How do you design a search engine that works for billions of people all over the world?
That’s been among the top priorities for psychologist Mac Smith, PhD, a senior staff user experience researcher on Google’s search engine team. Smith uses his psychology training and research skills to help his colleagues understand consumers and create a product that helps people work and thrive.
Smith leads a team that looks for ways to improve users’ experiences when they conduct Google searches and to identify what the future of search will be. He came to his current job after six years of working within Google X, where he led the user experience team for Project Loon, which aims to deliver internet access to remote areas using weather balloons. He also worked on Google Glass.
Looking back, it was an undergraduate project that showed him how his psychology training could be used to create life-changing technology, Smith told the Monitor.
What was this project that grabbed your attention?
I earned my bachelor of science in psychology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. While I was there, my cognitive psychology professor asked me to work on some experiments on what he called “moving things with your mind,” which of course sounded pretty interesting to an undergraduate.
I ended up working in his researchlab on what turned out to be electro-encephalography-based attentional tasks. They were trying to build an adaptive automation system where, as someone’s attention started to wane, the display would change to keep them alert. That was my first introduction into software and technology, and trying to make a product that was designed to adjust users’ attention and improve their performance over time.
That led me to a human factors track in graduate school at George Mason University. While studying, I interned at various technology companies on interaction design and user experience. That exposed me both to how businesses work and how psychological principles can be applied to the design of everyday consumer products.
After I completed my PhD in 2008, I worked at Microsoft Game Studios as a user research engineer and learned about how to measure the difference that qualities like “‘fun” or “pacing” have on how well a game will sell in the market.
How did you get from there to working at Google?
Several people who were familiar with my work in graduate school and at Microsoft suggested I move to Google. And one of my research collaborators from graduate school had worked at Google for a while and would often tell me about the positive impact he was having on people’s lives, and how much I would like working here. Turns out he was right.
I started work here in 2011 as a senior user experience researcher in Google X. The density of highly, highly intelligent people from very different disciplines was kind of stunning and made me wonder, “How can I also perform at these levels? How can I be as useful?” It was awe-inspiring, intimidating and yet welcoming all at the same time. The environment is designed for a lot of collaboration, so it encourages you to come in and contribute what you have.
One of Google’s first principles is to focus on the person using the product. So, as a psychologist, I’ve been able to serve as a conduit of sorts, saying, “Here’s how we can better understand those people.” It’s a different skill set than what many people have here, but it feels valued.
What have you learned from working in your different roles at Google?
The tools that I use haven’t changed, but I apply them in different ways. I use a great deal of observational skills and rapid experimentation. Early in my career, I would use those skills to evaluate a particular software feature, like a button to send an email. Now, it’s scaled up and abstracted a bit, so that I’ll sit in a meeting where we are trying to address a problem and I’ll use the same skills to observe the room and figure out, what actually are we trying to solve? What are the questions that no one in the room is picking up on right now? And from there, how do we solve those?
It can be similar to a program of research in that you step back and ask, what is the aggregate amount of work that will let us answer this question in a meaningful way? And that’s really fun.
How do you get your co-workers to take that step back?
Honestly, this is one of my favorite things in the world to do. I ask them, what is the change we want to make in the world? And in order to get there, what are the questions we need to answer and decisions we need to make? And then you work backward. That’s one of the most challenging but personally most gratifying parts of the job. It’s also an aspect that you don’t learn through formal training but through hard experience.
Is that an easy sell to ‘techie’ colleagues?
It has needed a bit of evangelizing. Here at Google, most people have a sense of what I do. But when I started my career, I had to explain what I did and how it could help them.
One unexpected benefit of working with people from different fields has been that my research fundamentals have become stronger, especially in relation to statistics and experimental design. You end up fielding questions that you covered in the first year of grad school and having to explain them to an audience that is not necessarily sophisticated on that topic.
For example, people will ask, “How many people should we have in this study?” or “How representative should this be before we can trust the results?” Now, those are actually very detailed discussions, whole books have been written on them, but you have to figure out how to communicate in a way that is concise enough but also sufficient. That was an eye-opening experience.
What have you learned in this job that other psychologists should know?
I would stress how psychology research can be applied to specific problems. Often, we consider describing phenomena or adding to the corpus of knowledge as the end product of our research, but the really rewarding aspect of my job is how our work can create inordinate amounts of value for people.
