From Google Research to Berlin: Julia on UX, Community, and Building with AI

A conversation with Julia, a former Google UX researcher who moved to Berlin for a clean slate. She shares how she got into UX, why she thinks the field matters more in the age of AI, and the toolkit she uses across research, design, and community work.

About Julia

Julia is a UX researcher who spent her early career at Google before moving from New York to Berlin about a year ago. Today she works as an independent consultant, supporting startup teams on product and users, running community and design workshops, and contributing to a Zurich-based nonprofit. Her thinking spans research, design, and product, and lately she has been folding AI deeply into all three.

"I feel like everything is different since I moved, to be honest," she says. "I was feeling just kind of done with New York, and it felt like a good time to move somewhere else."

A Clean Slate in Berlin

When Julia first arrived in Berlin, she started experimenting.

"I started using Claude and ChatGPT in the summer that I was here, to learn a bit more about visa stuff, more as a research tool," she explains. "Then I started using it to build websites and apps, and started thinking about other ways I could integrate it into my life, because I didn't feel like going back to UX would be such a fit for me anymore."

That experiment became the theme of her year. "It's been a fun kind of experiment, moving to Berlin with the clean slate. Everything in tech is so new and exciting with AI and all the tools available to us." Even so, she is clear about her foundation: "I will always be UX. That will always be a part of me."

Why UX Matters More, Not Less

A common worry is that AI will erode the need for UX. Julia sees it the other way around.

"I think if anything, UX is more important and the principles are more important. With less people dedicated to UX, it becomes more important, but the way we think about it and the way it fits into an organization is different."

She points to what she observes in early-stage companies. "What I'm seeing in startups is there's not often a designer on staff until they reach a certain level of size or funding. The focus is so much on engineers." The result is a gap between brilliant technical execution and the people the product is meant to serve. "This is what everyone is kind of trying to figure out at the moment."

The UX, Community, and Growth Triangle

Julia has started drawing UX as one point of a triangle, alongside community and growth.

"In the age of AI, this is how products are actually growing, especially consumer products," she says. "People feel connected to it, that's community. It's designed for them, that's UX. When you have people connecting to a product, using it, relating to it, feeling seen by it, that ultimately makes it grow."

Her consulting work maps onto that triangle. On one side, she helps startups that are heavy on engineering talent but disconnected from their users. "They have brilliant engineers, brilliant technical talent, but they're not necessarily connecting it to their users, which is leading to a big struggle in finding product market fit." On the other side, she runs community and design workshops for larger organizations, where the human layer often shows up "more in the form of a community layer."

How It Started: A Fifth-Grade Social Network

Julia's path into UX started absurdly early.

"When I was in fifth grade, so about 11 years old, my friends really wanted to join Facebook and we were too young. So I decided to solve the problem myself, and I made a website that was a fully active social media page with all 30 of my classmates on it. This is how I spent my summer."

That summer hooked her. "I really fell in love with designing a product, designing websites." She kept building, picked up HTML, and later learned C and C++. The human side clicked in university. "I was taking some tech and society courses, learning more about how technology was impacting us, and that's where I added the human layer."

UX became the place where all of it met. "I love design, I love research, I love product, and I feel like all of these pieces fit. I like that UX allows me to bridge all of these passions together." For Julia, that bridge is the whole point: "It's connecting the technology we use to the people who use it. If we're not thinking about who it's for and what problems we're solving, then it doesn't really make sense to keep adding features."

The Road to Google, and the Starbucks Detour

The Google goal was a childhood checkpoint on the way to a bigger dream. "When I built my first site, it became my goal to really become CEO of Apple. Some people want to be president or an astronaut, I wanted to be a CEO." Working at Google went on the list as a step along the way.

It did not come easily. "I probably applied 20 times. I had some interviews, but I never landed an internship." After her master's, with nothing landing, she turned to her alumni network and got a lucky break: someone at Google was hiring for a research coordinator role. "It was the one full loop of interviews that I had, and then I got the offer." Six months later she transitioned into a UX research role.

What set her apart was not a perfect resume. It was how she connected experience to thinking, including five years working as a barista.

"I worked at Starbucks for five years. Ultimately that's what got me the UX research job, because I was applying UX thinking to the customer experience. That's what stood out to the research team."

