Before she enrolled as a graduate student in Digital Media at Tech, Rebecca Rolfe was already an accomplished Web designer at CNN.com, where she prepared artwork for stories, made charts and graphics for the daily news desk, and even helped out with a complete site redesign in 2009. “At that point in my career, I was focused primarily on direct storytelling and visual design,” Rolfe says.

Her master’s degree in digital media (and an internship at the company) helped land her a permanent, plum job at Google as an interaction designer for its Chrome web browser. However, it’s a completely different role for Rolfe. “A visual designer works out the style—the type, the colors, the sizing,” she says. “Meanwhile, an interaction designer figures out where, for example, the print button goes on the page if it shows up on mobile or tablet devices, what dialog pop-ups you get when you click the button, and how the overall flow works so that you can print your page effortlessly.”

When Rolfe was hired for the Chrome team she wasn’t exactly sure how she’d stay busy. “If you use the Chrome browser you’ll see there’s very little obvious design going on,” she says. “But that’s what makes it magical. It only feels like there’s not much to design—there’s actually quite a lot there and we just don’t notice it. It aims to be minimal, to let you get to enjoying the Web.”

The challenge for Rolfe is to integrate all the Web browser features users care about while keeping Chrome true to its slick and sleek origins. “It’s an interesting, ongoing problem to solve,” she says.

Rolfe has learned a lot about design in her relatively short time at Google. “‘Design for the user and all else will follow’ is the overarching philosophy here,” Rolfe says. “If we’re thinking of the user first, then we’re doing the right thing.”

In addition, she finds it encouraging to work for a company that embraces change. “Google isn’t afraid to dismantle something and rebuild it from the ground up for the sake of creating something people love,” Rolfe says. “I could be more daring in my design, to be honest. I’m a good interaction designer because I try to find the clearest path. But Google forces me to ‘think 10x,’ where we don’t aim to increment little by little, but rather think how what we’re working on can be 10 times more awesome.”

Profile originally featured in the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.