Transcript

Rachid 00:00:00
Anish, welcome to the Made By Google Podcast. Great to have you back on again. Just for the people who didn't hear the previous episode with you, could you quickly tell us a little bit about yourself?

Anish 00:00:10
Hey, Rachid. First of all, thanks for having me back on the pod again. I had a blast last time. It was actually one of my first podcasts, so I'm really excited for this second go-around.

My name is Anish Kattukaran; I'm the director of products for Google Home and Nest. So I actually started out my career working on launching new mobile apps at a couple of startups. One was in gaming the other was in sort of mobile payments. Now this was in the early days of the Play Store and the App Store. So it's been a little while. And I've spent a good few years now at Google working on a number of products like YouTube. So two years ago, when I was approached to lead the overhaul and redesign of the Home app, it was just a really incredible opportunity.

And so, as I reflect on those two apps that I mentioned earlier, both were early in their product lifecycle, and both were newer concepts. We were working to find product market fit and understand what users would actually do with those apps to keep them coming back.

With the Home app, this is completely different, right? The app is already beloved by tens of millions of active users. It serves a real utility for those users every day, and I personally have been one of them, right? From being one of the first users of the very first Nest thermostat, I was a user of one of the first Google Chromecast and one of the first Google Home speakers. So, this redesign is really, really near and dear to my heart. And I'm just super thrilled to be back on here to chat about where we are and what we're going to do on that journey.

Rachid 00:01:42
And we'll get to that redesign in a minute. But as you probably know, Anish, we always like to ask our guests what's in their Google internal directory. So, we can look up any Googler, and they all have like this little mission statement. And yours says to build the most delightful and helpful experiences for the Google Home platform. I guess most people understand the first part of that, but what exactly entails the whole Google Home platform? What is that?

Anish 00:02:08
So to build the most delightful and helpful experiences for Google Home users, we've updated that a little bit. So I think of this charter for both myself and my team. And you can sort of very easily get into a bit of a trap where you lead an app with tens and tens of millions of users to get lost in the data, to be steered by averages and P50s or P90s, and you can sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are real people on the other end relying on our app to feel safe and secure to know what's going on in their home or just to turn on the lights at night. Right?

Now, don't get me wrong, we're incredibly data-driven, but this charter is a way to bring balance to that. And the one thing that I'll add to that is, for me, delight starts with just sort of nailing the basics, right? There's a kind of delight that you get when things just work, and they should very much be the starting point of delighting our users. So that's how I think about our charter.

Rachid 00:03:07
So the last time we spoke, a redesign for the Google Home app was underway. It was available as a preview for people who signed up for that. Now it's sort of out of the gate; everyone can use it. So what sort of happened in between? What was it you were working on since our last conversation?

Anish 00:03:28
When we talk about why we redesigned the app, actually, that might be a good place to start, right? There's the what but, but the why is, I think, just as important. So while the smart home has been around for a while, and Nest in many ways was a pioneer here in a lot of ways, we're still in the earlier days of the adoption of the smart home.

So, as we looked at our user data, on the one hand, we had these users that were buying their first smart home devices, complete novices, right? And in contrast, some of our earliest adopters had 40, 50, a hundred plus smart home devices in their app. So our users had these sorts of vastly different needs of the Google Home app.

New users just needed this absolute simplicity. And our most advanced users, kind of, where we actually see the entire smart home user base going over time, needed our app to grow with them as their homes and devices grew. So you add to the fact that home is an incredibly personal space that people configure in a million different ways. And, for us, the realization was that the old version of the app just wasn't built and designed to serve such distinct needs or give folks the ability to make it their own, right? So, back to the question of what we went about redesigning the app, we brought it to preview, and, if we, if we were to compare this to sort of like an actual home renovation, this would be, consider it sort of like a real house flip, right?

Where we went right down to the studs and rebuilt the house, but then we also brought some additional land, and we expanded the home with a few new additions. And what was really important here is that the foundation that we were laying would allow us to keep building into the future, right? So take this new version of the app and keep building on it to serve millions of more users that will come on board over the next couple of years.

