Tag: google

Adam Rifkin:

Put another way, Google designing social apps is like Microsoft designing iPod packaging.

Anything social by Google has been an abject failure, in my view. They’re just terrible at doing anything that doesn’t make Google better as a company. For most people at Google, life is 98% work, 2% sleep, and they design products with that lifestyle in mind.

As reported by IW:

The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

This definitely makes sense. In short: remember what people keep coming back for, constrain to location if they need something right away, and tailor to the medium.

Everything Android gets right are things the iPhone got right first and still does better. Every “unique to Android” feature seems, at best, a technological demo.

The fact that Android is open is probably a major part of the problem.

When you have to cater to almost any hardware stack, how do you really optimize for things like battery life? On some phones, the display is far less efficient than others. Some devices have the 4G modem as the top draw of power while others have a very efficient 3G modem.

How can you design software that integrates features into the whole system when only a small percentage of devices will have that feature in the first place?

Android ends up being a duct-tape solution to compete against the iPhone, and fails.

Open systems work really well when the audience consists solely of geeks, and when the solution focuses purely on technology. Beyond that, a closed system with good taste guiding it clearly produces better results.

Everything Android gets right are things the iPhone got right first and still does better. Every “unique to Android” feature seems, at best, a technological demo.

The fact that Android is open is probably a major part of the problem.

When you have to cater to almost any hardware stack, how do you really optimize for things like battery life? On some phones, the display is far less efficient than others. Some devices have the 4G modem as the top draw of power while others have a very efficient 3G modem.

How can you design software that integrates features into the whole system when only a small percentage of devices will have that feature in the first place?

Android ends up being a duct-tape solution to compete against the iPhone, and fails.

Open systems work really well when the audience consists solely of geeks, and when the solution focuses purely on technology. Beyond that, a closed system with good taste guiding it clearly produces better results.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

A good look at the problems Google Wave really does solve — primarily centering around business email:

I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”.

The article also discusses a few key shortcomings with conventional email. Would you solve them the same way?

The title says it all. Now you have proof for clients. Who really cares about Ask and Yahoo?

Another strike against SEO.

Derek Powazek:

It’s a game, and every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients. And every time they win, those of us trying to create quality work and good experiences on the web lose.

I’m looking forward to my first opportunity to use the word “jerkwad” in semi-formal conversation.

I’m always reluctant to link to anything Scoble writes, but I almost completely agree with what he’s written in this case, and have been thinking the same thing lately.

In response to a quote from Google saying, “We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people:”

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn’t seem like anyone is interested. Let’s go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they’d ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying “I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters.”

For UX folk, it’s one of the big disconnects between user research and the product design process. If everyone could name exactly what they needed, someone would already have gone and made it. Great products solve problems that people never knew they had.

Even if you don’t actually use many of these yourself, you should understand how each of these suggestions work.

It includes mostly developer-centric suggestions, like CSS optimizations and caching methodologies, but also includes some of the more design- and UX-related strategies for making sites appear faster:

When designing your website or web app, keep in mind that users come to your site with a purpose. The faster (and easier) they can accomplish what they came to do, the better. If users encounter a lot of difficulty in getting to your content, they will leave your site for one that lets them accomplish their goals faster.

An interesting comparison of the details between the iPhone’s keyboard, and the Android keyboard, as implemented on the HTC Magic:

A virtual keyboard lives and dies by the details. It’s not that there’s a single feature which makes the iPhone’s virtual keyboard better than Android’s; it’s death by a thousand cuts. A number of small differences end up making a huge difference.5 Apple obviously spent a lot of time getting every little detail just right (well, except for the ducking dictionary), while Google decided to go ahead with what they had – which is usable, but no match for what the iPhone offers.

The 10% difference in physical screen size (while still being equal in terms of pixels) probably reduces performance by well more than 10%

Looks like the years of Google OS rumors have finally turned out to be true. As predicted by most, the web is the platform:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

A lot of this has been made possible by new HTML5 features, like application caches, web app protocol mapping, etc. The network appliances failed years ago, but this makes the prospect much brighter.

Ian Bogost’s site got script-kiddied, Google marked it as being a malware site, and then Twitter (which uses Google’s malware system to detect spam) took Google’s word and suspended his account.

As Google offers more and more business to business services like malware detection, and more and more third-parties use those services, this particular type of Googlization can only grow in impact. And the worst part of it is, you can’t do anything about it. One can choose not to maintain a Google account or to use Google services, but one can’t prevent Google from maintaining you.

Google’s announced some new options for search, including topical, content-type, and chronological filters, as well as an ability to explore related terms.

Additionally, rich snippets bring structured data to the results page, based on data provided by Microformats or RDFa. A clear call from Google:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google.

In line with my recent post of the same nature about Twitter: A quick little list of instances of Google implementing “competitors’” product features shortly before or after the competitor’s announcement.

So what’s going on here? Greg’s reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to “the competition” (if that’s what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He’s right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop’s store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

Compete on features with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other market leaders at your own peril. If it’s just features, your risks grow exponentially.

Hyperbolic, but interesting nonetheless. Joe Clark posits that Google is no place for the creative brain. Instead, every aspect of its culture is tailored to the highly-focused, quantitative tasks that eschew the notion of “taste” entirely:

My impression of “Googlers,” which I concede is based on little direct knowledge and is prejudicial on its face, is one of undersocialized, uncultured, pampered, arrogant faux-savants who have cultivated an arrested adolescence that the Google working environment further nurtures. Their computer-programming skills, the sole skills valued by the company, camouflage the flaws of their neuroanatomy. Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use.

To Joe, the high-functioning prefrontal cortex differentiating babies from adults is a liability, not an asset.

Ben de Castella has an interesting take on the impact of the aforementioned engineering-centric design philosophy at Google:

While people may not be prepared to shell out for PC software, mobiles are a different story. Mobiles are the ultimate lifestyle accessory and one that consumers are used to paying for, even if indirectly through operators. While design may not be too much of an issue when you’re getting something for free, when you’re shelling out hundreds of dollars it suddenly becomes more important, particularly when it is something that goes everywhere with you.

I don’t think it’s a matter of one or the other. All parts of the team need to value and understand the thought/design/engineering process of the rest of the team in order to come to the best conclusions. Apple seems to indeed embrace both design and engineering, while Google seems to only embrace the latter. This is a legit criticism of the G1 to almost anyone except developers, unsurprisingly.

Another perspective from Kevin Fox, a former Senior UX Design Lead at Google:

Also please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface. It’s not as demonstrable as code that passes unit-tests, but trust in it anyhow.

and to the users:

Google could easily increase their revenue in the short term with just a few poor decisions, but they don’t. This philosophy of ‘put the user first and the money will follow’ is so ingrained into the Google culture that many designers and engineers for whom this is their first corporate job don’t even realize that this is unusual, and that is awesome.

There are two sides to every story. Good to hear Fox’s.

Things seem to be stirring up around previously-linked Doug Bowman’s departure from Google, and there seems to be a bit of a designer exodus from the Google fanboy-wagon. Joe Clark:

Google, I correctly contend, is overrun with unsocialized Aspergerian math guys who think anything to do with visual design (or, for that matter, accommodating cripples) just does not compute…

Two bull-headed communities — the Googleplex and the standards-minded design community, both with laserlike focus in their own ways — seem to be coming to a bit of a head here.

Douglas Bowman, one of the godfathers of web design, on his decision to leave Google after three years:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

As is now coming up over and over again, data and user research should be one tool to inform design decisions, but should not be the sole factor or measure of design success.