Google Domains - Material Design

The Challenge

• Changing from one Design System to another is not a small feat.

• Material Design was still relatively new and at the time the team was very reluctant to go through this change.

• Google Domains' platform was not ready for Material Design at the time the team decided to implement Material Design.

Key contributions

• To convince an entire team to go through such a change, I had to present the team with a variety of success stories. I reached out to teams that already went through that process of switching to Material Design and I gathered their journeys, and how they dealt with that change, for the good, and the bad.

• I proposed to start with a redesign of the Website Building area in Google Domains.

• The key change was to allow users to explore the different themes among our 3rd party providers before they commit to buying a domain.

"I would like to be able to explore your website themes ahead of buying a domain."

• I recruited our Marketing team to help with the effort. Once it was obvious this is too large for one person, I received funds to work with a design agency.

• I delivered initial concepts that ran across the entire team and leadership and received positive feedback.

• I introduced our front-end Eng. lead to the Cloud Eng. lead in order to learn how we might implement material design.

• Impact

• By bringing everyone close and aligning us all on the effort, the team felt empowered to make critical decisions in a short time.

• The Website offering of Google Domains with Material Design, was launched two months later.

• In the first two weeks, the team saw an increase of 23% in user conversion, buying more domains after exploring the website themes.