So, by the way, if you have no clue what I'm talking about with all these analogies, very explicitly, right? So we rolled out the new Google Home app. It was in preview, and now it's available to everyone on mobile and tablet - redesigned from the ground up. We also rolled out a completely new home app on WearOS with a preview on the web, and you can find that at home.Google.com. We built this incredibly powerful Android integration, which I'm excited to share as well, called the home Panel. And so that's gonna start rolling out with Pixel devices, including the brand new Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold. And lastly, but certainly not least, a script editor. And this is for our most advanced users to be able to automate their homes. So lots of, lots of excitement and lots of progress here.

Rachid 00:06:02
Yeah, we've gotta talk about all of these, but one of the things you mentioned is you needed to redesign the Home app for people who have dozens and dozens of smart home devices and at the same time, you'll have people who are doing their first steps in the smart home, maybe they got their first smart bulb. So these are probably very different audiences, yet they're all using the same app. So how do you keep both of these audiences happy?

Anish 00:06:27
Not easily, right? That's a tough problem. We spend countless hours thinking about how we do that. I shared last time that we're on this journey to land a multi-year vision for the Google Home platform, right? And how what we build is both this art and science - it sort of incorporates an opinionated point of view of what we think the future of the smart home should look like and how it should work, and balancing that with user insight, user testing, and explicit feature requests and things like that from users. So, we've transformed our development a lot over the last two years to ensure that we have a strong feedback loop at every step of the way.

So I'll give you a couple of examples. We started a rapid prototyping team. So very early in the process, we no longer just design the product anymore, but we actually build interactive prototypes that our teams use to test everything from how a smart home controller might lay out on different screen sizes, mobile to tablet, to watches, to how a user might expect to interact with a new device tile on their favorites tab.

So that was one. Now, we then paired that with new rolling research processes. Now I think we've mentioned it before, right? User research has, has always sort of been a core part of what we did, but what we changed was that we moved to this more constant cadence of it, right? So where we were running studies every few weeks, every month, and now we were doing that early research with actual prototypes that I just mentioned, right?

So not just flat designs, but interactive prototypes. So the fidelity of that user feedback started to get a lot higher, right? So we can get really valuable feedback from the users that have just one device and they're just getting started, as well as users who have a lot more. And the third example I'll give you is the one that you just mentioned - public preview. So we shared a preview of the new app about six months ago - think of it as a sort of public opt-in beta, if you will - and this was a first for us, a little nervous doing things for the first time. So it was definitely a first for us, and we ended up having over half a million users actually sign up and share and come back to us. And that was staggering. Like, I don't know what we expected, just that volume of passionate interest in the new version of the app and that was incredibly powerful.

And that was incredibly powerful - there's only so much you can test in these, like, small environments, right? So, in particular, when you support thousands of devices for millions of users, it can just end up in these endless permutations of a home. And then, we use that feedback. We use that feedback to make something like 50 - you asked earlier what we've been doing over the last few months while we've been in preview - we've been taking that feedback, and we've been updating the app, right? So we made something like 50 plus usability and feature improvements.

So, for example, the ability to favor automation - the ability to favor group lights. Improvements to camera history scrolling. Users had shared feedback about some iconography not being as clear as they would like, so we updated the iconography. So all of that was a direct result of preview users giving us feedback over the last couple of months. And our teams are iterating. So I can't wait for everyone to try this out as a result of that.

Rachid 00:10:36
So that's amazing. Since the preview came out, we had at least 50 features that were changed or updated based on the user feedback.

Anish 00:10:53
Exactly, so over the last six months, while we've been in preview, we took all that feedback in over 50 new features, usability improvements, and iconography improvements. We worked to address hundreds, if not thousands, of bugs that users submitted via the app. And then major improvements to the performance of the app, how fast it loads, how fast individual tabs load, camera live streams, and things like that.

Rachid 00:11:21
Speaking of cameras, and live streams, it seemed to me just from using the app that camera's got a lot more emphasis compared to the older version of the Google Home app. Is that actually the case? And was that on purpose?

Anish 00:11:34
I'm glad you could tell. And, of course, this is one of the things that I'm particularly excited about.

In Nest's legacy - cameras have always been a major part of that, right? And now our cameras have just been a place where we've long made major investments in AI and ML - from object and people detection to stream optimization. So, we're continuing to invest very heavily in both our camera experiences and with sort of like AI and ML as a sort of function of that.

