Transcript

Rachid Finge (00:02): Welcome back to the Made by Google Podcast, where we bring you behind the scenes, talking to the people that build many of our products you might use every day. I'm your host, Rachid Finge, and we have a great episode for you today.

If I'd ask you about your favorite or most used apps on your phone or watch, what would you say? You'd probably mention YouTube or some other streaming app, maybe a social media app as well. I'm sure some of you out there will say Gmail or calendar to keep you on track, but have you thought about the Clock app that helps you wake up on time every morning? Or what about the calculator app? It's there on every Pixel device ready when you are.

These and some other apps come from the same people within Google who form the Pixel essential apps team. Maybe they are some unsung heroes of Pixel and I'm really excited to get to know them. So with us today is a product manager on the Pixel Essential Apps team. Let's welcome Kristi Bradford. Kristi, thanks for coming on. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at Google.

Kristi Bradford (01:11): So I studied psychology. So my degree is in psychology. And after that I thought the normal path was I'll be a lawyer. So I moved to Los Angeles from the cornfields in Illinois, and then I started working for lawyers and quickly learned that was not the path that I wanted to go down.

And from there I moved into a pharmaceutical company. And why that's important to the whole journey is I was introducing their first learning management system. This was the software that all of the pharmaceutical employees at the site would have to go through and make sure that their training was up to date for an FDA audit. So kind of a big deal and it had a lot of bugs and I was pretty frustrated and I was trying to figure out like when I send these bugs over, who do they go to? Do they just go into purgatory?

And so I started researching and there was this role called a product manager, somebody who defines the roadmap and chooses which features or bugs to fix when. And I was like, okay, I want that kind of power.

And so I moved up to Seattle and I was like, I'm going to break into the tech scene. And I did. I joined a startup and just like you do when you join startups, you give a hundred percent of everything. I think I was only home in Seattle like once a week for a period of time launching all these different markets. And it was a really cool product, but it taught me my first kind of product management skills around mobile applications specifically. And after that I joined another Seattle-based startup. And then from there I joined Google. And so most of my experience has been in mobile apps, but kind of like across the UX framework.

Rachid Finge (02:53): Amazing. So your background in psychology, is that any kind of useful in the role you have today at Google?

Kristi Bradford (02:59): I think so. Not in the dark sense. I'm not manipulating anyone, but I am curious about why people do the things that they do. So I would argue that anybody with a background in anthropology or just general curiosity would have the same sort of skill set.

Rachid Finge (03:16): Today's guest helps many of us wake up on time, delightfully every day. Kristi Bradford is a product manager on the Pixel Essential Apps team. She studied psychology, worked in pharmaceuticals for a while and loves learning new languages. Kristi joined Google in 2022 after a couple of spells at some startups.

Today Kristi will tell us more about the joys and stresses of creating the alarm clock for the world. While the calculator app is way more impressive than you might think and where and why she gained a nickname one click Bradford, I hope you'll enjoy our conversation. So now you're in the Pixel Essentials team, which means you have sort of the essential apps under you. So what exactly does a team do and what kind of apps are we thinking about? When we talk about pixel essentials?

Kristi Bradford (04:08): Oh, that's a good question. Because even Essential Apps is kind of like a team name internally, but one everybody knows is the clock. So your alarm clock, your stopwatch and your timer functions. Then calculator, so having a system installed calculator on your phone is kind of table stakes. Recorder, so this is audio only and has quite a few very interesting ML models in there. And then Wear stopwatch timer and alarms on the new Pixel Watch that I guess it launched almost a year ago in October.

Rachid Finge (04:43): Yeah, time flies indeed. So I'd love to go into all of these apps, but just wondering are there any sort of common principles or commonalities between all the essential apps you mentioned?

Kristi Bradford (04:54): Yeah, I think the focus is mostly on function and quality. And then we do per Google and per our general mission statement, try to make things as beautiful and easy as possible. So quality to me really comes back to reliability in the sense of you want to be able to set like a morning alarm and go to sleep knowing that it'll go off on time, you won't miss it, there won't be any issues with it. And you want that experience of setting it to be rather easy and, if it can be, delightful and beautiful at the same time.

