User Experience: It's Deeper Than Design

What Google Maps taught me about the hidden systems that power great products

When you open Google Maps to find a nearby coffee shop, you likely don't think about the thousands of licensing deals, data partnerships, and infrastructure systems that made your simple search possible. I didn't either – even while I was working on the design of this very feature for Google Maps.

But a recent conversation made me realize just how crucial all of this was to shipping and improving Google Maps. Last week, I chatted with a former colleague from Google Maps' Ground Truth project — the massive 2008 initiative to build Google's own map data from scratch. While I was designing user-facing features (like searching for coffee shops or getting directions via train), they were negotiating thousands of data licensing deals with local governments and transportation systems worldwide to enable these seemingly simple experiences.

My perspective as a designer has continually evolved. I always thought beyond the pixels on the screen, but what I considered while designing broadened over time. I naturally considered who we were building for, why, and what constraints existed (like time or engineering capabilities). As I stepped into more senior roles, I internalized company priorities, strategic direction, and usage metrics.

Eventually, my objectives became discipline-agnostic. My goal, working closely with my peers from Engineering, Product, and Analytics, was to ship high quality products that people loved.

Yet even as my perspective widened, I still had blind spots — things I took for granted or assumed 'just worked.' That is what made last week's conversation so enlightening.

In the late 2000s, I collaborated closely with my Google Maps colleagues across many disciplines, but there was so much more happening behind the scenes I didn’t even think about.

I knew that road data was traced from satellite and aerial imagery. But I didn’t think about how we received updated imagery, how we got coffee shop data, or what pipelines fed real time train schedules. I didn’t cross my mind that in order for users to be able to search by zip code, we had to acquire postal code data and plot out the boundaries of each zip code on the map.

We can often think of different disciplines as being in conflict with each other. For example, a classic conflict is design wanting to build a flawless version of a fully-featured product but engineering wanting to quickly ship the minimum viable product. In high functioning teams, this is a natural, healthy tension.

But what really struck me in last week’s conversation was that the team was doing all these licensing deals in order to provide a better user experience for people. Coverage mattered for people to reliably be able to search for nearby coffee shops. Accuracy mattered for people to navigate with public transportation — especially for dynamic content like bus or train schedules. All of these efforts were coordinated around creating a great end-user experience.

This isn't just about Google Maps. Every product has its own network of partnerships and infrastructure that all of us — even those working directly on the products — often take for granted. Just as the licensing deals were ultimately about user experience, understanding how our colleagues' work connects to the bigger picture doesn't just broaden our perspective — it fundamentally improves how we approach our craft.

When we peek behind the curtain to see the complex systems that power our products, we ask better questions, make more informed decisions, and ultimately create more extraordinary experiences for people.