The Google Home app now lets you view your camera live views as soon as you open the app with no additional clicks. And very fast, I might add. So, this is an example where user feedback was actually incredibly valuable. So I'll give you a really good example here. Rachid, so users that had just cameras, especially if they had just used the Nest app before, were very comfortable with seeing all of their cameras on the first tab,

Pretty obvious. But users that had more smart devices other than cameras told us, hold on a second, if I have all my camera streams at the top, then that takes up all of the screen real estate right now, then I need to tap and scroll and do a bunch of, interactions before I can do something as simple as turning off the lights. So, this is a balance of, again, very distant needs of different kinds of users. So going back to one of our key design principles, give users their home their way.

How we decided to approach that problem was by bringing live streams to the home app via favorites, right? So if a user cared about a particular camera, they could favor it, and if they favored it, they saw the live stream on the app start, and then they could reorder it alongside all of their other devices in the right order for, for their needs, right? Fully customizable. So, that was, that's an example of how both the investment in cameras plus the investment in giving users a choice resulted in, in what we think is a much better experience for users.

Rachid 00:13:37
Yeah, and thanks a lot for that. Obviously, the baby room is on top of my favorites, so we can keep an eye on that.

Anish 00:13:44
Spot on. Same for me - the kids' room is right at the top. And bringing live streams obviously was a major investment. Bringing it to the first tab of the app requires a number of sort of performance-heavy improvements. But by no means was that where we stopped.

When you actually click into the camera controller, one of the things that users have shared a lot of feedback on that they really, really love is that we brought the Nest sort of famous vertical video history scrubbing feature over from the Nest app into the Home app. So what that means is users can now very quickly scroll through their footage, as needed, and I mentioned earlier, right, performance improvements were massive here. So the team spent a lot of time improving the latency of our live feeds.

So, the combination of experiences and performance, hopefully, ultimately, are delivering that set of delightful user experiences that we talked about at the start.

Rachid 00:14:54
I guess we could walk through the tabs that are at the bottom of the app. So we talked about favorites and how great it is if you like cameras or any other sort of smart home device that you put in there in your favorite order. So the second tab is devices, where I get, I think, a per-room view of all the devices I have. What would you say is the biggest change there compared to the older app?

Anish 00:15:16
Let me actually just give you a little bit of context on why we even got to those tabs. As I mentioned earlier, we thought of this redesign as laying the foundation for the home app for the next few years of our smart home journey, right? And that we'll continue to build on as, as the Matter continues to gain even more momentum. And so the five-tab architecture and sort of organization of the app is very related to how we see smart homes evolving over time. Which is that users will have more and more devices in their home, right? 50, 60, 70, 80 - all of your appliances over time are just going to become smart and connected and coming to the home app. With that being said, you're not actually going to use every device every day in the same sort of way.

And that's why you sort of had to balance having a single place where all of your devices would live with the ability to get to the ones that you use to sort of on a daily basis. And that's sort of the two sides of the coin - as I think of the favorites tab and the devices tab as sort of two sides of a coin.

On one side, the devices tab serves as this place, which is a single place for everything, and then the favorites tab is the place to surface the most commonly used devices that you'll use on a daily basis. So the favorites tab will give you quick access to all of your top devices, the camera live streams we talked about, your automation and your actions. And then, the devices tab will be that repository for everything. All of your devices matter, and it's also a starting point to these controllers for each of those devices. And we made some big updates to the controllers as well. So with this update, we support something like 60 new device types - or increased support for 60 device categories.

Rachid 00:17:07
So what's an example of a device that I can control right now from Google Home that I couldn't six months ago?

Anish 00:17:13
Where do we start? You can open or close your garage doors and your gates - so for my parents, very, very exciting. We've made updates where you can now use a precise slider to actually allow the right amount of light through your curtains or your blinds. You can check whether your washer is in the wash or spin cycle before pausing it. You can toggle an ice maker; you can switch modes on your air purifier and your dehumidifier. So, just a, just a couple examples of the kind of breadth we're building into the app - because we think that all of that coming into Google Home ultimately makes things like your automation much, much smarter.

Because I, like, let's go back to the sort of end goal here. Just make all of your devices smarter and bring them into the app so you can control each one individually. That's not the end goal, right? Like, I think we talked last time about the real goal with the smart home, and the vision for it is to make everything smart so that you can ultimately make them all work together versus working just individually. And so that's where automation will start to play an incredibly powerful role moving into the future.

