So I went to Dr. Sketchy this weekend. Wow, what was I thinking missing the last 10 months (I think that’s how long this has been around). I will definintely be coming back. As always click the photo for more photos.
Update: Where have I been the last 8 months.
3 comments September 30th, 2008
Click on the photo to view more via Flickr. I submitted some of my photos to the Hurricane Ike Group started by Ed Schipul.
Big old tree takes a nap in front of my House.
3 comments September 15th, 2008
I’m a huge fan of A List Apart. It’s a wonderful website that shares knowledge in all areas of web; aesthetic as well as functional design. It’s a great resource for any and all web developers. If you are a web developer of any sort I’m sure you’ve heard of the site, if not I’m going to punch you in the </head>.
Last year A List Apart created an amazing survey that gave me a better grasp of where my future was going and how my current career choice stood against others in the field.
I — like many — am a huge advocate of clarity and this survey definitely provided it. This year I’m thankful to say that I was able to contribute and submit my 2 clicks … OK so it was more like 5.
If you’re a web developer in any sense of the word I strongly encourage you to contribute 4 minutes of your time to filling out the survey.
July 29th, 2008
First and foremost I want to apologize for the headings on this article, they are horrible. They all look the same! It has to do with this template and the style sheets which I didn’t think I was going to have to fix before posting. I’ll have to work on that.
Secondly I’d like to mention that this post is not verbatim per Marissa Mayer, but more of my interpretation of her presentation. I didn’t change too much so don’t worry. I’m also sure that I missed some stuff because her presentation was moving a bit fast towards the end.
You solve big problems when you think about the everyday.
On an everyday bases there’s a set number of tasks and knowledge people wish to gain. iGoogle provides this, it allows everyone to personalize their search page and provide them with what they want without any extra clicking.
iGoogle also provides a great way for distribution and advertisement. Distribution - Any developer can create a gadget; Advertisement - this alone sells (advertises) you as a developer.
Lower the importance of something and make it possible, make it more likely. If you enjoy crossword puzzles, it’s not likely that you’ll set your home page to the New York Times crossword puzzle because there are other more important things the home page can be set to. With iGoogle, setting the cross word puzzle is not such a big deal, because it’s just one of the many things that can be placed on your home page.
A lot of people like the simple Google Search page; an obvious call to action, a very clean look. Occam’s razor for logic says: The simplest design is probably right.
Sergey created the original homepage for Google Search. Marissa Mayer as been asked a thousand times over “what was your logic behind the Google Search page?”
When Marissa asked Sergey what his inspiration was, he looked confused and after a short pause answered: We didn’t have a webmaster. And, I don’t do HTML.
The Google Search page has gone through a number of subtle iterations; one of these iterations provided the search page with the copyright statement at the bottom of the page.
When the search page was first going through some one-on-one testing with end-users they found that many users were not used to the simplicity of the Google Search page.
The page would load and the end-users testing the page would stare. They would sit and stare, after about 40 minutes of staring Marissa would finally ask “is everything ok?”
The end user would response “I’m waiting for the rest of it.”
They found that the simplicity of the page made end-users feel as if there was more waiting to be loaded onto the page. The copyright symbol was added as a punctuation mark. Letting the end user know that the page is now done loading and you can commence with interacting.
Another frequently asked question about Google services was “how many people work there?” Marissa would answer about 80 employees. The next question was always “are you from the psych department?”
“beautiful code” >> Load Balancer (decide which logic server to use) >> Mixer (organize query for most valid results) >> Google Web Server (Relevant Advertisements + Search) >> Mixer (right relevance and order) >> Google Web Server (write html to page) >> Query travels back
700 - 1000 machines get hit with this query (takes about 0.16 seconds)
Our users don’t need to understand how complicated our systems are in order to use them.
Design has become much more of a science than an art. You can mathematically figure out what design works best with end-users.
When a change is made you know what you’re gaining, but do you know what you’re losing, what future movements (interaction) you’re changing?
Example: The amount of white space under the Google logo on a search page with results.
This test showed convincingly that less white space rather than more produces more usage and more revenue.
Example: Yellow or blue background for paid results.
Yellow produced both more satisfaction and more revenue.
Understand users better than they understand themselves.
“If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will” - Sam Walton
“If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford
Split AB testing was done with the “number of results” returned on a query. When given a choice between returning 10, 20, and 30 results; everyone said they would like to see 30 results returned. Soon after this change was made they noticed that the amount of searches decreased by 20% (this is bad).
They put on their thinking caps and tried to figure out why there would be less searches. The most obvious explanation was that, they’re receiving more results so there are fewer results to page through. After extensive research it was found that people were performing less searches because the page took longer to load; a variable that was not considered in their change. People really care about speed. They worked with this discovery and put their Google maps on a diet and noticed that they gained a 30% increase in people searching maps.
They also discovered that instant feedback allowed their users to learn faster. Instant feedback provides a steeper learning curve. Turn your users into experts as soon as possible.
It took Google 24-48 hrs to get your video uploaded. YouTube did it instantly. People preferred YouTube because of the experience.
The urgent can drown out the important. How can we take searchers and make them better. Could we do something that would teach them to become better searchers?
The learning curve on search is extremely fast. People start off by asking complete questions, they later learn to optimize their searches by using keywords. The learning curve is so short people become experts in minutes.
Add to the experience by making it didactic (instructive, art or science of teaching).
Earlier we spoke about thinking short term. Short term allows you to see your daily routine and solve that problem or inconvenience you deal with all the time. Everyday tasks shouldn’t be hard, you shouldn’t even have to think about them — so if you are — maybe there’s something worth solving there.
