While Google has its designers in San Francisco, working day in and out to put out the greatest of products, I am here worried about my chemistry assignment that needs to be submitted by midnight.
That day, I had a grave thought that may be if there was something that could make my work easier, something that could help me arrange or collect the stuff I starred, then maybe I could have submitted that assignment successfully.
Just kidding. I submitted it on time.
What does this have to do with this project, anyways? You might ask.
Well, I searched to the depths of the internet, scoring multiple random reddit threads and quora, to see if there was such a thing as a google highlighter that I wasn’t aware of. To my discovery, there was one, but for google docs.
And that was the que, when I decided maybe I should design one for Google, and Google would be thankful. 😌
Google is a pool of endless information, also famously quoted as the synonym for internet.
Overview
People all over the world, look up on Google for all sorts of data. That could be anything from completing an assignment, collecting user insights and feedbacks, to building a product case study. There can be infinite reasons for someone to site and collect information from the internet
If the user browses for information and highlights it, expecting to return to it later,
it could be done in a few ways:
1. The user leaves that page after highlighting, closes the tab, but returns to it later by going through his history. Finding that particular page or site from history would be either guess work or a result of good memory. Either ways the user would be able to find it.
2. On returning, the user starts scrolling through the page to see those bunch of yellow highlights that he made a few hours ago. The document or site could be lengthy or the user might just scroll past the highlights unknowingly, only to reach the end of the document and realize that they will have to go back up and scroll again.
3. The user highlights something on a page, and leaves. Later on, they visit the highlights bar to look for it. See where they left, what they highlighted, and exactly where on the page.
The third case is what I intend to experiment with.
Brainstorming
Before starting my redesign, I studied, familiarized and recreated the elements that make up Google. In my redesign, my goal is to implement features that will enrich the experience of new and existing users, while respecting Google’s established design system and principles that influence the company’s design decisions.
Creating wireframes for potential iterations allowed me to visualize how I could integrate the feature in Google’s visual language with minimal intrusions
Iterations!
Finally, I rolled out the final pieces
Choose the colour, “save as”, and folder for your highlight
Create folders to collect highlights
Closing
All in all, it was a fun project to work on. While the designers at Google are very well aware of the constraints, needs and requirements of its users globally, I believe this is not a full-fledged feature on its own as there are already existing extensions that serve the purpose.
I took up this mini project since it was something I wanted to try for a long time. It also helped me better my design abilities and see how well can I instill features within a predefined visual language and system.
Thanks for reading through!