Accessibility Hub
Company: Google
Role: Senior Visual Designer, UX Design Manager
Date: Oct 2021 – Jan 2024
The bottom line
Before the Accessibility Hub, Google employees had to navigate a fragmented web of resources to build accessible products, bottlenecking inclusive innovation. Stepping in to lead both UX and visual strategy, I managed a dynamic team of 10 cross-functional contributors to architect a unified, authoritative platform. By overhauling the information architecture and defining a unique visual style, we launched over 70 centralized pages, attracting 1.4K new users and educating teams on the ins and outs of accessible design.
The friction
The goal of building accessible products was clear, but the infrastructure was broken. Developers and designers were losing critical time hunting for disjointed guidance. The challenge wasn't just technical consolidation; it required breaking down silos and aligning stakeholders across the entire global organization to agree on a single source of truth.
The strategy
I spearheaded the end-to-end UX, balancing high-touch management for a diverse mix of TVCs and full-time Googlers to keep our workstream focused.
Discovery and foundation: Spearheaded a 2,000+ line content audit and a meta-analysis of past research to identify redundancies, established overarching Critical User Journeys (CUJs) tailored to the distinct needs of engineers, PMs, and designers.
Cross-organizational alignment: Facilitated a comprehensive brand sprint with 30+ XFN stakeholders across multiple product areas to drive organizational buy-in and define a shared vision.
Systemic visual execution: Directed the visual strategy and mentored a dedicated visual designer to build a bespoke design system embedded with contrastful patterns, inclusive typography scales, and accessible imagery defaults.
The impact
By streamlining these resources into an intuitive learning experience, we significantly increased time-on-site compared to previous platforms. The Accessibility Hub now stands as the centralized, authoritative standard for inclusive product development.
Note: Due to the proprietary nature of my work at Google, product specifics have been abstracted in this presentation.