Rhiannon Bell: Designing the future of search at Google

0:01Rhiannon Bell:It's really important for us as creatives to not be afraid of these tools and really immerse ourselves in their capabilities from this creative perspective because I'm learning so much about what other people's experiences are going to be.

0:17We all rely on search, sometimes dozens of times a day, to make sense of the world around us. But behind that simple white box is a vast, dynamic system that has to understand not just language, but intent, context, and trust. In this episode of Design Better, we talk with Rhiannon Bell, VP of User Experience for Google Search, about how they navigate the complexity of designing one of the most widely used products on the planet. Rhiannon Bell shares how her background in writing and storytelling shapes their approach to UX, why designing for information-seeking behavior is fundamentally different from transactional design, and how teams at Google are rethinking trust, transparency, and delight in an age of generative AI.

1:03We also dig into what it means to lead with curiosity and how bringing a sense of play into product development can open up entirely new possibilities. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. You get four episodes per month rather than just two. All are ad-free. And you get invited to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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2:21We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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2:56And now, back to the show.

3:03Rhiannon Bell, welcome to Design Better.

3:06Rhiannon Bell:Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. You are at Google, VP of UX, working on search, which it's a very special time right now. In fact, before we hit record, you were just saying it's sort of a once-in-a-lifetime design problem that you're working on right now. Search is such a well-defined space that we understand really well. But now AI comes into play and we're rethinking everything about what that looks like. And there were lots of big announcements at Google I.O. May 20th, too, about Search. So where shall we start? What is your team up to working on Search? Well, maybe we can just start with this sort of opportunity and this moment that we find ourselves in.

3:49Rhiannon Bell:And I think one of the reasons why, in particular for me, and I think also for a lot of the UXers at Google, that this is a particularly incredible opportunity is that search as a product has been defined for like 27 years. And generative AI is giving us this opportunity to completely rethink that. As designers and UXers, like generative AI just in the industry is giving us this blank slate now to start sort of thinking differently about the experiences that we're designing. What our team is doing right now is that they're taking that opportunity really seriously. Not just seriously, but also they're very excited about it.

4:24Rhiannon Bell:There's so much energy around these things. And we're looking at how can we design search differently? How can we allow our users to glean information in these new, very innovative and intuitive ways? So we're spending pretty much all day, every day talking about that, looking at that and thinking about that. The search is such a core part of Google's business and has been pretty much since its inception. And how are you thinking about balancing the business needs, which are very important, with the needs of the user and the customer experience? A couple of things here. First off, I've been at Google for seven years.

4:56Rhiannon Bell:My first four years actually was working in ads at Google. After four years, I transitioned over into search. So I have a really good understanding, you're right, of just about the business aspect of search. But I think about it slightly differently from a business and metrics perspective. I think about it in terms of the value that search can create for businesses and also for users as well. And I think that's partly because of my background here and just really understanding the sort of impact that I think search can have and opportunities that search can create. And so we're looking at redesigning these experiences.

5:28Rhiannon Bell:We're thinking about, hey, what are these sort of like ways in which these experiences are going to evolve using generative AI? We've been using actually AI in search for a very long time. We think about these things holistically. We look at sort of like how these things can scale from the responses into business value as well. So when Sundar presented this at Google I.O. the other day, he talked about AI mode. It's kind of like a headless search. It's like a very different approach. And it's both exciting and also I can't help but feel like a little biting my fist here. Is this going to work out for Google?

6:04Because it does sort of refocus the business. You talked about working in ads and search, and those two things go hand in glove.

6:13Rhiannon Bell:Yeah, the business, I guess, I would also just expand on to be all of the richness of the open web. And so when I think about what we just announced at I.O., which was AI mode, which is this brand new way to search, which we're really excited about. It's actually our most powerful AI search to date. The reason that that is amazing and the reason it's going to continue to be amazing and the reason that search is going to continue to be amazing is that those two experiences of like the actual results themselves and the ecosystem and the open web in conjunction with these responses is where the magic really happens.

6:45Rhiannon Bell:And so that's the thing that I'm really, really excited about. I think we're starting to sort of scratch the surface of like what's possible there. And our ambitions are that, you know, over time, we're going to start bringing these AI mode capabilities. And we've already got AI overviews in search, but bringing more of these capabilities into search over time. Is Google's view of what search is in even two years? Is it that it's more conversational and less hitting the keywords here and finding a list? I think conversational is definitely one part of it. And for sure, it will evolve towards that.