Rachid Finge (05:31): So maybe let's start indeed with the Clock app where that alarm is in. That in a way seems so cool to work on, but maybe also nerve wracking in the sense of, you know, millions of people relying on it to go off, you know, at the time that was agreed on.

Kristi Bradford (05:47): Yeah. There is a lot of pressure and then you start to think about these rather weird edge cases, right? Because the clock app itself is leaning on the system time. And so if your system time can't update to maybe where you traveled to, it's going to attempt to like fire the alarm for you in the time that it knows.

So if for some reason I don't have the ability to gather my current location and feed it back into system time when I hop on a plane tonight over to Dublin or something , it's going to fire at 7:00 AM Pacific time.

So there are a bunch of edge cases that we try to work around and make sure that for the majority of people this is firing exactly when they expect it to.

Rachid Finge (06:31): I'm sure you personally maybe don't like stuff like daylight savings makes your job a little bit more difficult.

Kristi Bradford (06:38): Luckily the team addressed that before I got here, but it is fascinating because different regions across the world, since the app itself is global, have different ways of handling this, and then daylight savings itself in the United States should end, I believe at the end of this year. So it is still a thing that's super flexible and constantly changing.

Rachid Finge (07:00): You mentioned, you know, it would be great if an alarm clock could be delightful. So what kind of things do you add to the app to indeed make it delightful for our users?

Kristi Bradford (07:09): We have a close integration with something called Digital Wellbeing. And with that, so I'll backtrack a bit. Have you watched the movie Interstellar?

Rachid Finge (07:17): I have seen it, yes.

Kristi Bradford (07:19): Okay. So there's this really cool feature in Digital Wellbeing slash Clock where ahead of your wake up alarm, you can actually have a full experience to go to sleep. So you can choose to have this screen that looks like you're flying through space and have these, I think it's called Deep Space sounds, to try and lull you to sleep in a very calming manner. And then on the other end of that, when you wake up, you can wake up to any song or sound that you want.

So if I prank my eight year old nephew I could essentially record my own voice saying like, AJ, wake up, you have a math exam that you haven't studied for. Or I could wake up to what I do today, which is I wake up to Vivaldi and that's through a Spotify integration. You could wake up to pretty much any sound that you want,

Rachid Finge (08:09): Waking up to Vivaldi. That's my kind of delight indeed. That's a great idea for tomorrow morning. We have so many more apps to go through. And by the way, when we're talking about clock, you also mentioned the clock for a Pixel Watch for example. Is it much different to create that sort of delightful experience for a watch compared to a phone?

Kristi Bradford (08:30): I think so, and this again comes back to kind of like psychology or why people are doing what they're doing. But if you imagine the watch screen it's, maybe I'm just looking at it compared to my phone, maybe like a 10th of the size of the phone screen, right? So you have to be ruthless about which features you put in there, and they really have to match the intention of what the user wants to do on their watch.

So the clock, for example, has a feature for multiple timers, and this spans across the phone and the tablet. So if I'm making a big dinner and I've got like let's say pasta and pizza and some sort of other dish in the oven, I can have timers for all of that.

On a watch, you're probably only using timers for something fitness related and maybe rather horrible like a pushup timer or a sit up timer. And so we expect you to only need one timer at a time. So while the core functionality of you can set a timer, you can set an alarm, you can definitely use a stopwatch, are the same, the UX there from the user's intention and how they're using the watch is very different.

Rachid Finge (09:39): And then I guess my favorite feature is the alarm on Pixel Watch that will only vibrate so that, you know, the person lying next to me won't wake up when I need to get up very, very early.

Kristi Bradford (09:49): Do you use that?

Rachid Finge (09:49): Yeah, absolutely. Everyday.

Kristi Bradford (09:51): Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Nice.

