I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [33]
"The table of contents has a hardwired width of six fifty," Bay might say to kick things off. "How about creating another column in the middle, and making it a fixed width?"
"The headings seem to be set farther right on the page than the text," Marissa might jovially rejoin. "Can we fix this with margins or reducing cell padding or cell spacing?"
"You missed a comma after the second item in the series," I'd toss out, just to keep the rollicking good times rolling and oxygen flowing to my frontal lobe.
Mockup wars broke out constantly and quickly escalated, with design ideas expressed as HTML sketches. The projector linked to our laptops fired dozens or even hundreds of layouts at the wall as we fought our way toward the most user-intuitive implementation.
I was handicapped by my degree in English—a burden I alone struggled to bear. It wasn't that I didn't understand basic HTML tags (as a concept, anyway), but my limited knowledge left me unilaterally disarmed. I had brought a cap gun to an Uzi drive-by. As my colleagues furiously revised code on the fly and sent iterations ricocheting, I resorted to paper and color markers to render my ideas. That patronizing chuckle you bestow on toddlers for stick-figure portraits? It became the soundtrack of my presentations.
Sometimes UI team members disagreed, which made it easier to stay awake. Engineering, research, and marketing were all represented, but alliances shifted. I often found myself in concert with Bay, who had written his doctoral dissertation on human-computer interaction, and with Karen, who intuited what might be useful to "normal" people (that is, users who didn't have an advanced technical degree—or, God forbid, even a BA—from Stanford).
I also agreed with Marissa more often than not. She carefully constructed positions based on user test results or data culled from our logs, the automatically generated internal records of users' interactions with our servers. "When Urs put me in charge of UI," she reminded us, "he said we didn't need opinions. We need facts and research to base good UI decisions on."
The problem was that sometimes we had questions the data couldn't answer. Should color bars be used as section headers or only as page titles? Should we use round radio buttons or a pull-down menu? Should we force browsers to display sans-serif text or allow users to override our choices with their own preferred fonts? Divisive issues that could suddenly turn vicious.
"People want to adjust the number of results they see based on the particular search they're conducting. It's query-specific," a debate might begin. And then, "Any idiot can see we must give them that choice on each results page."
"You kludge-riddled broken brainframe!" would come the reply. "Users want to set their number of results and leave it that way forever. The option to change shouldn't be shoved in their face like a smelly sock every time they search."
"You unbuffered buffoon! You understand nothing about online behavior! Have you even read User-Centered System Design?"
"No. But I've read your mama's user-centered system design..."
Okay, so that never happened. Instead, we looked at what other sites did and hypothesized what would be most effective by drawing on our own experience. Truth could not be objectively and rationally derived until we had actually made a decision and implemented it. When we guessed wrong, usage dropped and user email increased.
"Why can't I change my display font?" people demanded to know. "Isn't this still America?"
Arthur C. Clarke once postulated, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Our job on the UI team was to set the stage for the technological marvel that happened whenever someone conducted a search—to make Google's interface supernaturally simple to use. The choices we made