Ken M. Haggerty

Driving is challenging, dangerous, and time-consuming. Our goal was to make the roads safer for drivers, passengers, and pedestrians alike, and to reimagine the car experience by creating the world's most experienced driver.

UX Researcher working with Ing-Marie Jonsson and Clifford Nash, with responsibilities focused on technical implementation, execution, analysis, and presentation of user research studies.

I also assisted in interface design work to conceive potential alternatives to our UI at the time.

The first version of Google's self-driving car was aimed at highway-only use. A key challenge of this was understanding the handoff between manual driving and self-driving modes.

We performed usability and safety studies via simulated virtual environments, rapid interface evaluation sessions, and in-car daily commutes.

Based on the results of our research, the difficult but necessary decision was made to focus on "end-to-end" self driving capabilities in order to mitigate the dangers presented during autonomous-to-manual driving handoff.

The self-driving cars project within Google [x] has since spun out into its own company within Google called Waymo. My former colleague Dmitri Dolgov now serves as co-CEO of Waymo alongside Tekedra Mawakana.

In 2017, Waymo launched Waymo One, the world’s first self-driving ride-hailing service, in Chandler, AZ.

As of 2026, Waymo operates in 11 cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta, and has driven over 220 million miles—all without a human driver.

Waymo is currently preparing to launch in 23 more cities including London, Tokyo, Madrid, and Munich.