Designing for media that had no rules yet — and unifying the one product every Google user touches.
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Google is where I moved from engineering into UX and never looked back. Over two and a half years I worked on four very different products: Pokémon on Pixel 4 with ATAP's Emmy-winning Spotlight Stories team, Tilt Brush VR, Google Lens research, and People & Sharing — the contact experience across six Google surfaces.
The common thread: none of them had an established pattern to lean on. Radar gestures, 3D painting, research storytelling, and a contacts system that six teams had built six different ways. The job each time was to decide what the interaction should be before deciding how it should look.
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UX / Visual Designer, Aug 2019 – Mar 2022 — ATAP Pixel 4 × Pokémon (2019), Tilt Brush (2019–20), Lens (2020), People & Sharing (2020–22). Partners: engineering, PM, UX research, and the Material design team. On Tilt Brush I also led QA for the final public release.
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Pokémon on Pixel 4 launched to 100k+ retail stores and on every Pixel 4 sold. Web Contacts redesign: paid Enterprise 1-day active users +40%, from 213K to 301K. Six contact products unified on one card-based system and moved to Material You.
The Challenge
Four products, one condition: no shared pattern to lean on.
In VR there's no edge to the canvas. With radar there's no button to press. In research, the insight dies in a 40-page report. And in People & Sharing, six products designed by six teams at six different times meant the same person — your contact — looked different on every surface. Each project needed the interaction model decided first; the visual design only made sense after.
The Design Pillars
Find the body's analogue
Before inventing a new gesture or tool, find what people's hands already know how to do — a camera move, a wave, a pen path.
Unify before you restyle
Six products don't need six redesigns. They need one structure, then a shared visual language applied to it.
Make research travel
Research only counts once the team acts on it. Turn findings into something small enough to share and vivid enough to remember — so insight reaches the people building the product, not just the people who wrote the report.
Decision 01 — People & Sharing, 2020–22: one card, six surfaces.
Overview
Android Contacts, People Sheet iOS, People Sheet Android, Hovercard, Web Contacts and Web Companion had drifted apart for years. Instead of restyling each, I redesigned the core products into a single card-based format engineering could reuse across surfaces, then moved them to Material You — prioritising content visibility so the person you're looking at is the first thing you see.
Tradeoff
A shared structure means every surface gives up something it did its own way. Slower to agree, faster to ship ever after — and the only route to the reuse that saved engineering time.
The Result
After launching the Web Contacts redesign, paid Enterprise 1-day active users increased 40% — from 213K to 301K.
Decision 02 — Tilt Brush, 2019–20: borrow the filmmaker's model, not a VR-native one.
Overview
Camera Path let artists plot a path around a 3D painting and record a cinematic fly-through — turning static VR art into video. Rather than invent a new VR mental model, I built it on two people already had: shooting a scene, and Pen and Path from Adobe tools. Internal usability testing then found the real problems — deleting and adjusting anchor points wasn't intuitive, and a second camera path felt clunky — and we rebuilt both.
Tradeoff
Familiar models make a feature learnable but can cap what's possible in a medium with no edges. I chose learnable. Tilt Brush's audience were artists, not VR engineers.
Built for PossibilityRecorded with Camera Path, the feature I designed: plot a path around a 3D painting and Tilt Brush films the fly-through. Made by me, start to finish, in VR.
The Result
Tilt Brush was the last of Google's VR era to be wound down — and the only one that didn't disappear. In January 2021 we open-sourced the codebase I'd shipped and QA'd for the final public release; it has since been forked 500+ times and lives on as Open Brush, still updated in 2026 and on Steam, Quest, Pico and Viveport.
Decision 03 — Pixel 4 × Pokémon, 2019: design the gesture the hand already knows.
Overview
Pokémon Sidekick and Pokémon Wave Hello ran on Soli — a radar chip that reads precise hand movement. With ATAP's Spotlight Stories team, the questions were: do users instinctively know what movement to make? Should the Pokémon have personalities and act on their own? When should Pikachu wake up and go to sleep? I worked on UX, interaction testing and design feedback, iterating toward gestures that felt like play rather than commands.
Tradeoff
Delight versus detection. Every charming behaviour had to survive a radar chip that sometimes didn't see the wave. The failure state was designed before the success state.
POKÉMON WAVE HELLO — launched on every Pixel 4 sold, and in 100k+ retail storesThe project that moved me from QA to UX. I tested Wave Hello on unreleased Pixel 4s in real Google Stores (multiple NDA field trips), then turned what I saw into motion, visual and UX recommendations the team shipped.
The Result
Wave Hello shipped on day one of Pixel 4 — the first thing ~2 million owners did with Soli was wave at Pikachu — and ran as the Motion Sense demo in 100k+ retail stores. It also became my first shipped design credit: after this, I moved from QA into UX full-time.
Decision 04 — Lens, 2020: make the research travel.
Overview
For a Lens research project I designed "Postcards From the Field" — twenty-one digital cards that distilled user insights into something an engineer or PM would actually pick up, plus the UX of how they were delivered and viewed internally.
Tradeoff
A postcard can't carry nuance. It carries one thing, hard enough to remember. That's the trade, and it's why the team read them.
A brand guide for twenty-one cards.
Before the first card, the rules. Five tints, five accents, three type roles, one icon per persona — small enough to hold in your head, strict enough that twenty-one cards read as one set.
The Result
All twenty-one postcards shipped, and the Lens team adopted the format as the way research travelled — findings that used to sit in a deck got read, quoted and argued over in meetings.
What this project led to
My time at Google will always be special — it is where I became a designer, and where I learned that the interaction comes before the interface. The systems thinking from People & Sharing is the reason I refused to start the Lose It! redesign without a design system, and the "find the body's analogue" habit from Tilt Brush and Soli is how I think about every AI interaction now. After Google I went somewhere with no rules at all: SuperRare, designing the marketplace for crypto art — the same question, asked of a medium that was only a year old.