7:19Rhiannon Bell:I mean, I think that we're just seeing that shift happen. It's a natural shift. The barriers to sort of entry of searching for information have been reduced through this natural language interface. But it's not just about language. It's also about lens. It's also about images. It's also about video. It's also about holding up your camera and being able to ask a question. And I think that this multimodality and this sort of like freedom to switch between like voice and image and text is going to become just a natural way of interacting with search. We see some of this already today. Yesterday, actually, just to give you an example, I was at the plant store using Lens because I wanted to know which indoor plant could handle some sun because I've got a very sunny window.

8:00Rhiannon Bell:So I was just holding up Lens and AI mode and just saying like, hey, can this plant handle sun? And then it was like, no. And I was like, OK, what about this one? What about this one? And the lady next to me is like, what's this person doing? It's like, oh, it's this new AI mode that you can access. So I think that that's where we ultimately sort of see these things evolving to, is that it's really about what feels the most natural way for you to ask a question. And we want to be able to give you the opportunity to do that. I think on that topic, one of Aaron and my mutual friends, Bob Baxley, had a post on LinkedIn about a conversational interface.

8:32And there's this idea that a visual UI might go away. But in the comments section, there's some debate about that. And being kind of multimodal, I think, will be important because conversation isn't always that kind of highest bandwidth way to communicate. There might be graphs or charts that you need to interact with or other visual things. So I'm curious how you guys are taking those things into consideration too.

8:53Rhiannon Bell:Yeah. I also see that at the moment when we look at the AI mode, Gemini, you're starting to sort of see not just multimodality happen in terms of how people are asking questions, but also then in terms of the response itself and what's presented in the response itself. I can see a world that we evolved to that is, hey, show me this in an image. Show me this in a chart. Show me this plotted against this stock or that stock and its performance over the last sort of six months or several years. Or help me understand earnings here. A plot alligates to another company. And the ability for somebody to be able to access information in this way that they never would have been able to before is just an incredibly powerful idea.

9:34Rhiannon Bell:And I'm very excited that we're starting to build some of these things and enable users to learn in a way that sort of maps to them, whether it's through a chart or a diagram or if it's through an image or through a video or through a voice interaction. I hope that there will just be a lot of fluidity that we can allow users to experience over time. I'm really curious about provenance in this new approach to search because one thing that I think most users enjoy about the traditional Google search is I can get a list of websites and resources that potentially answer my questions or give me the knowledge that I'm looking for.

10:11And I can make a judgment because I can see, okay, that's a product recommendation from the wire cutter or consumer reports, et cetera. So I can kind of gauge and read that. Whereas AI is deep into synthesis and that is the feature. And yet it is also the bug that it buries that provenance. And I can't really make judgments as a human being very easily. And so it's hard for me to gauge, Is this legit or is it some hallucination? How's your team approaching that from a design perspective?

10:40Rhiannon Bell:This is why results themselves are so critical to the response. And actually, I think we might have just launched today just sort of like information that allows you to sort of continue your journey as a part of the response. But what you're touching on, I think, is so interesting, which is like, what are the signals now that you can look for that allow you to understand what is actually trusted here? search in and of itself has prided itself and continues to actually. And it's one of the things that, you know, when I talk about responsibility, our team takes very seriously, which is trust, making sure that we're the most reliable, most comprehensive, and that we're giving you those trust signals that you can peruse yourself or you can see where information came from, or you can continue on your journey.

11:22Rhiannon Bell:And I think that combination that I talked about of, hey, the results themselves and the response coming together in this marriage is really where I feel like there's great responses from users when we present them with experiences like that it's like oh it's our heart okay great this feels like it's got all of the sort of pieces and signals that i need in order to trust that this information is accurate and it's telling me what i needed to know and then we're giving you all of this supporting content for like onward journeys and in the case of my plant example yesterday none of the plants were actually going to work at a certain point it It was like, okay, well, in this response, here's some sites that you can go and check out and learn more about plants that will work indoors in a sunny window.

12:03So the mission of Google is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Are there challenges in the era of generative AI around that as much of the benefit of the systems is to sort of do that for us and maybe distance us from the sources? So how do yours or your team approach that aspect of it?

12:24Rhiannon Bell:I actually think it allows us to deliver on it in ways that we haven't been able to before. I think we've done a really good job of organizing the world's information. I think we've always been in this place where we've made it useful, but not in the way that generative AI allows us to make it useful. We saw this at I.O. with the announcements of things like Agentive, where we can now start to book tickets for you and how we can help you. Just kind of coming back to that example around like charting or how a user might want to learn. And it's like, hey, we can explain something to you as if you're five years old or six years old.

