INTRODUCTION
For a voice assistant to be truly helpful, it must work seamlessly when our hands and eyes are occupied. Yet, users often find the opposite is true, with one sharing, "It makes me feel incredibly frustrated... no app is good enough to make the phone accessible without touch.". This gap between user expectation and reality presented a fundamental challenge:
How do we evolve Google Assistant from a simple command-and-control tool into a truly proactive, voice-forward partner that works in the messy context of real life?
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Building a Seamless, Context-Aware Assistant
To tackle this complex, multi-quarter challenge, I co-created a UX vision guided by three core principles:
Understand the Context First: Before designing solutions, we had to deeply understand the specific situations where users needed hands-free help the most.
Go Beyond Commands: A truly voice-forward experience is implicit and proactive. The vision was to move beyond reactive commands and design an assistant that intelligently anticipates user needs.
Advocate for a Long-Term Vision: Solving this problem required more than a single feature; it demanded a long-term organizational commitment, which we needed to build and champion through a clear, data-driven vision.
THE TEAM
As the UXR lead, I co-created and drove the end-to-end UX research vision for this strategic program.
My responsibilities included defining the multi-quarter research roadmap, securing engineering resources by advocating our vision to senior leadership, and leading all research from foundational discovery to evaluative studies. This was a deep partnership with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to define the future of voice-forward experiences on mobile.
THE PROCESS
Part 1: Foundational Understanding: The 'When' and 'Why'
Our first step was to ground our vision in a deep, data-driven understanding of user needs. We needed to move beyond assumptions to quantify where users struggled and uncover the 'why' behind their frustrations.
Uncovering Deep Frustrations & Unmet Needs (Diary Study): To capture in-the-moment experiences, I designed and led a 2-week diary study using dscout with 39 participants, yielding 479 detailed entries. This foundational study was pivotal in exploring current pain points with hands/eyes-free interaction and identifying key unmet needs. A recurring theme was the pervasive user frustration, with 1 in 4 participants using the word "frustrating" or "frustrated" to describe their interactions. The study confirmed that 100% of users regularly encounter situations requiring HEFE support , with driving and cooking emerging as primary contexts where users most desire reliable voice interaction.
Quantifying Priorities (Survey): Building on these rich qualitative insights, a subsequent large-scale survey (n=623, as referenced in the HEFE vision plan ) then quantified and prioritized these HEFE contexts, confirming driving (316 responses), cooking (244), and getting ready in the morning (219) as top user needs.
Part 2: Vision Setting, Concept Testing, and Iterative Design
Armed with a clear understanding of the problem from our foundational research, we translated these insights into a tangible product vision. This involved an iterative design and research process:
Ideation & Workshops: I collaborated closely with Product and Design in workshops to brainstorm initial concepts for a truly voice-forward experience.
Concept Testing & Refinement: We then conducted a series of concept testing studies to present these early ideas—ranging from specific features to broader experiential flows—to users. This evaluative phase was crucial for gauging the appeal of different approaches, identifying potential usability hurdles early, and iteratively refining our design principles. User feedback from concept testing directly validated the need for seamless, context-aware assistance.
Strategic Pivot: A key insight emerging from both foundational research and reinforced by concept testing was that users did not want to manually manage an explicit "hands-free mode." This pivotal finding led us to shift the entire product strategy towards a set of smart, implicit features that would activate automatically based on user context, a direction that resonated strongly in subsequent evaluations.Part 3: Synthesizing a Strategic & Enduring Roadmap
Part 3: Advocacy and Securing Investment
A vision is only as powerful as the organization's commitment to it. A significant part of my role was to continuously advocate for this new, implicit vision. I created and presented a strategic vision deck, grounded in our research findings, to stakeholders and senior leadership. This narrative was instrumental in demonstrating the user need and business opportunity, ultimately securing dedicated engineering resources to make the long-term vision a reality.
THE IMPACT
The research and strategy from this program provided a clear, long-term vision for the future of hands-free interaction on mobile. It successfully shifted the organizational mindset from one-off features to a holistic, context-aware experience and created a durable roadmap that is still referenced today.
Key impacts
Shaped the Product Roadmap & Strategy: My research was instrumental in establishing and driving the multi-quarter product roadmap. The insights directly led to a pivotal shift in product strategy—from a manual "mode" to a smart, implicit set of features.
Secured Engineering Investment: The data-driven vision I advocated for successfully secured dedicated, long-term engineering resources, transforming the project from an exploration into a fully funded product initiative.