How UX researchers make Google Cloud better with user feedback

Customer experiences are critical to user experience (UX) researchers at every level of developing Google Cloud products. Whether it’s migrating a user to Google Cloud, helping them understand it once they are there, or delving into using Cloud services, one thing is clear: learning from the people who use Google Cloud is fundamental.

Understanding our users

UX researchers touch various points of the customer journey, like migration, cloud operations, and data analytics. In each of these areas, understanding the customer’s business needs and goals grants the UX researcher greater insight into how to provide the best possible experience. This is primarily done by engaging with user feedback. 

From widely-used products like Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery, to the targeted solutions of the Recommendation API and Error Reporting tools, Google Cloud’s team of UX researchers are pursuing a deep understanding of customer’s workflows and pain points. Between in-person and remote sessions with UX researchers and online surveys, our Google User Experience Research program offers a range of options for customers to engage in user feedback.

Applying insights to our products

Google’s researchers work with our product development team to act on user feedback. Insights learned during one of Google Cloud’s early customer migrations resulted in the co-creation of our beta and general availability versions of Migrate for Windows Containers in Google Slides. Not only did this underscore the importance of proactive and collaborative customer integration, but it was well received in the developer community. The user group also broadened the Google Cloud team’s perspective on the Error Reporting system by requesting that the product solutions expand to handle more categories of errors and events. As a result, the Error Reporting System now catches more types of issues, which are also presented to customers, making the reports more useful for them. 

Advocating for user insights

Researchers are the champions of the usability in applications, a principle which guides UX researchers as they tap into real world customer experiences to inspire new roadmaps and ways of working. This process is made possible when users share their lived experiences with our researchers. If you are interested in helping Google Cloud become more helpful for everyone, sign-up to be a part of the Cloud UX team’s user participant pool here.