Rachid 00:18:28
I always feel that the third tap with automation sort is where the magic happens. But it has to be, I guess, in a way where it works for the rest of us. I think there are probably people listening to the pod right now who have some smart home experience and they've actually been coding their smart home on other platforms, and that's maybe great for them, but not so great for, as, as I mentioned, the rest of us. So how do you make sure that it's powerful enough yet easy to use?

Anish 00:18:55
Yeah. And listen, we are definitely building for both - the rest of us and those folks whom you talked about; we can, we can come back to that advanced group in a second. But yeah, the third tab in the app is the automation tab. And I agree with you; I think this is where a lot of the magic is going to happen, right? Where it's gonna be about getting devices to work seamlessly together. I think the big challenge for all of us in the industry is how do you, how do you make that a lot easier for folks. And we think we're taking a first step. There were, but we're just getting started now. The automation tab is, and, and household routines are sort of where you can get all of your smart home devices to act as triggers and actions.

So, for example, you'll be able to do things like, set a schedule for your sprinklers to turn on and then set a timer and then make an announcement that you've started watering your plants, right? You can set a routine that automatically closes the garage door when somebody leaves their home at a very specific time of the day or within a certain time range. So bring more devices into Google Home for our users and let them work all well together. And the automation tab and household routines. We're gonna make that simpler and simpler over time, but more power, like more powerful under the hood. And the idea is that you've gotta make it super easy for anybody to get started with something like automation, not just the folks who can, who can do the advanced scripting and things like that.

Rachid 00:20:19
Exactly. And it shows that it is easy to use. But then, indeed, those more advanced folks probably care about the script editor that you mentioned before. I think most people are wondering, like, okay, so what kind of scripting language is that? Can I learn that? And what sort of benefits does it offer for those people who like to spend time in that kind of environment?

Anish 00:20:39
Yeah. The automation tab is very much for all of us. But we've definitely had sort of a cohort of power users that have been really excited when we shared back in the fall that we were working on a script editor. And so that's about to roll out to preview this week.

And so what we did is we built this script editor to give that cohort of users, those early adopters, those power users who really want to invest in getting it very precisely to give them more control over their home automation. So it's early days for us here - but this tool, what it's going to do is it's gonna provide a new way to create very quick and edit really powerful home automation using a language called yaml. And so you can easily create scripts for advanced automation with even more device traits, conditional logic and actions that aren't even available in the app just yet.

Rachid 00:21:37
And I'm guessing you're putting that in preview first because you'd like to hear from those expert users to see what's great and what could use some more work, perhaps.

Anish 1 00:21:46
Absolutely. And what, I expect, and I hope, is that that set of users will be incredibly opinionated and share a lot of feedback. But yes, that's coming to Home.Google.com , so that's Google Home on the web, and we're bringing that to the mobile apps on Android and iOS as well.

Rachid 00:22:04
Amazing. So those advanced smart home users better check that preview out. Absolutely. You also mentioned the home panel, which sort of existed in a way, I guess. So what is new there, and especially I think, in the context of the Pixel tablet coming up?

Anish 00:22:22
Okay. First off, the Pixel tablet and the Dock, it's a game changer. I'm excited that I can actually talk about it now. But I've had the pleasure of using it for over a year now, and I cannot wait for people to get their hands on it.

So, to start with the basics, a great app ecosystem is absolutely critical for this tablet. So we invested a lot in actually optimizing the Google Home app for both landscape and portrait orientations. So you'll see that all of the tabs have this nested navigation bar so that users can move around really quickly, regardless of the orientation. We made some deeper investments in things like the camera timeline, so you can actually see the camera viewer off to the left and the timeline on the right. So, better utilization of the screen real estate that you get from a larger screen, and Pixel tablet and Android tablet users will see those updates rolling out this month.

So that was very much a starting point. But, then, drawing from many of our learnings from smart displays, we kind of asked ourselves when this tablet was docked, right? So one of the most unique things about the Pixel Tablet is it has this awesome Dock. So when you're not using it, it sits there, it charges, it acts as this great speaker. So when it was docked, could we actually make this tablet even better to control your smart home? And so that was the seed of thought for a small part of our team that was sort of thinking about this. And what it resulted in was what we call this new Home panel.

