Inbound

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Context

A project manager from Google reached out to design and build a quick mobile prototype that he could test in San Francisco. He wanted to pitch a new feature for MyBusiness to his managers, so I worked along with him to make this possible.

Challenge

The main challenge for this project was to work with a lot of discretion on one side, and without any access to users or potential users on the other. There was not much information apart from assumptions from the client, so I had to validate them as we moved forward.

The idea was to add a feature to the MyBusiness app in which the vendors that offered their services in Maps would be able to schedule their visits and automatically create the best route depending on the times and distances. For the customer, they would be able to track at which time the vendor would arrive, so they could avoid waiting for them the whole day.

Actions

The first thing to understand was who were our potential users, so I facilitated a proto-personas workshop with the client and we defined two different profiles, one for the vendor and one for the customer:

With the proto-personas defined, I created low fidelity mockups that I iterated with the client:

Since I didn’t have access to users, I strongly recommended the client to take these mockups and show them to them which he did, and we were able to keep iterating until we had final versions of low fidelity mockups.

Another challenge that I faced during this process was that it was not clear for the client about how this could work for both types of users, so I created a swimlane flow that gave us better visibility about the expected interaction between the two user roles:

Finally, I created a delivery document in which I detailed the components and expected behavior so this prototype could be coded.

Impact

The prototype was successfully built. Although I was not part of the pitch meeting from the client, I was told that this approach made a good impression with his managers and that they proceeded to authorize the necessary resources to start building a full version of this feature in-house at Google.