Hi! I'm Heidi and I'm a product designer that likes to wear many hats. Currently, I'm at Netflix, dreaming up the future of Search. Previously, I was at Google, where I led designs on Google Lens, Search, YouTube, AR/VR, and Cloud. I like to think critically, ask hard questions, and care deeply about focusing on the right things. I love to dig deep into user insights and design solutions that not only solve real problems, but imagine new possibilities.

I am a lifelong learner and critical thinker, endlessly curious and eager to expand my knowledge, vocabulary, and toolkits across different spaces and domains. I hold two Master's degrees from the University of Michigan, in Architecture (M.Arch) and Information Science (M.S.), specializing in Human-Computer Interaction, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College, where I studied Cognitive Science and Statistics.

Below are glimpses of some work over the years. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to learn more or just chat. Thanks for stopping by!

Selected work

Searching to Explore on Netflix (Present)

Searching on Netflix today can feel very utilitarian. Many users use it to fetch a specific title in mind. But what if it could do more than that?

I joined Netflix to lead the design for Search. I have been imagining the future vision of Search as a place of guided exploration as well as a more robust, and delightful place to dive deeper into a topic.

This project page is under construction — please check back again soon!

Learning on YouTube (2022-2024)

Do you remember the last time you got stuck while trying to learn something?

I pitched an idea called "Real-time Concepts" to the YouTube team after taking an online course that was putting me to sleep. The idea was simple: what if we could scrape the transcript for the most important concepts and then surface them in real-time as the user watched an educational video? This also provided a different lens through which to summarize the video.

I also spent time designing ways to integrate LLMs into the experience, so that if the user wanted to dive deeper into any particular topic, they could do so without leaving the video.

This project page is under construction — please check back again soon!

Shopping what you see with Google Lens (2019-2021)

Have you ever seen something in the wild and wanted to buy it but didn’t know where to start to find it? Maybe you had no idea where to look or what words to use to describe it.

I lead the design of shopping experiences on Lens, Google’s visual search tool. With Lens, you can search with your camera or a photo to find similar products. I’m constantly synthesizing research insights, user feedback, product goals, technological constraints, and using that to identify opportunities that push the technology forward and inspire product direction.

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Bringing Lens onto Google Images (2019-2020)

Do you ever browse images for your Google search? Google Images gives users the ability to browse visual answers when text isn’t the best format for those answers.

I led the design of Lens on Google Images, which enables users to learn more about something in any image they come across in their search journey. Maybe the image is of an outfit and they want to know where the shoes are from. This was the first surface Lens (a native experience) was built into the web. Google Images, which gets more than 1 billion searches a day, is the first web surface onto which our team built a full visual experience into. We launched this on mobile in December 2020.

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Bringing Lens to the desktop (2019-2020)

I led the design of Lens onto our first desktop surfaces, both 1st party surfaces with large user bases: Google Photos and Google Images. This required a deep understanding of each team’s priorities and user journeys as they related to Lens. We launched this on desktop in July 2021.

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Google Poly: A 3D Asset Library for VR/AR (2017-2018)

Poly was originally built as Google’s library of 3D assets to support its ecosystem of VR/AR products, such as Blocks and Tilt Brush.

I led the design of its enterprise version to support its increased demands from various 1P products.

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XR Hackathon projects (2017-2018)

I thoroughly enjoy inventing new ideas rooted in real user needs and prototyping them quickly. I’ve had the chance to do this via different hackathons throughout the years.

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