And what that is - is it makes controlling your smart home much faster - and it does that by giving you really quick access to the Home app - your Home app favorites - with only a tap on this home icon that you can see at the bottom left of your device lock screen, right? And the home panel brings you quick one-tap access. You get your favorites, you get your spaces, and you get it directly from the lock screen, right? So think about your experience today, right? So today, when you wanna do something in your smart home, you go to your phone, you pick it up, you unlock your phone, you type in your pin, or you authorize with your face, you scroll through a couple of screens to find your app, you open the app, you wait for it to load. We took all of that and condensed it into one tap, and you get your home. And we thought that it was just an awesome experience, right? So we made it so much faster to get to your lights or your lock or your cameras. So that was, that was a major part of that investment.

Now, again, that dock part of the Pixel tablet is so unique. So when the new Pixel tablet is docked, what the home panel does is it actually turns your tablet into a smart home controller. So from hub mode, the entire household, right? So myself, my wife and my kids can very easily control access to a light switch, turn off a plug or whatever it might be. And then when someone does something like ring a doorbell, anyone in the home can actually see who's at the front door; you get this beautiful, proactive full-screen notification, and you can very quickly answer with two-way talk with quick responses.

And so you can access the home panel, from the Pixel lock screen, which gives you faster control and faster access to your devices. When it's in dock mode, you get a bunch of additional experiences that are communal for the home, which is really, really exciting. So that's the home panel.

We'll roll that out on the Pixel tablet, but by the way, this is coming to the rest of our Pixel portfolio as well. So I personally have been using it on my Pixel Fold, and it's a fantastic experience. It's coming to the rest of the Pixel portfolio of phones and devices as well.

Rachid 00:26:25
Amazing. You heard it here first, the home panel in Android 14 for our Android friends. That's wonderful.

Anish, the previous time we spoke, we spent quite a lot of time on Matter. We said it is the future of the Smart Home. I think we spoke in 2022, and we sort of felt like 2023 is going to be the Year of Matter. So how are we doing, and what's the next step in creating that ultimate Smart Home with Matter?

Anish 00:26:53
Some of the things that we talked about last time, just to recap, right? So Google was very much a founding member of the Matter consortium. And we remain huge believers in the potential of Matter and the future of Matter. A lot of that is already here, right? A lot of the promise of the Matter was to make it easier, faster, more reliable, and more interoperable for your smart home. And we are already starting to see a lot of that value.

So we have since rolled out some big matter investments from Fast Pair right in Android to set up all of your Matter devices to support Matter on a number of Nest hardware devices. Set up control in the home app of some of your matter devices on Android. And now, actually, with this update, users will be able to use an iPhone to set up their devices in Google Home.

So with the arrival of iOS 16.5, it essentially no longer matters what smartphone you're using, pun intended. Our Google Home users will be able to set up any matter device regardless of whether they're using Android or iOS. And so this is something we at Google Home are very proud of. It's a win for users. And by no means, the extent of our investments in the Matter, we're continuing to invest heavily in improving the home app, making it a much better controller for Matter, thinking about the next set of matter devices that will come into the ecosystem as well.

Rachid 00:28:22
Right? I think it's important for people to understand. It's not like, okay, now Matter has been launched, and that's the end of the story. It's basically the beginning of the story right now.

Anish 00:28:30
Absolutely. And, part of that is, we've talked about Matter and, and the promise for a number of years. I think towards the end of last year, that's when you started to see and, and started to realize that it was a real thing, right? All of the major providers launched support for it. A lot of the smart home manufacturers have rolled out their devices with Matter. So absolutely. We're in the early days of - the early innings of - Matter. And excited to continue on that journey.

Rachid 00:28:59
Anish, we have something brand new. We have super fans of the Made By Google podcast, and of course, of the Pixel portfolio and the Google hardware portfolio - and they have sent in questions. So we have two of them. They're for you. So let's see how you're gonna do with those. The first one's from Colin from the UK, and he's asking, with the increase in smart devices and home automation, what design features did you take into account for the design of the Google Pixel Tablet.

