Rhiannon Bell: Designing the future of search at Google

Jul 23, 2025

Rhiannon Bell, VP of User Experience for Google Search, leads a team that crafts intuitive search experiences for billions. She shares insights on how storytelling influences UX design and the challenges of differentiating between information-seeking and transactional user behavior. The conversation dives into how generative AI redefines trust and transparency in search, with a focus on creating engaging, personalized interactions across various media. Rhiannon emphasizes the importance of curiosity and play in driving innovation in search technology.

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INSIGHT

Rethinking Search with Generative AI

Generative AI gives a blank slate to rethink search experiences after 27 years.
Google Search UX team is excited and focused on designing innovative ways for users to glean information.

INSIGHT

Future of Search is Multimodal Conversation

Search will evolve towards a conversational, natural language interface.
Interaction will be multimodal, including images, sound, and voice, making it more fluid and natural for users.

ANECDOTE

Plant Store AI Mode Example

Rhiannon used AI Mode and Lens at a plant store to determine which indoor plants could handle sun.
This use case illustrates how AI-enabled multimodal search aids everyday decisions intuitively.

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We all rely on search—sometimes dozens of times a day—to make sense of the world around us. But behind that simple white box is a vast, dynamic system that has to understand not just language, but intent, context, and trust.

In this episode, we talk with Rhiannon Bell, VP of User Experience for Google Search, about how they navigate the complexity of designing one of the most widely used products on the planet.

Rhi shares how their background in writing and storytelling shapes their approach to UX, why designing for information-seeking behavior is fundamentally different from transactional design, and how teams at Google are rethinking trust, transparency, and delight in an age of generative AI. We also dig into what it means to lead with curiosity, and how bringing a sense of play into product development can open up entirely new possibilities.

Bio

As the VP of UX for Google Search, Rhiannon Bell leads a team of talented Designers, Researchers and Content Strategists who are responsible for all of Google Search experiences. They have over 20 years experience in product development, working with diverse and global products such as NerdWallet, BBC, and Zynga.
Rhiannon's mission is to build responsibly toward an AI-powered future, using user research, creative direction, and user-centric product development. They are passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology to solve user pain points, raising the quality bar on execution, and driving home the consumer-centric view within any product organization. They are also an active investor and advisor in the design and AI space, supporting visionaries who are shaping our world.

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