I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [17]
Codifying some UI guidelines† would be a good beginning project, I thought. How tough could it be to come up with some design rules for a page containing nothing but a search box, a hundred or so text characters, and some corporate shovelware behind it?* Besides, working with Karen was like drawing the right lab partner at school. Even if I screwed up, Karen wouldn't let us fail. We knocked a proposal together in less than a week.
Google was fast, accurate, and easy to use—that's what our users told us. Sergey wanted our site to be "fun" as well. Yeah, great, it's fine to have fun occasionally, but Karen and I agreed that whimsical elements shouldn't get in the way of users getting things done. We explicitly stated the obvious: "The personality of the site should under no circumstances interfere with the speed of results delivery, the accuracy of the results, or the ease in using the search functionality." An axiom we would unintentionally prove soon enough.
The rest of the proposal involved other obvious points—tweaks to what existed rather than a major overhaul—like adding decorative graphics to our corporate section. That didn't fly.
"Yahoo doesn't use images beyond the homepage," Larry reminded us, "and they have millions of users. Images take time to transfer across the Internet and slow things down." Larry and Sergey rolled on the floor rapturously speaking in tongues when we shaved a nanosecond off the time it took a page to load. Or to read. "I want all the content of the About Google section on one page," Larry said. "It would be faster to scroll up and down one page than to click from page to page and wait for it to load."
"But no one's going to scroll down a hundred pages," I said, not sure if he was joking. He wasn't, but we managed to argue him out of it. Other suggestions fell by the wayside, like a help link, a tagline, and an embarrassingly naive idea Sergey had to change the homepage logo every day to build user interest. Professional branding people were in the house now, and we would never abide such amateur antics. Overall, Larry and Sergey gave a thumbs-up, proclaiming our guidelines "sensible." High praise indeed.
I let out a sigh of relief. Now I got it. This was what I'd been hired to do. If I hadn't knocked my first project out of the park, at least I'd hit a solid double. Everyone seemed reasonable and receptive to new ideas, and the feedback made sense. I hadn't done anything terribly unconventional, yet my ideas had been accepted.
"Yep," I thought, "it's all going to work out just fine."
Birth of a Data Agnostic
"As of last night, Google's result font has become sans-serif," engineer Marissa Mayer announced to the company at large. "We tested the change and Larry and I reviewed it with some other engineers who were here and offered opinions about it."
I had seen Marissa's name on a note Sergey forwarded to the new marketing group a couple of days earlier. She had suggested we replace our temporary slogan—"Best Search Engine in the World. Promise"—with one Urs had come up with: "The Little Engine That Could." I didn't particularly like either line, though Marissa had constructed a detailed rationale for associating Google with the "scrappy," "determined," and ultimately "triumphant" children's book character. Besides, she pointed out, look at the importance of Ask Jeeves's tagline to their valuation.
Shari thanked Marissa and explained that we didn't have a slogan, just a phrase that was printed on some cards until we could properly research our brand character. Marketing had it under control.
Marissa, like Susan, was an old-timer who had