Rachid Finge (09:54): That's one I really loved. And the next app I wanted to touch upon is calculator, because it just fascinates me in the way that, you know, that's maybe the app that's taken for granted. Most people think ‘yeah, of course there's a calculator app’. Yeah, of course it should work. It's probably much harder to create a well-functioning calculator than people who think at first.

Kristi Bradford (10:15): Yeah. And some of the interesting history behind this is that there is a former mathematics professor at Google who volunteered his time, so you know, of the Google 20% project.

Rachid Finge (10:29): Yeah, of course.

Kristi Bradford (10:30): In a 20% project, before calculator shipped, I think in 2016 he dedicated his time to create a full expression library. And the difference between mathematical expression formulas and computational math is that if you put in a formula into a calculator with computational math, it's trying to convert it into zeros and ones, and that's for speed behind the computer. But if you're doing, you know, calculator math on your phone, most likely you're not doing these like multiple units like heavy calculations that you would see in the movies about like the Turing machine. And so we have a full expression library, which means that you have the most accurate calculator possible and it's on your phone.

And I'm not going to do it justice. Hans would be able to talk to you for two hours about what exactly that means. But to me, hearing that I was just blown away that there are bug requests that come in that say, Hey, this, this output of the calculator is wrong compared with, you know, my calculator. And we have to respond, well, actually it's the inverse. And it's just amazing that it's something so simple that can function so highly accurately.

Rachid Finge (11:45): Amazing. That's what I was thinking, that it is so much more complicated on the backside and, you know, it might seem on the front, you know, as we've all or had a calculator at some point in our lives.

And then the final app you mentioned which is of course a very special to Pixel, I guess it's the Recorder app. How, how did that app come to be when, I don't really remember which Pixel phone it was when it first launched, but it is something that wowed a lot of people when it launched I remember.

Kristi Bradford (12:13): Yeah. So this app was attempting to do something completely unique to the concept of voice recordings. In that voice memos started to become a good way for trying to like, squeeze out as much of a minute as we can prepping for the next minutes or hours in our days.

And Recorder came out, I believe in 2019, and probably the coolest part of it is that it's a live transcript, so as you're speaking into it, yeah. It's using a model that's all on your device. So based on the language that you're speaking, it's giving you that transcript of what you're saying in the moment right then and there. And then the factor of, again, like back to form versus function it's just beautiful. Like people love to use it because it's so simply designed and pretty straightforward.

And then in December we launched a feature called Speaker Labels. So this is an entirely new machine learning model that essentially tries to target different speakers based on some biometric data about your voice, and then label them throughout the conversation in the rest of the recording.

Rachid Finge (13:23): Right. So if I'm recording a lecture, maybe there are multiple people speaking, I can easily figure out later who said what instead of it being one long transcript seemingly from one person. Right.

Kristi Bradford (13:35): Yeah. And we've done, you know, some interesting UXR and surveys on how people use this because some of the fascinating data that we were seeing is that the majority of these recorder sessions are three minutes or less. And so we are starting to assume like, okay, well is this kind of a glorified grocery list maker, but it turns out it's not. It's just that people are using them in bite size chunks to brainstorm things like rap lyrics which was a really interesting interview to go through. And then they're doing voice overs.

So there's a lot of actors that are doing voiceovers for maybe content they're creating, or even for actual production samples. And one of those actors is also a hobbyist that does ghost hunting. And I can't validate this, I have no way to, but she said that the recorder app is perfect for picking up these supernatural sounds when she and her crew are out ghost hunting. And I was like that's absolutely incredible.

Rachid Finge (14:41): Absolutely. You did not know that you built that in a way . That's cool. So you know, if I circle back to the start of our conversation, you worked in pharmaceuticals wondering, you know, what does that product manager do? Where do the bugs go? So now you kind of have an insight into how that works. So if we take Recorder as an example, you know, since, and I was looking this up just now, so it launched with Pixel 4 you know, we're a Pixel 7 now, so it had many iterations. So how do you sort of decide what kind of features to add and how do you keep that app you mentioned looks very, very nice and there's this thing, you know more about it than I do called feature creep, you know, where you just add and add and add features and that whole thing becomes unusable. How do you balance the need for new features, but also keeping it simple to use?

