Navigating challenges:
A "home profile" vs. a setting tab

As part of the 2020 app-wide redesign sprints, a "home profile" hypothesis arose:
Make the last tab of the app an everyday destination with metrics, insights, and tips about the home...and of course settings too.

My hypothesis was:
Our #1 need is to consolidate all those scattered settings into one place...

...and to quickly get people to the most important settings items.

Because the meme here sums it up:

Our foundational UXR found that the vast majority of participants rarely visit settings, but when they do, it’s to address something important.

But settings was part of a bigger design-led redesign of the entire app. And a hypothesis that came out of the brainstorming workshops was:

What if this tab was a destination, a dashboard of insights and suggestions…how to make your home run better?

And this showed up in the research, where users didn't grasp the value prop of a "home profile".

A quote from a research participant:

"I'm equating [Profile] to settings and I'm not sure why we don't just call it Settings."

The term “profile” also wasn’t clear:

“Is this my digital-wellbeing profile, or the whole house?"

With that, our efforts recentered on my hypothesis that we needed a settings tab*.

There was still a lot of interest in more warmth and larger, more colorful visuals.

However, I noticed we were making it more difficult for people to get to the most-visited settings items—in the following image, see the most-visited items (highlighted in pink) in relation to the fold.

Research confirmed the need for reliable settings destinations and the need to get to important items quickly.

A recurring ask was to make the home member avatars larger, and even include email addresses.

But we found that people rarely edit home members, people usually know who they moved in with, and a separate screen is better for privacy needs like seeing members' email addresses.

And eventually, it turned out that we didn't have the resources for the new imagery that a lot of the warmth relied on.

We didn't have the photography or technical infrastructure to provide device photography or to show which services were linked to people in the home (an account + account + home settings relationship).

Final decision: list items or carousels?

One systems designer and I were still favoring a very utilitarian list-item-only approach.

In the last usability studies, my research partner shared that we could go either way. The user preference wasn't strongly for either direction.

In the end, I chose to keep the device and services carousels because these UI mechanisms put more touchpoints at people's fingertips (the pink highlights are items from the top-ten most-tapped settings items from our metrics before the redesign)

Navigating challenges:
Break from the system when it makes sense

The final UX includes a "+ Add" floating-action-button in the "Devices" tab, even though adding devices is not a "day-to-day control" need.

I prefer opinionated stances on design systems, but I also believe in breaking from a system when it makes sense. I often see that users simply expect to manage things (devices) in the place where they see those things (in the "Devices" tab).

But not everybody was on board.

The initial premise was that the "Devices" tab would be for everyday control, and the "Settings" tab would be for management

Initially, I also thought this could work. Why put an add-device button in an day-to-day-use screen when you rarely add devices?

But I had a small suspicion that users would not have the same mental model that we had.

I requested a UXR study dedicated to critical settings journeys*. The results show about half of users went to the "wrong" tab.

*These tasks included moving devices, getting to device settings, removing devices, and adding devices.

Research and I thought the results were clear... 

I put forward that the "Devices" tab actually needs an always-visible floating action button, not just a scroll-to-the-end-to-see-it "Add devices" button. 

...but partners for other areas of the app still prefered the less-visible UI.

As a backup measure, I prepared an add-devices-in-the-new-settings-tab instruction in the new user education that would accompany the app redesign

Normally, you don't want to have to teach users much about settings, but the research team agreed this action was critical enough to warrant a user-education feature.

When possible, I also asked to include the "add device" user journey in research studies

Even after 6 months, and even with the user education*, the data showed that still about half of people went to the "wrong" tab.

*We had a user-education learning: Our research found that people often don't read wizard-like user education sequences. It's better to use tool-tips if your product needs users to learn what you're pointing out.

Eventually, we had agreement:

The data was clear and the partner teams agreed: it made sense to break from the system

Outcomes for the tab

We addressed the original problems & challenges:

• Settings were consolidated into a new tab—any setting affecting the home can be reached via the tab

• Met the needs of stakeholders who wanted to retain items in the tab, but kept the list curated and digestible for users

9to5Google: "Both [the Home features and Nest services & support sections] are concise and easy to navigate…

I genuinely can’t express how big of an improvement this is.”

A tidier "Add" menu still has what users need:

9to5Google: "There’s also an 'add' button that shows every action that you might expect to fit that description."

Problems that were addressed

• The old menu included settings, not just items to add

• It included a low-usage, paid customer-service line

• Unconsolidated media services

• Lack of a Works with Google entrypoint to link compatible devices

(Ongoing)
Google Material 3 updates

Google Material 3 is the latest, dynamically themed design system for Google products.

The project

• Applying accessibility standards, responsive layout behaviors, and Google Material 3 dynamic color to the high-priority settings screens in Google Home app

• As we finish this work, it will increase the speed of design and engineering as more of the app is on an infrastructure that scales