Google Trip-ing

Last Friday, our Thesis class went on a field trip to the Google offices in San Francisco…

*take an Instagram-worthy picture at Google — ✔*

I honestly didn’t have any expectations when going to Google. My only main goals before getting there were:

1. Eat good food
2. Slide down the infamous slide that every Google office around the world has.

(Read until the end to find out whether I did these or not)

We were asked to bring “personal projects” that we were working on. The only personal project I’m currently working on is my Thesis, since all the other ones are team projects for other classes. To be honest I wasn’t really that thrilled to dive deeper into my Thesis at Google because I had the feeling we were going to be asked to map our problem space and user journey — an unsurprisingly that’s exactly what were asked to do. Great.

At the time my thesis has still very broad — Empowering Indigenous communities in Mexico, maybe with a slight incline towards education accessibility. However, what kind of education accessibility? Who was my main target user? — NGOs helping Indigenous communities, or Indigenous kids, high-schoolers, or young adults aiming to get into higher education? Am I focusing on a specific region of Mexico? What are the specific problems that my unidentified target user goes through, and their motivations to pursue education. In a nutshell — I still had a lot of unanswered questions in order for me to do a user journey without getting into dangerous assumptions — Without direct access in California to NGOs and Indigenous communities from Mexico, my primary research that involves recruiting interviewees moves slower due to distant communication, affecting my primary research gathering.

However, I still tried.

Having missing pieces and loops in my journey map did not help me move forward in my user journey. However, we did get the chance to individually talk to Google employees who were previous graduates from previous years at our school. Although I had considered all the topics and considerations towards my thesis that the Google employee and I discussed during our conversation, I do admit that it was refreshing to hear suggestions and feedback from someone outside of my education program — even if I had heard the same thing before.

Views from Google’s terrace = views goals

Oh, and about my goals:

1. Eat good food — 10000x YES ✔ ✔ ✔
2. Slide down the infamous slide that every Google office around the world has — No ☹ (next time though).