The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance. No decision-making process is perfect; pointing out the warts in Google's isn't much of an indictment. Really, to my mind the whole thing comes across as a bit whiny.
Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.
Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.
I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.
For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.
Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
> Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
No, that's exactly their focus. You got a lot of attention regarding the product that you were a customer of, the premium paid apps.
In the other instance, you were the product: a pair of eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. And the advertisers are the customers in that instance.
I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.
For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.
Sure, the author is a bit whiny, but I still think he has a point.
One example: design. I still haven't seen a single page from Google that looked stunning, or even good (to my eyes, obviously). Their entire design philosophy seems to be infinite-amount-of-monkeys-hacking-css and A/B-testing. They even manage to make their main landing page, with only a handful of items, look quite messy.
The method may be scientific and all, but it doesn't produce good looks.
Because good looks don't necessarily equate to good performance. They optimize for conversion, not beauty, and make an ass-load more money because of it. That's how it should be done.
You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. You can just tweak the details, in the turd-polishing sense.
That being said, being ugly can of course be profitable. If you want to signal that you are cheap, for example, the ugliness helps. Just look at the difference between, say, Walmart and an Apple store. So maybe Google wants to look cheap - but I for one wish they didn't.
> You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design.
That's just crap. You can test anything, including entirely different versions of an app. The idea that you can't test good design is what designers tell themselves to justify their operating on gut feeling and pulling opinions out of their asses.
There isn't anything a user does that you can't come up with a way to test, designers are just afraid of actual data showing them they're full of shit. They don't want their ideas challenged democratically by users, they want their own ideas used instead because of some misplaced sense of taste. Engineers do it right, test, iterate, improve, follow the data wherever it leads regardless of your own ego.
It may be crap, undemocratic, pulled out of behinds, and egotistic. It's still true though.
You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.
And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two different novels, for example, but pretty much all the "intermediate novels" you can think of just don't make any sense.
> You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.
Yet it's still testable. There isn't anything you can't test somehow and there isn't any design any designer could come up with that can't benefit from incremental improvement as a result of testing.
> And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps.
That's your own strawman, no one says you have to. Test radically different designs against each other, testing will still declare a winner and that winner can be incrementally improved by further testing.
I agree with you, but it is still possible the they are only optimizing within a local minimum (ala Jason Cohen's latest blog post - http://blog.asmartbear.com/local-minimum.html).
I think you're ignoring the fact that a product as familiar as the Google search page alters the search space you're trying to optimize. No matter how bad of an idea it was to add background images, the fuss that it caused was way out of proportion.
Any change that deviates too much from the current state of things has a huge amount of friction working against it. Whatever you think of the current design, I defy anyone to come up with a major overhaul that makes up for the loss of warm fuzzies the average user associates with the current home page.
I submit to you as an example Chrome, which while technically sound has not exactly caught fire, despite Google's ability to promote it from the Google page.
By the metric of Chrome zooming up to about 4% share and then staying there, despite Google's frequently promoting it from the most popular page on the web, promotion no other browser could ever have.
On our web sites Chrome has gained no share in the last six months, while Safari (due to iPhone's increased share) has surpassed FireFox.
I'm just saying given the engineering resources dedicated to it, and the unparalleled promotion resource available, it could do much better.
Personally, I use Chrome, but I object to the product management decision not to offer a dedicated multi search box like FF and IE. I think this was an engineering driven decision because the omnibox is so [fill in your favorite positive adjective].
Comments
The author of this article backs up his argument with little substance. No decision-making process is perfect; pointing out the warts in Google's isn't much of an indictment. Really, to my mind the whole thing comes across as a bit whiny.
Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.
Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.
I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.
For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.
Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
> Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
No, that's exactly their focus. You got a lot of attention regarding the product that you were a customer of, the premium paid apps.
In the other instance, you were the product: a pair of eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. And the advertisers are the customers in that instance.
I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.
For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.
Sure, the author is a bit whiny, but I still think he has a point.
One example: design. I still haven't seen a single page from Google that looked stunning, or even good (to my eyes, obviously). Their entire design philosophy seems to be infinite-amount-of-monkeys-hacking-css and A/B-testing. They even manage to make their main landing page, with only a handful of items, look quite messy.
The method may be scientific and all, but it doesn't produce good looks.
Because good looks don't necessarily equate to good performance. They optimize for conversion, not beauty, and make an ass-load more money because of it. That's how it should be done.
You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. You can just tweak the details, in the turd-polishing sense.
That being said, being ugly can of course be profitable. If you want to signal that you are cheap, for example, the ugliness helps. Just look at the difference between, say, Walmart and an Apple store. So maybe Google wants to look cheap - but I for one wish they didn't.
> You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design.
That's just crap. You can test anything, including entirely different versions of an app. The idea that you can't test good design is what designers tell themselves to justify their operating on gut feeling and pulling opinions out of their asses.
There isn't anything a user does that you can't come up with a way to test, designers are just afraid of actual data showing them they're full of shit. They don't want their ideas challenged democratically by users, they want their own ideas used instead because of some misplaced sense of taste. Engineers do it right, test, iterate, improve, follow the data wherever it leads regardless of your own ego.
It may be crap, undemocratic, pulled out of behinds, and egotistic. It's still true though.
You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.
And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two different novels, for example, but pretty much all the "intermediate novels" you can think of just don't make any sense.
> You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.
Yet it's still testable. There isn't anything you can't test somehow and there isn't any design any designer could come up with that can't benefit from incremental improvement as a result of testing.
> And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps.
That's your own strawman, no one says you have to. Test radically different designs against each other, testing will still declare a winner and that winner can be incrementally improved by further testing.
I agree with you, but it is still possible the they are only optimizing within a local minimum (ala Jason Cohen's latest blog post - http://blog.asmartbear.com/local-minimum.html).
I think you're ignoring the fact that a product as familiar as the Google search page alters the search space you're trying to optimize. No matter how bad of an idea it was to add background images, the fuss that it caused was way out of proportion.
Any change that deviates too much from the current state of things has a huge amount of friction working against it. Whatever you think of the current design, I defy anyone to come up with a major overhaul that makes up for the loss of warm fuzzies the average user associates with the current home page.
I submit to you as an example Chrome, which while technically sound has not exactly caught fire, despite Google's ability to promote it from the Google page.
by what metric do you argue that it has not caught fire in ways that are remotely possible based on past experience with browser market share?
By the metric of Chrome zooming up to about 4% share and then staying there, despite Google's frequently promoting it from the most popular page on the web, promotion no other browser could ever have.
On our web sites Chrome has gained no share in the last six months, while Safari (due to iPhone's increased share) has surpassed FireFox.
This recent report, http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20001546-264.html, actually gives Chrome 6.1%.
I'm just saying given the engineering resources dedicated to it, and the unparalleled promotion resource available, it could do much better.
Personally, I use Chrome, but I object to the product management decision not to offer a dedicated multi search box like FF and IE. I think this was an engineering driven decision because the omnibox is so [fill in your favorite positive adjective].