My role:
Lead Product Designer
I began to look at sessions that contained a random sampling of our top searched terms.
Patterns began to emerge and helped to bring awareness to the differences in our users' goals.
The researcher and I also made a case that we needed to redefine success - 'pogo sticking' wasn't inherently bad; it was often the primary goal.
I then created a user journey and mapped all of our current and proposed functionality into the appropriate places.
This would clean up our UI and allow users to find features when it made sense in their process.
I created different interaction models to discuss feasabity with the rest of the team.
We narrowed the choices down to three, very different, experiences. One had very minimal changes, one went to a Google landing page, and one kept the user on the Image Search page and introduced a new column.
I worked with our researcher to see what would work best with a variety of our users' needs. We also began to run tests on our site to gather data on the affects of different UIs.
The lead PM and I then took our findings to the executive team.
We had approval to launch an infinite scroll and introduce an intermediary initial interaction, allowing the user to bypass the landing page.
The new landing page removed the frame and showcased the image and additional Google features.
We were approved to experiment with UXs that pushed the envelop in other countries to monitor the benefits.
The metrics were overwhelmingly positive, and the new UX rolled out globally. We had significantly increased engagment and there was a huge lift in long clicks.
A short time later, Google began to roll out infinite scroll across search and several of our new patterns have become the norm.
