danny farra - Design

Chrome reading mode

Recently, I led design for a project taking Chrome reading mode from a side panel-only experience to offering an "immersive", full screen, distraction-free reading experience. This involved multiple studies hearing from users, including those with visual impairments and/or attention challenges, to nail down the details of how to make a full-width layout comfortable for focused reading while preserving the side panel experience with a view toggle.

Google blog The Keyword writes: Get more done with new vertical tabs and immersive reading mode in Chrome.

Lookout (Play Store↗)

Lookout is an app for people with visual impairments. Mostly, people use Lookout to point the camera at text, and Lookout reads it out loud; documents, food labels, and currency.

Lookout also describes photos using AI, and can help users navigate to bathrooms, open seating, vehicles, and more. I've been working on Lookout since May 2022.

GIF file of Google Lookout's Image Q&A feature. A photo of people in a canoe with a scenic view is described by AI. The "Type a question" text field is tapped, and the user types "What is the weather like?" and Image Q&A answers "The weather looks sunny and clear ☀ There are no clouds in the sky"

I led design of Image Q&A in Lookout: an accessible way to capture photos with guided framing, have photos described using AI, and it answers your questions about the photo.

Sorry the GIF is blurry. I can only share public assets, and I found this in an article about our launch, and I felt it was too good to not share.

Images mode

Summary
Before the redesign I led, Images mode required users to upload or share a photo, so they could extract the text in it or get a basic description.

Now, Images mode opens to a photo-capturing experience with assistive audio framing guidance. People who need visual aid can line up their shot, snap a photo, have AI describe it, and ask follow up questions.

Problem
Images do not typically have a description or alt text, which excludes visually impaired people from engaging with a critical media format used in the world today.

Design

We wanted our visually-challenged users to know what's in the frame and have help lining up a selfie (a common desire we heard in our research). So we reused some of our tech from other parts of Lookout. The selfie camera can tell you how to adjust your camera ("face cropped on bottom").
Once the user presses the shutter button, we should immediately send the AI prompt to describe it. The description text is read out loud with word highlighting, followed by other metadata such as the text it recognizes. Then users can ask follow-up questions about the photo, share the image and/or description, download, etc.
I wanted the buttons to be as large as reasonably possible given our users base's disabilities, while knowing that many users have to maximize their system-level display/font size.
I led this design process which included
- - Overall UI/UX including the capture experience, description page, chat page, prompt menu.
  - A tutorial video which the app opens to
  - Marketing materials for Google I/O
  - A workshop with the Deepmind team

Introduction to Lookout (2024) tutorial video I helped produce which we then embedded in the app onboarding. I give lots of credit to a great team of designers and producers, I just think it's the most accessible way of explaining the app in-detail, so I share it here. My contribution: I initiated the workstream of redoing our previous tutorial video based on research feedback about users' learning preferences, secured budget for the video, defined an outline, and helped make the assets and final script.

Lookout design system update

Lookout was growing in the number of capabilities it had, which users needed to navigate easily. It was using an older design system, and when I joined the team, I was asked to develop a point of view on whether we should upgrade to a more modern design system. I concluded we should because of many reasons, namely and an updated aesthetic. I then worked with a report/mentee to audit the UI, decide what needed to be changed, and design all the assets. I wrote about this experience on Google's Design site: Evolving Lookout: A progressive approach to designing accessibility apps

Press

- - I was featured in Google's LinkedIn post for World Arabic Language Day for our launch of right-to-left language support in Lookout.
  - Inside Google’s Image Q&A On Android And Using AI For All (Forbes)
  - Android can now analyze any image and describe it to you — here's how it works (Tom's Guide)
  - AI Principles Case Study - Responsible Development of Lookout (Google) (This was taken down recently. I am trying to find out why.)

Past work

Before this role, I was on the Cloud Inclusive Design team where I designed improvements to the accessibility of Cloud products:

- I worked on an accessibility-focused redesign of the Cloud Console search experience. There, I did things like redesign the search box itself to include a clickable button with a button label and hint text communicating the keyboard shortcut to search. I also helped audit and redesign the keyboard navigation order for the search results page.
- I also worked on a Clippy-like helper tool for keyboard-only users of the Cloud Console, which made keyboard shortcuts more discoverable, particularly useful for shortcuts that were only available when the user is focused on a particular element of the UI (e.g. data table cell, search, etc.)
- I worked on improving the design of Cloud products and design system components in compliance with accessibility audits that were conducted.

Before that, I was designing advertising products, where I began my accessible design journey as a subject matter expert. I conducted multiple workshops and trainings around accessibility, built a centralized resource of useful accessibility links for our team