I’m Andrea, nice to meet you.
With 20+ years of product development and user research experience at Google, Siemens Medical, and Rockwell Software, Andrea has worked in the website, mobile app, consumer electronics, small business, education, healthcare, finance, and software developer spaces.
Andrea has honed her craft in to-the-point user research that cuts to the heart of what product teams need to know to make informed decisions with a focus on launching new products.
Past Work
Consumer web
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The question was: “Why are so many Google Sheets users want cell-level permissions in Google Sheets?”
The answer was “To collect structured data from large groups of people,” and out of that user research came a new product, Google Forms!
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The question was: “How do we take disparate start-up acquisitions and create a unified product suite?”
The answer was to identify user needs and expectations for each product and across products, identify new/expanded feature opportunities, and define common patterns to create a fully-fledged Google product suite used by millions.
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The question was: “What ways do consumers contact local businesses & what methods work the best?”
The answer was to explore the web traffic and compare the drop-off funnels on Google Search’s local business results for the various means of contacting a business - from phone calls, online chat, WhatsApp, SMS, etc. We identified what means of contact are most successful, and the causes of drop-off for each.
TV and internet
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The question was: “How do people find things to watch online or on TV?”
The answer was a multi-dimensional mental model of the decision-making process that informed recommendation engines and user interfaces for YouTube, GoogleTV, AndroidTV, and Google Fiber TV.
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The question in 2008 was: “Should we be a unified experience for live and streamed TV? Or be a stand-alone streaming device?”
The answer was the first version of GoogleTV, where competitive research and prototype testing revealed that stand-alone devices fall out of use because users don’t think to switch to a second or third input device when considering what to watch.
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The question was: “How can we enable new customers to set up their own Internet & TV connections?”
The answer was to conduct a series of rapid iterative testing & evaluation (RITE) that allowed us to evaluate and improve the experience from end-to-end including packaging, written instructions, hardware setup, online setup and account configuration.
Software Developers
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The question was: “What’s the impact of slow build speeds on developer productivity?”
Research revealed that developer productivity is impacted less by slow build speeds directly, and more by the context switching required when a build takes too long to wait for. Furthermore - satisfaction with slow builds is not predicted by actual build speed, but by developers expectations of build speeds.
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The question was “What makes engineers productive?”
The answer was a 4-attribute model of the elements that predict self-reported developer productivity, and an accompanying set of survey questions that measured these attributes to identify success stories and hot spots within the company.
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The question was: “What is the benefit of having a single large repository for most of Google’s code?”
We explored the impact of codebase structure on engineering productivity, finding that Google software engineers find benefit in velocity & code quality from being able to see and edit code within and beyond their current project - which is a key component of Google’s engineering culture.
SMBs & Advertisers
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The question was: “Why are businesses creating pins where they do not have locations?”
The answer was that they were trying their best to represent to their customers on Google Maps where they provided service, such as food delivery. This led to new opportunities in Google Maps and Ads to allow businesses to mark their “service area” better serving local businesses and Google users.
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The question was: “Why do more local businesses not advertise on Google?”
The answer was that they are focused on local, community-based, and easily trackable forms of advertising - and it was not easy nor cost effective to create local ads on Google’s platform.
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The question was: “How do we ensure a smooth transition to the newest version of AdWords?”
The answer was to design a series of surveys that evaluated ongoing measures of success during the phased roll-out of the new version.
What People Are Saying
Let’s chat
The best way to determine how I can help you is to have a short conversation or email exchange, where we can explore your vision, goals, and open questions.