Google deserves a lot of credit. They built a better search engine and have kept it one step ahead of the competition for seven years. They reinvented online advertising with AdWords and gave everyone with a website the ability to make a couple of bucks with AdSense. Gmail is one of the best webmail clients out there and Google Maps is just so amazingly great, it shocked MapQuest and Yahoo Maps out of their decade-long slumber.
With the exception of a couple of privacy freakouts, Google’s image has remained mostly untarnished. When the US government recently asked all the major search engines for server logs, Yahoo forked them over, but Google said no, earning the admiration of every geek who’s ever searched for a naughty word or two.
Google’s gotten a lot of praise, and they deserve pretty much all of it. But just because they’re the biggest dog in search, that doesn’t mean they’ve done everything right. In fact, when it comes to visual design, they’ve done pretty much everything wrong.
Portal to the Past
In the late nineties and early 2000s, when words like “portal” and “stickiness” were thrown around like so much unwise investment, every search engine piled layer upon layer of crap on their homepage, making it harder and harder to ascertain what, exactly, they did. If you want an example, just look at Yahoo’s homepage today – it’s still a “portal” in all its hectic, eye-crushing glory.
But Google kept it real, man. Their Zen-like homepage has remained pristine through it all. But what seems like smart marketing now was probably just design ineptitude. You don’t have to look much past Google’s Fisher Price logo to know it: These people have no use for design.
After a few years, the sparseness of Google’s homepage and refrigerator magnet logo have become their brand. They’re the anti-design search engine. But as they roll out new services (Calendar, Gmail, Etc), their pristine homepage’s days are numbered.
The Problem
Too many of today’s web companies simply copy Google’s sparse homepage because they think some of that success might rub off on them. But Google was successful in spite of their design, not because of it. Google rules the web today because their technology was so great, so unique back then, that users were willing to overlook their hostile user experience.
Imagine a web page with just a logo, a form entry field, and a submit button. What does it do? Only one way to find out. Some call that brilliant – I call it mean. The only reason we all tolerate it at all is because we were trained to. But that only works once – to compete, you have to offer users a better experience.
Google was not a success because their homepage was sparse. They were a success because they brought a better technique to solving a real world problem, and didn’t ever go off-message. And partly because it didn’t take much explaining, and partly because they were the scrappy underdog, and partly because they were going against the design trend of the time, their homepage was utterly bereft of any hint of design.
The lesson startups should learn is that, if those conditions are exactly the same for them – if they’ve got a red hot new technology that solves a real problem and is so dead simple that users will instinctively understand it without instruction – then by all means, copy Google. Create that perfect, sparse, Zen-like, no-explanation homepage, man.
But if you are entering a crowded marketplace, and you’re doing something a little bleeding edge, something a little newfangled, something your mom or dad might not see the value in without your explaining … in other words, if you live in the real world, you can’t expect people to understand your product when all you give them is a logo and a blank form.
The Cult of Google
Ever heard of a Cargo Cult? During World War II, supplies were air-dropped to soldiers on Pacific Islands. The natives saw this as miraculous – food falling from the sky! When the war was over and the soldiers departed, the islanders repeated the things they’d seen. They built wooden altars that resembled runways and control towers. They wore wooden earphones and waved wooden landing signals. They thought that if they did what they’d seen soldiers do, the food would come parachuting down again.
Seems crazy, right? But it’s no different than search engines copying Google’s design, somehow hoping it’ll bring showers of cash. Just look at the recently redesigned Ask.com. Where there once was a friendly butler, there to lend a hand, now there’s just a logo and a search box. Where there once was a differentiating characteristic and an interesting (albeit kind of silly) brand, now there’s just another pale imitation of the market leader. How can a site like Ask prove to its users that it’s better than Google when they’re obviously changing their design to be more like it? It’s clear who’s leading, and who’s playing catch-up.
And it’s not just Ask.com. Take any half-serious search engine like A9 or Microsoft’s new Live search engine. They all copy Google’s user interface: Logo, form, button. Why are they so afraid of giving their users a little context?
Something Completely Different
When I redesigned Technorati, I felt strongly that if we copied Google’s structure, users would expect a Google-like experience. But Technorati is a fundamentally different search engine: the results are blog posts sorted by time, not websites sorted by relevance. If a user expected an experience like Google, they’d walk away unfulfilled. So Technorati had to reset some user expectations.
We did that by adding text and context. The text took some time to explain what Technorati did (assuming everyone will “get it” is a classic startup mistake). The context showed example content. The best way to indirectly teach users is to provide them with excellent examples. In this case, we chose to show the top recent search terms and tags. That way, if you were suffering from input anxiety, and didn’t know what to search for, you could jump in using what the crowd thought was hot.
This made it clear, right from the first page, that Technorati was different. It reset the expectations that users came to the site with. And best of all, the users loved the top searches feature, sometimes coming back to the site many times a day to see what was hot. I was happy to see the recently launched blog search engine Sphere provide some context the same way.
The Question to Ask
If you’re ever tempted to copy Google’s sparse interface, or have a client who says, “Well, Google did it this way, so they must be right,” tell them that copying Google says two things about you:
- You don’t care enough about your users to bother talking to them about why they should care about you (and, therefore, they won’t)
- You’re as unoriginal as the guy selling knockoff handbags on the corner, so it’s probably best to just avoid eye contact altogether.
So I beg you, the next time you’re faced with a design decision, don’t ask “What would Google do?” Instead ask, “What would the people who use our product totally love?”
Answer that and Google might just have competition someday.
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Sun, May 14, 2006
Design, Features, User Interface