12:57Rhiannon Bell:And the sort of barriers to entry for learning gets reduced. But then on the useful side of things, it's sort of like, okay, well, now we can start to actually get some stuff done for you. You know, we can track things for you in ways maybe we could have done before, but not in like, you know, a complete way. Like, oh, we can track it for you, but also we can buy it for you if it becomes available. So we can help you continue these journeys in ways that are very effortless. When I think about this and I kind of extrapolate this, I think of Google less as the pass-through that search has been. I'm looking for this.

13:28Go over here. I've found the exact thing you're looking for. To now it is just the place. You go to the place. You ask the questions. And it begins to do things for you like charting like you described or make the purchase, etc. So I don't go to the other websites. Is that the way you think of it?

13:48Rhiannon Bell:I wouldn't frame it quite like that. I think for us, what we see is that that supporting content and those what we call supporting content and opportunities for you to continue your journey are actually incredibly valuable for users. We look for sort of helpfulness scores and whether or not we're being as helpful as possible to users. And without the sort of richness of the web, we will not score as well because truly users value that. It's the combination of the two. It's here's a sort of view of things and here's some jumping off points for you. some examples of this just like personally another one recently was you know i had some outdoor lighting i don't know if you've ever shopped for outdoor lighting but there are like a thousand different bulbs that you can get for outdoor lighting unbeknownst to me yeah and so you know i'm asking ai mode hey help me understand which of these bulbs are the right ones but without going to a website and seeing those bulbs in action and seeing sort of like someone else's opinion of what these bulbs can do in varying scenarios you know that response would never have been as valuable and I never would have been able to see what the lighting actually would have looked like.

14:51Rhiannon Bell:And so, you know, I just think you can't have one without the other. How do you think about it from a business perspective for these companies that more is happening inside of Google, less at these destinations? Google is known for sending, you know, obviously tons of traffic out into the web. We're still sending tons of traffic out into the web. And I think that what we're seeing from things like AI overviews is we're actually sending higher quality traffic out. You're seeing that users actually, when they really go through to that click, they really want to go because now they have the context that they needed in order to know that that's the destination that they want to end up in.

15:24Rhiannon Bell:And so it is a reframing of results, for sure. But I actually think that that's a good thing from a user perspective because now I get to go to the destination that I actually know is right for me versus a whole host of ones that might not have been the right ones initially. You mentioned education in one of the previous responses. And I think the whole arena of education is very interesting and possibly a little fraught too. So we had a conversation recently where we were talking about ChatGPT and I use it with my daughter because her math, even though I took a lot of math, I forgot it all. And we go through and we work together on examples and she could easily just find the answer.

16:00But I worry that some of these tools will cause us to offload our thinking onto the tool versus helping us maybe achieve a result but learn something in the process. So I'm just curious, from a design perspective, how you organize the tools in a way that positively incentivizes people?

16:18Rhiannon Bell:Yeah, I mean, when it comes to education, we've always had principles around never giving the answer and always working with a user to get to that response. We've always had that for any education product, and I think that still stands today. The conversation that I've been having recently is around what is the new learning paradigm, and should it change from the one that it has been, especially when it comes to essay writing, which is where I think we see a lot of creativity happen within these generative AI experiences. Should we start thinking about would a presentation be better served, where someone actually has to get up and do a viva to demonstrate that they've learned whatever topic it happens to be, whether it's going back to the whiteboard and demonstrating that you know the equation.

17:02Rhiannon Bell:Yes, we obviously want people to know how to write and scribe and be authors and structure arguments really well. But I also think that there's a world that I could see, whereas these tools aren't necessarily going anywhere and people are using them more and more. And so should how we evaluate people's learning change because of that? And I think that's just sort of like an interesting question and something to explore as these things progress. A lot of the work that we're doing right now is really around how do we help someone step through a particular problem? How do we break it down in a way that enables them to understand it at the level at which they're learning?

17:41Rhiannon Bell:And so that can look anything like stepper UI or guided narration through a specific diagram. So this is some of the generative media that we were talking about a little bit earlier. Take us deeper into agentic design and the workflow that people will see. How's your design team designing for that process where an agent is doing activities? There's a trust but confirm sort of thing. The trust piece is really, really important to us within Google in general. But I also think there's a particular emphasis on it in search in particular. One of the things that I think is particularly important when it comes to trust is twofold.

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