recommendations

The primary strategic insight is that in a scaled organization, the UXR team's greatest value is not in being a "research factory," but in being an "enablement engine." My recommendation was to formally shift a portion of our team's focus from executing studies to creating durable, self-service research frameworks and AI-powered tools. This "force-multiplier" approach became a strategic imperative for scaling our influence without scaling headcount.

Business & Product Impact

These scalable methods delivered broad, measurable impact across the organization:

• Accelerated Issue Resolution: The UXRMs directly led to 12 bugs being fixed or added to 2024 roadmaps. The Sandbox Sessions identified 33 previously unknown issues, including 3 launch-blocking P0 bugs.

• Drastic Time Savings: The AI-powered tools created dramatic efficiency gains. The gap analysis process was reduced from weeks to hours, and heuristic analysis time was cut from days to mere minutes.

• Widespread Adoption: The expertise from the A/B pilot is being used to shape future experimentation projects, and other Cloud teams are adopting the Gem concept for their own innovation sprints, amplifying the impact of the original work.

Cross-functional Partner Testimonials

“The [name redacted] Sandbox session run by Noel was a game changer highlighting a wide range of critical usability issues which have now been brought to the attention of senior leadership...”

— Lead Product Manager 

“Noël's understanding of the roles and teams across T&S has been invaluable to the program to map this ecosystem. The T&S Archetypes will allow future projects to kick-off with a concrete understanding of the user needs and has the foundation of multiple research efforts integrated into one resource.” 

— T&S Senior UX Designer

The Challenge

Project Timing: The engineering design process had already commenced without any initial involvement from Industrial Design (ID) or Human Factors (HF), meaning key architectural decisions were already being made.

Resource Allocation: Project funding had not yet been formally secured, making it a challenge to advocate for investment in non-traditional engineering activities like iterative prototyping and user testing.

Organizational Maturity: The product team lacked a clear and established understanding of User Experience (UX) principles, requiring a foundational effort in education and advocacy to demonstrate the value of the discipline.

My Approach & Leadership

Strategic Alignment: To align a historically engineering-driven team, I created a simple but powerful UX strategy framework: "Card Printer Touchpoints." This artifact translated the entire user journey into a shared map that the cross-functional team could use to debate priorities and allocate resources, effectively creating a common language for a user-centered design process.

Rigorous Iterative Testing: I led a multi-method testing approach for the critical ribbon carrier component. The process began with simple sketches and progressed through three versions of physical SLA models. We utilized a combination of research methods to gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback, including Heuristic evaluation, Likert Scale ratings, Forced Rank comparisons, and a Think Aloud protocol.

Effective Stakeholder Communication: To ensure the research resonated with an engineering-focused team, I developed a communication strategy built on three core principles:

1.  Show, Don't Tell: using photos and videos of user struggles 

2. Speak Their Language: presenting findings in quantitative data tables

3. Deliberate Documentation: providing clear, unambiguous visual evidence of design flaws and improvements.

Key Insights & Recommendations

The combination of the "Think Aloud" protocol, where users vocalized their confusion, and analysis of photos and videos from testing made the ergonomic flaw undeniable: users' hands naturally gravitated to the sensitive print head during installation. This contact risked damaging the component and degrading print quality. This qualitative data, backed by quantitative Forced Rank comparisons of the different models, provided the engineering team with irrefutable evidence to justify a design change that shifted the grip area away from the print head.

Business & Product Impact

• Ergonomic & Usability Improvement: The final, validated design protected the sensitive print head from user contact, directly improving the product's long-term reliability and day-to-day usability.

• Economic Advantage: The redesigned carrier's form factor enabled a more efficient packing configuration, doubling the number of units per shipping container (from 36 to 72) and creating a massive logistical and cost-saving advantage for the business.

Award winning

I was awarded a patent (# 10,633,208) for my co-invention of the new card door mechanism and the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Stan Caplan Human Factors in Product Design Award 2018.