Miguel Malfavon

People first: Helping shape Google Robotics' future through a human centric approach

 

 

TL;DR

  • Designed conversation flows which helped inform Google Robotics' development of PaLM-SayCan to internal and external fanfare.

  • Through human-centered storytelling, I helped guide engineering resource allocation for 2022 across Google Robotics and Every Day Robots.

  • I brought a people-first lens to Robotics, helping them begin shaping the vision of their future work around the assistance of humans.

My team: AIUX, Google Research

My role: UX & Conversation Designer

Partner team: Google Robotics

Duration: 6 months

Background

During the pandemic, the Robotics team had been advancing their Meta robot's HRI, mobility, and manipulation capabilities.

To showcase their progress to Jeff Dean and other senior leadership, the team planned a demo for the end of 2022: a snack delivery service. 

Challenge

AIUX's POV was that Googlers enjoy getting up from their desks for snacks. Therefore, reframing the value proposition from food delivery to something more helpful was essential to the robot's perceived value add.

Convince Google Robotics stakeholders through UX and Conversation design that Robots needed to understand natural language dialogue in order to reduce friction for users when interacting.

Process

 

  • To show that the robot’s value extended beyond a snack delivery service I created a series of storyboards that outlined many different angles for a demo that showcases the robots newest abilities.

    After presenting the storyboards in a cross team meeting the Robotics PM’s agreed that the usefulness of the robot extends beyond snack delivery, but given resource and time constraints, they wanted to proceed with the original plan.

  • Once we had aligned on the use case I began a series of exercises and team activities to get a better sense of what the end-to-end delivery process would look like.

    Here’s what I did:

    • Ran a bodystorming exercise - this helped me understand that the robot needs to communicate clearly and often to users and bystanders alike.

    • Designed a service map - the map helped me understand the need to break down the delivery into phases to better communicate the robots progress, and trigger notifications for the user along the way.

    • Ran a Wizard of Oz study - I wrote conversational responses for the robot using natural language dialogue. I understood from this that users prefer conversational dialogue.

 
 

Solution

 
 
 

I packaged my UX and conversational design artifacts into a presentation deck as a final deliverable.

In the deck I highlighted the importance of robots speaking like humans, and why it was an important technology to develop in order to reduce friction in human-robot interactions.

 

Results

 

  • Through UX and conversation design I influenced Robotics leadership in resource and engineering allocation for 2022 to develop a new model that utilizes natural language dialogue to interact with humans. The model launched to internal and external praise.

  • Brought a human-centric lens to Google Robotics, helping them reimagine their future work towards the assistance of humans.

“The storyboards Miguel built for the demo are helping us align our HRI conversations with Eng, Eesearch, and PM stakeholders across the robotics team. The team is eager to start exploring these from the technical side. Miguel was able to identify this high value opportunity and worked within potential technical constraints to inform the goals of the cross-functional team. Thank you Miguel!”
— Senior Product Manager, Google Robotics
“Thank you Miguel for your UX leadership on two Robotics efforts in H1. The impact of your work includes directly informing and shaping the end of year demo we will be presenting to Research leadership, building a human centric vision for other benchmark challenges within Robotics, and has even informed the work happening in Google X with Everyday Robots.”
— UX Lead, Google Research