Anish 00:29:31
I'll talk about two of them. There were a number of them - but to give you two examples. On phones, users use the Home app in one orientation, right? In portrait orientation. On tablets, it's quite different. Users switch between orientations. And you've got this much larger screen. So, one of the fundamental parts of redesigning the home app for the tablet was - "Hey, we've got a lot of real estate. When the tablet is in this landscape orientation, how can we deliver better experiences that make use of that real estate?" And so I think a good example of this is the camera controller. So if you switch your tablet into landscape orientation, you'll see the camera experience adjust where you've got this beautiful, large viewer off to the left, and we've adjusted it so that the timeline sits on, on the right. And it actually makes it very usable, you can sort of scroll with your fingers or your thumbs on the right side.

So, that's, that's one example. I think the other example is what I mentioned earlier -the Pixel tablet has this unique property of having a dock, and the interesting thing about the Dock is that when a tablet is docked, you're actually interacting with your smart home controls at a slightly different distance than you would when you're holding your tablet in your hand. Right? So if you think about it, when you have your tablet in your hand, it's kinda like a book. You've got it about half a foot or so away from your face and your interactions. The touch targets can be a particular size, but when you put it on a dock, you tend to; what we saw in user research is that users tend to interact with the device at probably arm's. And so, to get really good usability, your touch targets had to be sort of larger to account for that. And so that's another example of how, from our labs, from our user research, we started to understand these distinct patterns that users have. And ensuring that our device tiles and things like that were larger as they moved to that dock state of the tablet compared to a phone.

Rachid 00:31:40
Amazing. I love that kind of attention to detail. And the second question we have from one of our super fans is from Anthony. And he says, is there a way to limit what you can do with the home ecosystem? I would love to restrict what devices my son can activate where they couldn't with a traditional switch.

Anish 00:31:57
What, that's a great feature request. I've actually been thinking about it a fair amount recently. My kids are still young, so we don't let them touch our phones just yet, but I can see myself even needing that

But listen, more granular controls for users in the home, that sounds like what Anthony's asking about. We don't have that just yet, but it's something that our teams will look at. So hoping to be able to build that out and share more with folks over time.

Rachid 00:32:27
Amazing. So thank you, Anthony, for the feedback. Something we're gonna think about for the future.

Anish, before we wrap up, we always ask our guests, what is a top tip for users to try out on the products they're working on? So we have this brand new Google Home app and a lot more stuff coming up shortly in preview; what would you say to our listeners? What is the top thing they should try in the Google Home app?

Anish 00:32:53
I'll give you two. I'll give you an anecdote first, and then I'll give you a tip second. All right, so the first one is sort of a funny story. We've had a few users over the last couple of months mistakenly opt out of the preview, okay? So they were in preview trying out the new app and mistakenly opted out, and boy, did they panic , right? This actually happened to my wife too. She was using the new app. All of a sudden, I hit the wrong button, opted out, and she was like, whoa, and, and what we heard was that people were just clamoring to get back to the new version because what they told us was, once you started using the new one, you just couldn't imagine going back. Now, obviously, that's feedback from a few users. I'm hoping that everyone will feel that way over time.

So, perhaps one tip is that the new app does make it significantly easier to work with your home compared to the older version. So that's one. Now, the actual tip for me is the combination of the home panel and favoring a few light groups is the fastest I've ever been able to turn on and off a light sitting on my couch. Just so what that does is right on my Pixel device, bottom left, there's a little icon tap home, and I can turn off all the lights in my living room. Fantastic. That is one of my favorite sort of features as of now.

Rachid 00:34:27
Yeah. Just think about doing that with manual switches across the room. Indeed. So that's much faster. Indeed.

Anish 00:34:34
As a team, aspirationally, our goal is to make it as easy to control your smart home as a switch on the wall. I think we're getting really close there. This home panel and favoring light groups, you're starting to get to a place where you're actually maybe competing a little bit with the switch on the wall. So, that's a good outcome for, for all of us, I think, for users. Certainly.

Rachid 00:35:00
Definitely a good sign. Anish, thank you so much for coming back to the Made By Google podcast. I have a feeling this won't be the last time, so hopefully, you'll stop by again to tell us what's new in Google Home.

Anish 00:35:11
I have a fantastic time every time we talk, Rachid. So thank you for having me back on, and absolutelyI'll be back very soon.