On this episode, our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara dive into Google Cloud Platform UX with guest and Google Product Designer Michael Kleinerman. Michael’s path to Product Designer started with “ancient” tech designing with Flash and 3D motion graphics and progressed from there through interaction designer to his place now with Google. His experience has helped him appreciate the many different kinds of designers needed for projects and how they have to work together for a good product.

At Google, Michael’s team builds design systems that create a balance between what Google uses and what the products built on Google use. He adopted Material Design, which offers guidelines for patterns and components of design, to Google Cloud. Material Design spans across multiple devices and screen sizes to help simplify design across devices. When Cloud reached the enterprise space, where components can be more complex, Michael’s team worked to adjust Cloud using Material Design so that features like tables would work correctly.

Accessibility is also a top priority for Cloud and the design team. To begin the process of designing for accessibility, the team finds the top three or so reasons that a user would come to their product and ensures those are accessible to all. The next step is to create easier usability in the second tier features of the product, and then all features beyond. Using a screen reader, they go through the product to see if it’s usable, and really try to make the experience better. The team also makes sure there are a lot of guidance pages as well.

The goal in product design is to make things simple and consistent for everyone.

Michael Kleinerman

Michael is a Product Designer at Google. He worked on Android and YouTube in the Bay Area before joining Cloud in NYC, where he started by leading the UX for Firestore until it launched in both Firebase and GCP. This work evolved into his current role on the core platform team, responsible for the design direction of the main design system used by producer teams to build and launch products on GCP.

Cool things of the week

Committed use discounts at a glance blog
Networking in depth blog
Chatbots with Dialog Flow blog and video
Turn it up to eleven: Java 11 runtime comes to App Engine blog
App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available blog

Interview

Material.io site
Material Design site
Firebase site
Cloud Firestore site

Question of the week

How do I work with my containers locally and then get them into the cloud?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

Mark Mirch’ is filming for customers in the Bay area.

Everyone else is just laying low for now!

Sound Effect Attribution

“alert.wav” by danielnieto7 of Freesound.org
“cell phone vibraion.wav” by MrAuralization of Freesound.org
“laugh crowd 2.wav” by MrAuralizationFunWithSound of Freesound.org

Google Cloud Platform UX with Michael Kleinerman

Google Cloud Platform Podcast