Listening for insight: How Penny Trieu ’15 helps shape Google user experiences

Penny Triệu

As a senior user experience (UX) researcher for Google, Penny Triệu ’15 spends her days listening. 

“Research has always been my passion,” she said. “No matter what the topic is, I love the feeling of sitting down with someone, discovering their needs, and understanding what’s working and what’s not.”

UX researchers study how people interact with products to understand their behaviors and needs. They also advocate for users in the building and designing of technologies and experiences. 

“It can mean investigating topics as specific as where a button should be placed on an interface so that it makes intuitive sense or what should happen when somebody signs up for a service to much broader topics, such as people’s privacy attitudes toward a product or how they communicate,” she explained. 

It is a highly collaborative field that finds her working alongside other researchers, as well as designers, product managers, and engineers. 

“After getting a PhD, you go into academia or you can choose to go into industry,” said Triệu, who majored in psychology at Randolph and earned a PhD in information science from the University of Michigan. “I was more interested in the industry route because of the application of it. I like the environment, collaborating with engineers and product managers.” 

“It’s very rewarding to work in the background, and maybe a few months later, see an announcement or even people using the product,” she added. 

Triệu first became interested in information science during a psychology seminar at Randolph. 

“One of the topics we encountered was psychology of the internet, and that’s where I really developed an interest in how we use social media platforms,” she said. 

She wrote her honors thesis on the topic and credits it with helping her get into graduate school. 

“The entire psychology department here was so nurturing,” she said. “There was so much room for independent thinking, with support from professors. Having the bandwidth to independently conceptualize a project was what stood out on my grad school application.”

“It’s hard to imagine the level of individual attention we got at Randolph happening anywhere else.”