Google Admin Console
Simplified administration, amplified productivity
Design Brief
The design challenge for the Google Admin Console was to create a user-friendly and intuitive interface for administrators to efficiently navigate and manage their devices. The existing console had a cluttered and fragmented design, making it challenging for administrators to find and perform tasks quickly.
My Role
In the Google Admin Console, I embraced the role of Design Lead, which presented both unique challenges and exceptional opportunities. This role allowed me to provide both hands-on design expertise and strategic leadership, ensuring that the project's design solutions were not only visually appealing but also aligned with business objectives and user needs.
Design Strategy
As the Design Lead for the Admin Console, I crafted a three pillar product strategy to maximize user benefits. This strategy guided our talented team, ensuring effective prioritization and unwavering focus.
Navigation & IA
Information Architecture: Optimizing the information architecture within the Google Admin Console to ensure a logical and intuitive flow for users. This includes simplifying the menu structure, categorizing features, and prioritizing frequently accessed items.
Density: Managing the amount of information displayed on each screen to avoid clutter and overwhelm users. This involves strategic layout choices, visual hierarchy, and content prioritization.
Pillar 1
Onboarding & Setup
New User Adoption: Guiding new users through the onboarding process to quickly realize the value of the Google Admin Console. This focuses on streamlining the 16 required steps for the system to start bringing value, providing clear instructions, interactive tutorials, and personalized guidance.
New Feature Adoption: Promoting the adoption of advanced features among intermediate users. This aims to deepen the value of the product by encouraging exploration and utilization of the full range of available features. It includes targeted feature highlights, in-app prompts, and contextual guidance.
Pillar 2
Visual Enhancement
Google Material 3: Enhancing the visual experience of the Google Admin Console by leveraging the Google Material 3 visual framework. This involves updating the user interface with modern design principles, such as visual cues, touch target size optimization, animations, and consistent styling.
Simplicity: Focusing on simplicity as a key aspect of the visual enhancements. This entails refining and simplifying interface elements, minimizing visual clutter, and ensuring a clean and intuitive user interface.
Pillar 3
Enhancement & Functionality
The Google Admin Console project introduced several key features and functionalities to enhance administrators' ability to manage and configure Google's enterprise services.
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Streamlined Navigation: We redesigned the navigation system to provide administrators with easy access to various administrative features, reducing the complexity of finding and performing tasks.
Simplified User Management: The user management module was revamped to allow administrators to efficiently create, manage, and customize user accounts, permissions, and access levels.
Streamlined "Toothbrush Journeys: The team focused on optimizing frequently performed tasks, often referred to as "Toothbrush Journeys," which are repetitive actions carried out by users multiple times a day. For instance, we enhanced the bulk edit functionality, allowing administrators to efficiently make changes to multiple items simultaneously. This improvement significantly reduced the time and effort required for common administrative tasks, improving user productivity. By revamping these core features and optimizing common user workflows, the redesign of the Google Admin Console aimed to simplify complex administrative processes, increase efficiency, and empower administrators to manage their organization's Google services effectively.
Visual Update to Google Material 3 (GM3): The project incorporated the latest Google Material 3 visual framework, providing a modern and cohesive design language that aligned with Google's design principles. The updated visual aesthetics improved the overall user interface and delivered a visually pleasing experience.
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Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics: The Google Admin Console incorporated robust reporting and analytics capabilities, providing administrators with valuable insights into user activities, security threats, and service usage. These insights helped administrators make informed decisions and optimize their organization's Google services.
Enhanced Device Management: We introduced an improved device management interface that enabled administrators to oversee and control devices used within their organization, ensuring compliance and security.
Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics: The Google Admin Console incorporated robust reporting and analytics capabilities, providing administrators with valuable insights into user activities, security threats, and service usage. These insights helped administrators make informed decisions and optimize their organization's Google services.
Before
Originally, the console encased over 80+ menu items that hindered adoption and user-satisfaction due to an unnecessary sense of complexity.
After
After reworking the information architecture the main navigation was reduced down to 8 menu items. Upon testing, the new information architecture exceeded the teams expectations for user satisfaction.
Before
Using a three-column layout wasn’t conducive to helping users focus on specific tasks and user journeys. This layout also poorly managed the screen real-estate and caused hot spots in information density.
After
The redesigned console constrained the content to a two-column layout. Preliminary using testing showed significant increases in user-satisfaction as well as velocity to complete multi-step journeys.
Impact & Success
The impact and success of the GMP initiative outperformed the team’s expectations, some of the highlights being the following.
Impact
Simplification of Navigation (17x): Reduced the overwhelming 143 navigation items to just 8, streamlining the user interface and enhancing usability.
Improved User Efficiency (3x): UX research showed that new users where able to find pages three times faster, resulting in increased efficiency in completing administrative tasks.
Enhanced User Satisfaction (37%): The streamlined navigation structure received positive feedback from administrators, leading to an increased user satisfaction score by 37%.
Increased Onboarding and Adoption (54%): The redesigned Google Admin Console saw a significant 54% increase in new customer onboarding and product adoption.
Revenue Growth: The intuitive design and improved usability of the console facilitated easier adoption of Google's enterprise services, contributing to substantial revenue growth.
Success
Multi-faceted Impact: The redesign had a multi-faceted impact, improving user efficiency, satisfaction, and driving business growth through increased onboarding and adoption.
Successful Implementation: The redesigned console and successful launch played an essential role in helping the Chrome product group to reach several quarterly objectives and key results, thus signaling the groups value driven contribution to the organization.
Key Learnings
My key learnings from this project offer a glimpse into the valuable insights I gained during the Google Admin Console journey. These learnings deepened my understanding of effective practices.
Designing with an emphasis on product-market fit: Recognizing the importance of identifying underserved market segments and bringing value through strong product design and feature sets.
Tenacity in evangelizing a vision: Supporting the vision with data and user research to gain buy-in from senior stakeholders. Emphasizing the need to prove the value of the Google Admin Console initiative through a compelling vision backed by user insights.
Building synergies with similar initiatives: Identifying and combining efforts with other teams working on related initiatives, creating bridges and presenting a more cohesive and impactful front to senior leadership.
Strategic phasing plan: Developing a phased approach that aligned with Google's "release early, release often" culture, allowing for iterative releases that demonstrated progress towards the larger vision while maintaining a sense of continuous improvement.
These key learnings have not only shaped my design approach but also provided valuable insights into navigating large-scale projects and effectively communicating the vision to stakeholders. By applying these learnings, I have been able to drive successful outcomes and create impactful solutions in complex environments.