I collaborated with our design lead Simon Fung to pitch a new UI design and flow for Local Search that promoted tappable, categorical search suggestions.
We discovered a valuable opportunity area after user testing and competitive research in local search showed that users needed more help formulating local queries and honing in on their search intent.
We developed several new design ideas to address these problems including tappable categorical suggestions and categorial icons in as-you-type suggestions, both of which successfully launched in GMM and Google.com and lead to significant increases in categorical search volume.