Along the way she had stacked up the foundations a research role usually wants: a master's with a human computer interaction focus, work in a university innovation lab, and freelance projects to build a portfolio. "For UX that's essential, because it is so much about bringing the human to something bigger."

Julia's Current Toolkit

Julia's tools split across thinking, research, and design. Some are familiar, some are new, and one is paper.

Pen and paper. "I'm a visual thinker, and it helps me to start writing things. Especially in the context of a user flow, it can be helpful to think about my own journey and visualize it with words and arrows, sometimes pictures."

Claude for words and synthesis. "It's helpful to organize thoughts. I can enter a lot of data from interviews or stories, and it's able to synthesize it into clean ways, even find patterns that I wouldn't be able to see before."

Gemini for data. "I'm using Gemini a lot for data analysis. I can enter sheets from Excel, tons of data, and it's able to find these patterns." Her rule of thumb: "Claude is better with words, and Gemini is a bit better with big data sets. That's my thesis."

Codex for design. Returning to hands-on design work, she leans on AI that understands design systems. "You're able to use it as your code designer, entering your design systems, and then it's able to generate custom assets that look great."

Figma, with reservations. Designing in Figma again after a few years, she found the free experience underwhelming. "It's so much worse than it used to be, maybe because now the premium features are behind a paywall." She sees the tool landscape shifting toward the bigger AI tools, while Figma still shines for collaboration inside an organization, "to collaborate on flows and things," as she did at Google.

She is also watching free, image-generating tools like Stitch that lower the cost of exploring many design directions at once, a contrast she finds compelling next to pricier design assistants.

The Shifting Shape of UX Roles

Julia is candid that job titles are in flux. In startups, she often sees engineers where a researcher or designer used to be.

"They have product engineers, AI engineers, forward deployed engineers. A forward deployed engineer is talking to customers, similar to a UX researcher, doing some concept testing, but they're engineers, so they have the knowledge of how it connects to the product from the technical perspective."

She has considered going more technical herself, but coding is not what excites her. Instead she sees UX strengths translating into new shapes. "The opportunity for UX is that we're able to think in a way where we're seeing problems, identifying pain points, and thinking through the solutions. I would like to see more UX people step into founder roles and build their own products."

For researchers specifically, she highlights a skill that is becoming universal. "A big focus in my time at Google was connecting insights to business metrics. In any role you're having to show how your work is leading to growth and driving revenue."

Her summary is blunt and optimistic at once: "It doesn't seem like UX is going to exist in teams of folks working with that title. The titles will change, even the PM role is changing. Right now we're seeing different people test things and try things, and I'm curious to see what happens."

Working in the Open: Together by Design

Julia's community work runs through Together by Design, a nonprofit based in Zurich and founded by one of her former managers at Google.

"We're a team of 28 researchers, artists, designers, and teachers, really people from all ends of the world. We're a distributed team, and I'm the only member in Berlin." The group works with people building communities, from grassroots groups to corporates, "to understand how they build and sustain healthy communities."

That practice produced something reusable. "From this we developed a toolkit of 42 community building principles, which are in our free, open source toolkit." For Julia it is the Starbucks lesson again, applied to a new problem. "Ultimately, design is solving problems."

Learning to Experiment

If there is one skill Julia would put at the center of the next few years, it is the willingness to experiment, something she had to grow into.

"At first I felt really scared to experiment. I had the idea to do research on a consulting basis before leaving Google, but I wasn't ready. It took some time to feel comfortable using AI and the tools, to marinate in the brain."

Now the calculus has changed. "I see what I can do that I couldn't do before, and what I can do is a lot more experimenting, trying things, picking up projects that sound interesting, and feeling more free to try and learn."

She thinks UX people are unusually well prepared for that. "UX folks are well positioned for this, because we come from a huge range of backgrounds. There's not a very clear path that one takes from university to UX. It's a lot more varied."

She zooms out to the bigger cycle. "I remember around 2010, startups were huge, Uber and Airbnb and that SF startup culture, and then it moved toward the big companies. Now with AI we're seeing the shift back to small companies, teams of 10 people or less, only scaling once there's funding and significant traction. There's a lot of uncertainty about how that looks, but I think it's time to just start trying."

Find Julia Online

Connect with Julia on LinkedIn, or visit her at juliafontana.com and the22nd.de. You can also explore the free, open source community toolkit from Together by Design to see the principles she helped develop.

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