14 November 2002

Google UI secret: be a swiss-army knife, and lots of testing All of us on the UI team think the value of Google is in not being cluttered, in offering a great user experience. I like to say that Google should be "what you want, when you want it." As opposed to "everything you could ever want, even when you don't." [...] I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed. [...] The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience. It's important to differentiate between "usefulness" and "usability." At Google, we make a *useful* tool, and then we put a *usable* interface on top of that. One has to precede the other. If you have usability without a useful product, you don't really have much. This is the UI principle that even Yahoo! sometimes forgets (hence the arrival of services like MyWay, which sells itself as Yahoo! without the banners and pop-ups; motto: Yahoo! is toast). And here's their approach to testing: do lots of it, and respect and act on its results. When I first started testing in 2000, we tested once a month. Now, we're user testing almost every week. We'll do a site-wide test once a month or so, with some tasks, but more free-form, just to see where people go, where they encounter problems. The other three weeks of the month, we test specific features. Adwords, for example, is a new product that's big enough that it needs its own test - it can't be layered into a sitewide test. So we test every 10 days, usually with eight users each. We want to find the big problems, and with eight users we definitely get to that level. 5:32:59 PM     comments

SandCherry: carriers should offer speech resources on a per use basis Dale Hartzell of SandCherry sees two key trends in carriers today regarding speech technology: consolidation of their independent speech services into a single infrastructure to save development, maintenance and management cost: call centre, voice-enabled messaging, voice dialing, voice portal... separation of content and applications ownership from resource ownership. The applications that carriers should own are the ones based on their own content: directory services and voice dialing; but they're no good at traffic directions etc. However, they are well suited to deploy, manage and maintain large pools of resources such as SALT or VXML browsers, recognition engines and TTS engines that they can provide to users as needed. When carriers offer speech resources on a usage basis similar to charging for an 800 call they eliminate the need for each enterprise to buy or build an onsite speech solution. Based on this, we really see three major areas where carriers will focus their service efforts. The first is using voice to augment existing network services: prepaid, voice dialing, voice mail, email and messaging. The second is improving their customer self service and call center. The third area is creating a network-based speech service for enterprise customers. 8:55:46 AM     comments

Milton Glaser, designer: This Is What I Have Learned I am going to tell you everything that I know about the practice of design. It is a sort of collage of bits and pieces that I have assembled over 50 years. It includes a lot of things I've said before but I've repackaged them rather attractively. This is what I've learned. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE (Just enough is more) STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN (Drawing makes you attentive) DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY SOLVING THE PROBLEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING RIGHT TELL THE TRUTH (incl 12 steps in the Road to Hell) 8:31:19 AM     comments

I have no words and I must design: What is a game? A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal. [via Interconnected] 8:30:30 AM     comments

Observer review of Balmond: The Informal There is a common thread linking Anish Kapoor's gigantic, vertigo-inducing sculpture at Tate Modern with James Stirling's monumental Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Toyo Ito's lighter-than-air garden pavilion at the Serpentine, Daniel Libeskind's proposed Spiral for the V&A, and just about everything that Rem Koolhaas has ever built. None of them would have been possible without Cecil Balmond. [...] Koolhaas describes what Balmond has to offer like this: 'Instead of solidity and certainty, his structures express doubt, arbitrariness, mystery and even mysticism.' Balmond's structures tend to look as if they have no business standing up. Instead of depending on massive walls and simple symmetry for their strength, they rely on what he presents as being a deeper understanding of nature. Cecil Balmond is the uber-engineer at Arup, the world's biggest and cutting-edgest engineering firm. See also: New writing about objects 8:30:03 AM     comments