Hello!
I'm Ed Lea – Principal UX Designer
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I love the combination of complex problems at scale and building diverse, thoughtful, fun, talented teams to tackle those problems. I spent much of the last 20 years as a designer understanding insights and business opportunities that help make meaningful differences in people's lives.
Today, I'm focused on making sure teams are purpose-driven and working on the right problems. As much as I love getting knee deep in product strategy, I've found a huge amount of satisfaction in my role of empowering people to do their best work.
I'm passionate about access to information but mindful of how technology is impacting society. I believe UX lies at the heart of finding the right balance of technological advances and healthy individuals and societies.
Director UX – Google Pixel Watch & Fitbit Trackers
May 2022 - Present
My team is responsible for the overall experience launch of Pixel Watch in 2022, a new category of hardware for Google, followed by Pixel Watch 2 launch in 2023. Alongside Pixel Watch, my team oversees the development and launch new Fitbit Trackers. As the UX team responsible for the end to end user experience, we partner closely with the industrial design team, specialist teams and feature areas to create a cohesive product that brings the hardware and software experiences together.
These launches build on my teams long term investment in R&D and product discovery, ideating on new experiences in partnership with hardware engineering, envisioning and validating the future of wearable devices and helping bring those to life.
Fitness & Health Experiences
Fitness and health is a core value proposition for wearables. With the launch of Pixel Watch 2, my team overhauled the user experience, modernizing the information architecture, elevating the design system, bringing Fitbit and Google closer together.
In 2023, alongside launching Pixel Watch 2, we also launched Fitbit Charge 6, integrating essential Google experiences on top of a rich fitness foundation.
Head of Design – Google Search App
May 2019 - May 2022
The Google Search App program was wide ranging, multi-disciplinary and cross company in nature. My role was to lead the team to develop a platform that enabled the best of Google Search technology to shine, such as Google Lens, search by humming, personalized content feed and many experiments that advanced Google's 25 year search heritage.
Head of UX – Google News
May 2017 - May 2019
Announced at Google I/O in 2018, the all new Google News brought together a number of different teams and products, to launch an AI powered news product. The reimagined Google News uses a new set of AI techniques to take a constant flow of information as it hits the web, analyze it in real time and organize it into storylines.
My role was to build and lead the UX team, growing from a single designer to a cross functional group of researchers, visual designers, interactions designers and program managers, setting out an experince vision that continues to power the product today.
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