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
Revisiting my new years resolution for 2008.
I owe nothing, woot! I’ve saved a pretty penny, but not my goal amount. I’ve read a little more than 1 book each month, go Eloy!
You could say that I’ve completed 3 out of 5 of my goals for this year. Or atleast you can say that I’ve completed 2.5 out of 5 this year.
Home ownership has been on my mind but I’ve been less than driven. I’ll do better. I hope I hope.
I’ll also list out the books that I’ve read this year incase you’re curious.
2 comments September 26th, 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 want an iPhone! No I don’t, yes I do! Arrgh I’m a pirate.
I like my regular old Samsung phone, it has what I need … it’s a phone with text messaging. That’s all I really use.
Enter Will.
He shows me twitterific, facebook, gmail, gtalk, google maps, google search, the easy voicemail system, and contacts section, oh and wordpress (blogging from your phone) oh my.
How dare he accidently sell me. I use all of those things, and now I don’t have to be stuck at some desk in my home or office.
Ok, so he didn’t tell me about the wordpress thing, but still you get the point. It’s the thing I never knew I always wanted.
There is one thing and one thing only keeping me away and that’s the AT&T network. Verizon rules, can you hear me now? – Good.
4 comments July 21st, 2008
Today I purchased a printer on NewEgg. When I finished placing my order it asked me to print the confirmation page. Sad days.
1 comment July 20th, 2008
Went to see The Dark Knight on Friday and I don’t regret it. I honestly only wanted to go see it because it was one of Heath Ledgers last movies (he still has one more coming out called The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009).
It was a-mazing to say the least. Heath Ledger as the Joker — brilliant! I’m not ready to say that he was better than Jack Nicholson, but it he does help you to see the Joker in a whole new light
The story line wasn’t bad either, lots of twist and turns … dark, but not too dark … cheesy but not too cheesy. Just right. I give it 2 thumbs way up and a toe.
Add comment July 20th, 2008
Went [indoor] Rock Climbing yesterday. It was awesome. I’ve been 3 times total now and I’m loving it more and more each time. Did some extreme courses this go-around and came out of it with tiny scratches nothing worth showing off.
I’ve got plenty of running going on and climbing is there, now for some swimming … that would be nice and is very much missed.
We’ll (@Jman2k3, @heavymetalguru, @holtkampw, Jennifer, @karaet, @eloy) do a better job of taking pictures next time and publishing some of our new found heights.
This trio [Will, David, and Justin] can also be found at http://www.asklg.net/.
Add comment July 20th, 2008
Ahh the 4th of July. Man Christmas. You cook meat, you drink good drink, play with fire, you make things explode, you hang around outside, and talk about manly men stuff. While the women are inside preparing the meat (accounts for 80% of actual cooking), and squeak to each other about things they find pretty and who’s not talking to who now.
The 4th of July is under appreciated by most, but I’m beginning to believe that it might be one of my new favorites.
2 comments July 6th, 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
We arrived in California yesterday. We took a ride on the trolley and visited Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bare by the time we got there but still enjoyable. We ate at Bubba Gump Shrimp (yes just like the movie) one of our programmers Jenny took 2 sips of a tropical drink there and got drunk. You never know what you’re gonna get.
It’s 7:30a right now, that translates to 9:30a Houston time. I’ve got about 1 hour before we start registration for Google IO / breakfast, yum.
We’re staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, which is wow to say the least. The view is gorgeous, yes I’m a guy and I can say gorgeous when the moment calls for it. Beautiful view in the center of Downtown San Francisco California.
Weather is awesome, the sun is out but it’s not hot. I’m going to go now and enjoy that thing they call life, it’s almost like it’s easier to do that here. Oh yeah and learn some stuff.
2 comments May 28th, 2008
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