 Google has released some pretty beautiful iOS apps lately, like YouTube, Gmail, and Maps. How'd that happen? There's only one way to find out. Head to the campus, talk to people who made the apps, and figure out just how Google upped its design game. So I'd say if you pulled a Googler on the street, you'd be more often to find that they're on an Android phone than an iOS phone, just by nature of we make Android, but there's a lot of iOS users. Yeah, I'm constantly surprised how many Googlers you talk to and ask which platform they use and they pull out two phones. One from your pocket. I have both. Well, I have a corporate phone, I have a personal phone, I have a tablet. Actually, I also have an X7 for reading books, but it's a phone. In 2011, Larry Page became the CEO of Google and he issued a mandate, redesign all of the major apps. They called it Project Kennedy and the crazy thing is that it worked. Google doesn't have a Johnny Ive who dictates design across all of its products, but they found a way to make everything that they do on iOS and Android relatively consistent and also very pretty. On the day that Larry became CEO, he also said, hey everyone, we're going to redesign all of our products. Oh, and we need to do it by this summer. There was a previous endeavor to do this. It was called Kana. It was a bit of a bottom up approach and we came up with a series of really interesting, great designs, but it was hard to get traction because again, you have to mobilize the entire company to make it happen. Historically at Google, I think there were pockets of designers or teams that they were like, oh, let's bring all of Google together into one beautiful, amazing design, but because of the way that Google set up, again for speed, there was this dependency factor. We want to lower dependencies on products so that they can move fast. It was kind of hard for any one team to push that Google wide, so it really required the vision of someone like Larry who can rally the entire company to make it happen. Larry Page didn't take the traditional route. He looked outside Google's Mountain View campus to New York City where the company runs an isolated design studio called Creative Lab. It's known for producing Google's famous Parisian Love Super Bowl ad and an innovative Arcade Fire music video that utilized Google Maps. Lead designers at Creative Lab worked with Google product designers to work out a sharp, modern take on applications like search and Gmail. Some of these same design ideals seem to have found their way to Google Now on Android under the direction of Mathias Duarte. Google traditionally, not really well known for design, but it's really changing. Google passionately cares about design and the entire company is transforming itself around that idea. Google Now is a great example in so many ways to talk about design and the rise of design culture and the way that design works at Google. Design is not just about making things more useful. It's not just about making things more beautiful. It's about really figuring out what is the right thing to make and how to make it right. When Google Now began, it was really this mandate and this vision from Larry that Google could be better than instant, that Google could be almost psychic. This was a very shocking, provocative direction and definitely scary and disturbing, but it was a very different way of thinking about product. It's not like, oh, we're working on a feature. We've got this idea. We're going to add these little incremental things. It was a vision and that was awesome. Then the job of the designers was like, okay, how do we get there? What can we do with that vision? Design is really about kind of... I like to think of it as practical imagination, imagining possibilities and making them real. One of the essential parts of that is to do it. You just have to do a lot of it, iterate a lot, look at everything. Only when you've done it, done every possible variation that you can think of, then you realize, oh, there's actually one thing we didn't try. Let's try that. This is different explorations about how we'd actually render the context header. We were trying to decide, should the context headers be photography? Should it be tight illustration? Should it be this water color illustration? We tried a lot of different things. We created context headers again in this very brushy look. We thought, oh, this looks beautiful. It looks amazing on the screen, but again, it's a little bit off from the Google brand. We tried something a little bit more technical and then it just felt a little fussy. This is just the kind of level of iteration we go through. What if we do the Google box with the holo style entry field? Doesn't feel Googley enough, right? There are challenges associated with building apps for any platform that isn't your own. Here's the issue with iOS. You want your apps to look like Google apps, but feel iOS native. The strategy initially was to get a Gmail presence on iOS. Looking at the raw materials that we had to work with, what we started with was the web version of Gmail for the phone. We took the pieces of it that needed to be native and we made those native and built an experience on the phone. I think when you look at the app today, it's still based on those same underpinnings, but just a huge amount of work has gone into making it fluid, making it really responsive. Then on the visual design side, which I think everyone is reacting to recently, really making great strides in evolving what Google's visual design aesthetic should be on iOS. When I just joined Google five years ago, there was no such thing as a common design language for a platform. I think we've made a huge progress over the last few years, especially on iOS. Users notice that. They really appreciate the recent redesigns. When we launched Gmail to zero, when we launched Maps, when we launched YouTube and YouTube 1.1 and YouTube Capture, we got a lot of this positive feedback of users talking about consistency of visual language and Google actually being able to find its own language for iOS. Google succeeded in creating a host of mobile apps that all adhere to one cohesive personality. At least for now, it seems to be working. If you go back to the original iconic homepage, why is it this clean white surface? Where do we take what's great about Google design and try to express it in many more places? We wanted to have the same level of simplicity that Google always had. We worked very closely with John Wiley's search team and we got together in this giant war room and just churned and mashed and just iterated. We would just kind of go through it endlessly, just debate and look and create mock-ups and talk about them and go through that process. And then as we launched these changes to Google, as we launched them to Google products, we wanted to keep up that momentum. I'm the lead for mobile maps and I talk with the people who work on desktop maps, but I also go and we have meetings with the people who are working on various iOS maps. And we'll just have a very casual get together, but on a regular basis to talk about feedback we have for each other and things we've tried. And really it's about what's freshest and best of all the things that we're working on so that everybody can somewhat selfishly have that in their product too. And we don't have a single mastermind designer. It's all about teams iterating together and talking and sharing information, making sure that at some point we're kind of ending up in this sweet spot where our design language is very similar. It fits well into the platform, but at the same time it keeps being Google.