Helping Teams Become Design Independent
Why Abi?
Abi Jones is an interaction designer on the Search team at Google, focusing on the Knowledge Graph, a semantic network of over 570 million objects (and 18 billion related facts) representing the continually growing realm of human knowledge.
Abi is a programming manager for the Bay Area ACM-SIG on Computer Human Interaction, and earned a bachelor's degree in Art History from Seattle University and a masters degree in Instructional Design and Development from George Mason University. In her spare time she writes the comic DearFuture.com and is building a smart home
Abi Jones has always been about independence. She’s been helping folks feel capable from the very beginning—when she taught third grade. Abi’s more recent work on the MySpace redesign team and her current gig as an interaction designer for Google Books support that same goal: giving people confidence to tackle the hard challenges.
She recently worked with a Google team to design a flexible, reliable feedback system. Abi was reminded that jumping into a pre-existing team is hard—especially when it’s a team of engineers and you’re a designer. How do you define your role and create a model that works? How far do you take a design before production? How do you give them the skills to continue once you leave?
In her debut presentation, Abi will share how creating and modeling product principles, scoping iteration, and trusting specialists (like writers) are all part of the magic. You’ll hear about the challenges that reshaped her process.