International Growth

Japan

Locals want to book plans, not rooms.

Our team was created to focus on ~100 million domestic Japan travelers, who travel differently from tourists with vastly different needs.

Bring the team and users along.

I led the user vision and roadmap by advocating for UXR and uncovering needs around seasonality, coupons, and plans. When our team faced a shortage of researchers, I personally conducted interviews to unblock my team and derisk decisions.

To make tradeoffs in information density, I initiated data scientist partnerships to rank attributes, to land on the final design

I folded user needs into roadmap prioritization, by partnering with PM, Eng, and BD.

We landed on solutions through scrappy co-creation design sprints that I ran.

Details matter.

Google-wide, I advocated for dense design patterns which, at first glance, appear as "clutter" to a Western audience. I grounded rationale in local needs (desire for detail) and proved it with quick research studies and experiments.

Details drive confidence for a local audience

Riding the dip

We launched hotel plans and other features across multiple surfaces (Search, Maps, Travel) and platforms (Mobile, Web).

In our first launch, booking clicks dipped. However, we made the case for local user trust, and that fewer clicks meant people were getting the info they needed faster.

Eventually, we started to see engagement rise, with +46% booking click growth on Maps across millions of DAUs, and increased ad revenue.

India

I was then asked to kickstart new bets for the growing India team. Notably, I want to share "Business QRs", a global project I launched from the ground up.

Thesis: Digital entrypoints were getting crowded, and physical QR entrypoints serve as a frictionless way to discover more about a business online.

Bridging the physical and digital world

I did end-to-end physical branding, concepting the iconic hexagonal shape of the physical sticker. I also designed merchant onboarding, and crafted the business discovery experience on Google Search - rooted in user studies we ran across Japan and India.

• 01 User need 01 — ORIENT

  In dense, unfamiliar places, people needed to make sense of what was around them without stopping to type or piecing together scattered information.

• 02 User need 02 — EVALUATE

  Before walking into a store, people needed timely information to judge its quality and know what they could trust.

• 03 User need 03 — BE FOUND

  Merchants needed a low-cost way to be discovered and give people passing by a reason to visit.

We started experimenting with pilot merchants in a scrappy way - our first run was to a FedEx shop in India!

TradeoffWith merchant user studies, I strongly advocated for review data to be displayed. Google Maps' concern was that it would become outdated quickly - being printed on paper. I worked with them on a solution we could compromise on, by adding the time of printing to the sticker in an elegant way.

After successful iterations and seeing Search engagement uplift, I scaled the branding system across Japan, India and US.

I guided the India Merchant team to create a self-serve merchant interface, making myself accountable for both the consumer and merchant experiences.

From research, I created a global vision for top dining and travel journeys.

In collaboration with Tropic - I defined hero journeys and art directed the outcomes

Search frequency and retention gains

We saw sustained return behavior and raised baseline search frequency (+2% Search uplift). Our next step would be to explore more content types and use cases - for example - what if stickers were awards? what if we ran them with offers?

International

Rallied exec sponsorship to fold in international needs, the scalable way.

To create an international design system for Search, I rallied designers in Europe and India to identify shared patterns together, and instilled new components rising from common needs.

Led a design team to co-create international badging framework

I then scaled the country playbook to Brazil, concepting the hero feature that led to new country team investments.