Thinking long term is good because it allows you to consider how your world may change. You use a cell phone today, but a cell phone is only a means to an end … but what end; communication, entertainment, organization?
6 month thinking lead to a nicer cell phone, 2 year thinking lead to a more robust cell phone, 10 year thinking lead to the iPhone.
It’s obviously harder to predict the status quo the further you go out, but that’s what separates you from everyone else.
Google knows that in 10 years out they’ll have a bigger index, and there will be a dramatic context change. Google believes that search will be more personalized.
A simple search was first created, then an image search, then a blog search, then a news search, then a video search, then a map search. Now Google needs a search engine that searches their search engines. What’s always been wanted is the ability to search.
Google has a secret, why are their products so amazing and why won’t many compete with them? It’s because they work on the impossible. They have fun gadgets and toys, but there is meaning to their madness. They build everyday applications that solve the harder problems of the world.
“A Healthy disrespect for the impossible” - Larry Page
Search is an impossible problem. But we work very hard for it every day. Dr means drive, doctor, and Dominican Republic … trying to disambiguate the search based off of 2 letters.
Getting to a 95% solution is a huge benefit.
Google doesn’t know if they’ll ever make revenue from GOOG-411, they believe that’s helpful and a good idea overall that will help people in everyday tasks, but there’s more.
Behind this application lies advanced technology, voice recognition. This leads to bigger better things. Should your first iteration not work, there is always a new way to package it.
You search in Arabic, the query translates to English, finds the results, retranslates the results, then translates the pages as you click through them.
Be scrappy. Revel in constraints. The company is composed of many small teams, we’re constrained by time, people, etc …
Constraints help. Google translated their pages to 14 different countries. They went through a lot of trouble. Google sent this information to translators; it went through testing and “Q&A”. Google would update while information was getting translated, the deliverable translations were old and headaches followed soon thereafter.
Later on she spoke with a friend who owned a website; this small website was owned and worked on by 6 other employees. They managed to translate their site to 50 different languages. It turns out that fans enjoyed the site so much; they would offer to translate pages.
Google Health is once again trying to work on a serious problem, giving people the ability to keep their own information. It took me (Marissa Mayer) 4 doctors to figure out if I was due for a vaccination because of a trip that I was taking.
It’s doubtful that allowing people to keep their own medical information will solve the problems of the medical history world, but we’re moving in that direction in a healthy disrespect for the impossible.
Maybe if we got enough of these we could define traffic patterns. Looking at these GPS signals, we wanted to know how closely we could get to the real thing. How live can the search be how we can best represent the information?
The purpose is not really to move forward with this but if we figure out the technology behind this we might be able to use it for a better purpose.
An example for working out the brain would be building a bridge between 2 buildings. How big would it be, what do we use, how high should it be. Something that currently has no practical use, but it gets the mind going
Let people work on what they want to work on, it’s where the best products come out from.
The overall approach is solving our own problems to the best of our ability then releasing that technology to everyone else. If it helped us it usually always helps everyone else.
The majority of user feedback used by Google comes from emails, statistics, and split AB testing.
Think about the everyday - Look at your everyday, if something in your everyday is requesting too much of your undivided attention, this might be something worth working on
Keeping it simple - Simple helps solve one definitive problem, solving one problem at a time and iterating on this solution seems to work
The Science of User Interaction Design - Know your users better than they know themselves, this sometimes means stepping away from the computer and putting yourself in their lives.
Think long term - Building for the next 6 months is great, but it would be best if you could think for a further future.
Create what is hard - Work on something meaningful, something hard even if it’s hidden in a not so meaningful disguise.
Imagination is a Muscle - Remember to spend time playing with what you’re passionate about. If you don’t know what you’re passionate about, you might want to start with that first.
1 comment June 1st, 2008
I woke up early again today. 4 hours of sleep. Not by choice. My head won’t shut up. On a happier note, I’m going to San Francisco towards the end of the month. Woot for me!
On some older news, we wrote memoirs a while back. 6 word memoirs. 6 words to express your (entire) life.
My memoirs are not that insightful, but still worth a read.
Eloy in 6 words
For more examples, Check out some of the memoirs that my peeps down at work came up with.
Can you describe your life in 6 words? Maybe I can do it for you.
1 comment May 14th, 2008
Student from Berkley uses Twitter to save himself from an Egyptian jail.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html
All I can say is “amazing.” It’s times like these that make me want to purchase an iPhone, just because the iPhone makes it so easy to use services like Twitter.
What is this that you’re saying, you don’t know what Twitter is? Well let me explain via this handy dandy oh-so-easy to watch video.
2 comments April 26th, 2008
I went to Discovery Green yesterday and it was awesome. I loved it, especially the part that reminded me about father hood. Click on the photo for more discovery green moments (not all photos have been uploaded yet).
Add comment April 14th, 2008
I went to a Rachel’s 10 year old birthday party. It was fun, I forgot how much cooler 10 year olds are than I am. I hadn’t roller bladed in about 8 years. It’s good to know that my legs still remember. If you haven’t gone roller blading or partied with the youngens lately, I highly recommened it.
Add comment March 16th, 2008
We were so close guys. We lost the Colgate Fun Center to Detroit, Michigan. Losing, when your best just isn’t good enough.
1 comment March 1st, 2008
Hey Houston. Colgate is offering to build a fun center for ill children in Houston. All you have to do is go to the site and click to vote. It’s simple and I promise it takes less than 10 seconds.
We’re currently in competition with only Detroit.
Detroit: 29.81%
Houston: 29.33%
You can vote once every 24 hours. We can do it. Your last day to vote is February 29th. Have you voted today?
http://www.colgate.com/app
1 comment February 24th, 2008
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