Google Editors Information Architecture Redesign

I lead the UX for the information architecture redesign across Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings in 2021-2023. The new design improves the findability of key features, making it quicker and easier to use Docs, Sheets and Slides, especially on Chromebooks.

The project required extensive in-person and virtual workshops, large scale cross-functional team alignment, and cross-editor product vision alignment in order to gain buy-in and consensus from executive leadership and to ensure I was creating a design system that would scale today and in the coming years.

This project was important because of known feature find-ability issues (based on quantitative and qualitative metrics) as well as reports that our lengthy menus were being cut off on standard laptops, especially Chromebooks.

Before & After Example

Highlights of the IA Updates

Reordered menus based on impressions and established clear groupings and hierarchies within each menu. These groupings were then scaled across the Editors and applied universally to Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings.

Established design principles and shortened menus to 2 levels where possible. Previously, some menus had up to 5 levels of interaction.

Improved scannability via consistent icon system. I partnered with the vendor Math x Joy to create over 400 new icons for the menus that aid in usability, especially for features unfamiliar to users.

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User education was built in from the beginning. Implemented a series of promotions to call out changes to users to ease the change aversion throughout our updates.

Success Metrics & Outcome

In our experimentation framework we defined percentages for how much we wanted feature usage to increase by and how much we considered an acceptable decrease. We measured 7 daily active usage numbers in our experiment to help make decisions about how to launch to the general public.

The results were generally very positive. Most changes caused by re-ordering or moving items to another menu resulted in increased usage numbers. A few features saw reductions, if they were moved into a fly-out or if the iconography we chose for the feature was too vague. These drops were addressed in future iterations of the experiments or the decreased usage was accepted. In general, we learned that our users really liked our new iconography and found it sped up their productivity in finding items in the menus.

Company: Google
Principal UX: Liz Tervenski
Lead Engs: Janice Gu (Sheets), Tony Jianz & Vanessa Siriwalothakul (Docs, Slides, Drawings)
UXR: Aleks Sinayev, Clayton Stanley
UX Managers: Christina White, Juyun Song, Karen Rainert
Eng Manager: Michael Avrukin
VisD: Yuyu Lai
PM: Andy Rudd, Alex Jansen