Kristi Bradford (15:31): That's a great question. I mean, obviously we get a lot of inspiration about new features, not only from Google Research and what's newly available specifically for audio but from our users directly. So the UXR and then you know, the most vocal users that send in feedback, we go over that every month and then obviously when we're planning the roadmap.

So for us, it's a kind of a mix of balancing what users are directly requesting because we want to make sure that they're getting everything that they need out of it with an overall vision of what's the next phase of audio technology that we could bring to people who are already using recorder or people who might not see the value in it until they have that piece of technology coming in.

But you're right, with all the features pushed into this, you know, one UI, it can get a bit difficult and that's why it's nice to have like these different form factors now.

Rachid Finge (16:29): That makes a lot of sense. And then I guess it's mostly the same for, for the Clock app as well. You mentioned it should be really easy to set that alarm clock and at the same time you wanted to add those delightful features, like, you know, special ways of waking up and winding down at the same time.

Kristi Bradford (16:43): Yeah, I think one of the most complex features to like about how we keep it beautiful and easy was it's called Paused Alarms. So if you look at Reddit prior to December when we launched this feature there were a lot of like - ‘oh, this Assistant feature which launched in 2022 is so cool, but I wish it could finish the end-to-end flow’.

So Assistant does this really cool thing where it's like, it can understand that there's probably a bank holiday or a government holiday coming up, and it'll suggest, especially if it's on a Monday, like yesterday was Memorial Day suggest - ‘Hey, there's a holiday tomorrow, do you want to, you know, disable your alarm?’ - And you're like, well, why disable your alarm if it's set to go off like Monday through Friday when you could just pause it? Right? And so now you have this feature where if you've got a scheduled alarm, you can select a pause it up until a certain date and building that UI in if you think about like a date selector and the complexity of like helping somebody figure out like, what does it mean to pause your alarm versus to disable it was actually a little bit complex to go through as a process.

And I think, you know, honestly, I think we nailed it. So that's another example of just kind of balancing the ease of it with the, like the actual benefit of the feature

Rachid Finge (18:11): Kristi, before we go we like to ask our guests to share a top tip. Maybe you have a top tip for one of the essential apps that you work on?

Kristi Bradford (18:19): Yeah, actually. So we do see that the majority of our users have up to 10 alarms, 10 active alarms, really? So alarms that they're actively using. And we have this cool feature kind of tied to like being able to pause, but on the beginning end of that, so if you go in and you select a time, let's say 9:00 AM and then you go back into that alarm and you attempt to schedule it , we can actually let you schedule the alarm out through, and you have this like date selector out through the year 2100 .

So I could, you know, schedule for you know, I guess it'll be 11 years from now when my nephew is going to graduate high school. And I could set an alarm and I could enable it. I could also set a pause schedule against it. But I will forever have that alarm in my clock app of AJ, in 11 years, so in the year 2034 he will be graduating high school. And I think it's just a delighter - that's an extreme case.

And another one is like, if you want an alarm for your doctor's appointment in two weeks, you can schedule it out that far instead of only having to schedule for this week or for tomorrow.

Rachid Finge (19:34): Amazing. Thank you Kristi.

Kristi Bradford (19:36):

It was really fun. Thank you.

Rachid Finge (19:38): That was a lot of fun. Who knew that calculator had such a sophisticated scientific foundation underneath it? And the edge cases you get to deal with when building a clock app for all over the world are incredible. And thanks a lot to Kristi. Can't wait to see what's next from the Pixel Essentials team in the future. Now here's a question for you. Are you a subscriber of the Made by Google podcast? Because if you're not, maybe just take that one click and become one and you'll be the first to know when there's a new episode out. Thanks for listening to The Made By Google Podcast. Take care and talk soon.