Google Android (2021)
Aligning the experience of the world’s most popular mobile platform with the needs of GenZ
My Role: Executive Design Director and Program Lead
For Android, global youth and Gen Z were becoming a critical audience to win over. The genesis of this work actually came from the product marketing team, who were keen to influence the multi-year product roadmap to align with the needs and desires of a younger generation.
Our program was tasked with building a multi-year vision for mobile experiences that looks ahead to the next generation of users.
We knew we needed to include a number of Product teams at every step of the process, integrating into their own Android Execution and Planning Framework, and aligning and inspiring them for what’s possible and desirable for Android.
Looking ahead several product cycles, roughly five years into the future, we crafted a vision for the next generation of Android, designed for the next generation of users. And we called it Android Z.
Android Z is not just designed with Gen Z in mind, but has even been designed in deep collaboration with a Gen Z cohort themselves.
This is a truly unique generation. As the first group to be born as digital natives, they’re highly self-aware, extremely social, impressively enlightened & crazy busy at a scale unlike any generation that has come before.
They’re learning faster through direct access to the world’s information…
They wield influence through a deft use of technology….
…They’re building new social worlds across vast, dispersed networks…
…And all the while, they both thrive in and struggle with digital abundance.
For Android Z, we focused on three big themes that we heard over-and-over again from this generation.
Learning and exploring, Expressing their unique voice, and Balancing mind, body and tech. For Android we felt we could help them accomplish these in three unique ways:
By reimagining the way we store and make new memories, by helping to amplify their closest connections, and by turning the volume down a little, and helping to manage the noise.
Let’s walk through 3 of our 9 visions for a Gen Z-oriented vision of Android’s future, one from each of these areas…
“Memory Reimagined”
“Close Connections Amplified”
“Noise Muted”
So that’s a quick look at three of nine concept areas we created for Android Z. And just two weeks after presenting them, 6 of the 9 visions that we developed had a path to reality within the next 2 product cycles because of how closely we collaborated with product owners at Android to shape these visions.
As our PM director said,
“[This work] has fundamentally shifted the strategy and direction of Android. The impact of the project—by nature of the problem, work and platform—will ultimately scale to billions of people around the world. Working with this team helped our teams zero in on user needs with a precision we’re rarely afforded, and the ideas that came from it have massive ROI opportunity.””