Backup experience

1. The Setup

Backup is one of the most important promises Google Photos makes: your memories should be safe without you having to think about it.

But backup is also largely invisible. When everything works, there’s no reason to notice it. When it doesn’t, people are left with stressful high-stakes questions: Are my photos actually backed up? Which are safe? Why did backup stop? What do I do now?

When I joined the team, the mission was ambitious: “Provide a best-in-class backup experience to everyone on the planet.”

But we didn’t actually have a shared definition of what best-in-class backup meant, let alone a way to measure or design toward it.

At the same time, Backup was only one part of a much larger experience. The storage journey was split across three teams: Onboarding, Backup, and Upgrading. Each owned and designed a different part of it independently.

The three storage teams

Onboard

Reach

Where people first encountered and enabled backup. Sustainably acquire and retain backed-up users.

Backup

Experience

Where they relied on it day to day. Deliver a trusted, reliable, understandable and personalized backup experience.

Upgrade

Grow

Where storage limits and paid plans hit. Grow the subscriber base.

When I stepped in, I was responsible for the middle: the experience of actually backing up your photos. But I quickly realized we couldn’t define a great backup experience in isolation. A user experiences one continuous relationship with Google Photos, not our org chart. So my first priority was to bring the three teams together.

I organized and facilitated a cross-storage workshop with product experts from each area. Together, we mapped the end-to-end experience of a Photos user: from first encountering backup, to relying on it every day, to reaching their storage limit.

The result was our first shared view of the full backup and storage journey.

Workshop output; cross-storage journey map

Across that journey, three recurring problems emerged:

• Terminology & mental models. Users struggled to understand what backup actually was, how cloud and device storage differed, and concepts like syncing.
• Status & visibility. Users weren’t always sure whether backup was on, whether their photos were safe, or what would happen when they ran out of storage.
• Value. Many users didn’t realize that experiences like Search and Memories became more useful when photos were backed up, or understand why they might need more storage.

2. Defining “best-in-class”

With the journey mapped, I led the Backup Engineering and PM team to turn those problems into a shared definition of what a healthy backup experience is.

We landed on four pillars:

The four pillars

Trust

Do I trust Google Photos to keep my memories safe?

Reliability

Does backup consistently work the way I expect it to?

Understandability

Do I understand what backup is, what it’s doing, and why it matters?

Personalization

Does backup adapt to what I actually want to save?

Instead of treating “best-in-class” as an abstract aspiration, we now had a framework we could measure against, and a clearer way to decide what to build.

3. Turning the framework into shippable designs

I then led the team through a second planning workshop to define how we could measure each pillar and brainstorm the product work most likely to improve it.

The following decks are the detailed UX thinking and designs for each pillar.