Lennard Lukas Schmidt
Lennard is a Quantitative UX Researcher on the Google Design Platform team with a focus on experimental design research and logs analysis. Before joining Google, he was a postdoctoral researcher investigating urban scaling laws and holds a PhD in Quantitative Marketing.
Authored Publications
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Usability Hasn’t Peaked: Exploring How Expressive Design Overcomes the Usability Plateau
Alyssa Sheehan
Bianca Gallardo
Ying Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain (2026)
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Critics have argued that mobile usability has largely been optimized, and that only incremental gains are possible. We set out to explore if the newest generation of design systems, which promote greater flexibility and a return to design basics, could produce substantially more usable designs while maintaining or increasing aesthetic judgments. Through a study with 48 diverse participants completing tasks in 10 different applications, we found that in designs created following Material 3 Expressive guidelines, users fixated on the correct screen element for a task 33% faster, completed tasks 20% faster, and rated experiences more positively compared to versions designed using the previous Material design system. These improvements in performance and aesthetic ratings challenge the premise of a usability plateau and show that mobile usability has not peaked. We illustrate specific opportunities to make mobile experiences more usable by returning to design fundamentals while highlighting risks of added flexibility.
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Human-Computer Interaction research and design pedagogy rely on idealized process models, such as the Double Diamond, to describe how user experiences are designed. These models assume an orderly, linear design process that, while easy to understand, fails to capture the iterative and collaborative reality of professional practice. A few qualitative studies have successfully captured this complexity -- still, they often suffer from retrospective narrative smoothing and lack systemic scale. To understand how design unfolds in real products, we analyzed historical snapshots of 102 Figma files from a multi-national technology company and investigated the true trajectories of the design process at scale. Our analysis reveals that while the established process models might be applicable, the operational details are highly non-linear. Rather than a straight line from ideation toward completion, design advances are repeatedly reset to the ideation stage as feedback is received. We argue that by treating design files as operational telemetry, the industry can move beyond abstract frameworks to build practices and collaborative tools that support the non-linear realities of modern product development.
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Material Design provides an open source library of over 3,000 icons for both digital and print use by anyone, anywhere in the world. The library includes icons for user interface (UI) interactions and icons for visuals. While these icons are available globally and do include international symbols, such as different currency icons, our understanding of how the icons are interpreted by a global audience from different regions and cultures is limited. We are developing a research approach that evaluates classes of icons at scale to understand how design teams can ensure their iconography is legible to end users. Our aim is to provide design guidance for selecting icons from the Material Design library for international end-users and target interventions to help end-users develop familiarity with icons.
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