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Google’s Goals, User Experience Challenges

This presentation discusses Google's goals, user experience challenges, and how they strive to understand and meet the needs of their diverse user base. It covers topics such as localization, consistency, integration, and making Google accessible anywhere, anytime.

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Google’s Goals, User Experience Challenges

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  1. Google’s Goals, User Experience Challenges Maria Stone 10/08/07 based on earlier talks by Jen Fitzpatrick, Jenny Gove, Deepak Menon and Michael Margolis

  2. Google’s Mission • Organize the world's information and make it universallyaccessible and useful.

  3. Innovate. • Remember portals?

  4. Embrace the browser.

  5. Build for scale, speed, and reliability. • According to comScore: • Google is the #2 Web Property in the U.S., with 129 million monthly unique visitors. • Google is the #1 Web Property Worldwide, with 561 million monthly unique visitors. (Source: comScore Networks, 9/07)

  6. Keep it simple. 1999 2007

  7. 5 User Experience Challenges • Understanding our users • Localization and internationalization • Consistency • Integration • Anywhere, anytime

  8. 1. Understanding our users

  9. Diversity of Users and Needs

  10. 1. Understanding our users • Get different parts of the story from different sources at different stages. • Usability Studies, Field Studies and Contextual interviews • Quantitative market research • Live online experiments (aka A/B tests) • Logs • Customer support

  11. 1. Understanding our users • Usability Studies and Discovery Research • Fast, qualitative, customer research with small samples • Tells us: Who? What? How? Why? • When: • Before: Rapid discovery techniques define problems and needs (field studies, phone interviews, card sorts, competitive evaluations, diaries, etc.) • During design: Evaluation methods (think aloud, eye tracking, prototype testing, cognitive walkthroughs, etc.) • After launch: More evaluation and discovery for next iteration.

  12. Google Talk (in Gmail) Version 1 Finding: users got stuck, looking for send button

  13. Google Talk (in Gmail) Version 1 Finding: users got stuck, looking for send button Version 2 Finding: some users thought chat window was a popup – closed before seeing message

  14. Google Talk (in Gmail) Version 1 Version 3 Version 2 Success!

  15. 1. Understanding our users • Quantitative Market Research • Includes • Profile groups of users (e.g. demographics, segmentation). • Monitor customer satisfaction and net promoter scores. • Identify key drivers of satisfaction. • Test concepts. • Quantify issues identified through qualitative research. • Tells us: Who? What? How many? Where? • When: Before design, after launch

  16. 1. Understanding our users • Live Online Experiments (aka A/B tests) • Present new UI to small % of users and compare to use of existing UI. • Tells us: What? When? How many? • When: After build, but before launch.

  17. 1. Understanding our users • Logs Analysis • Statistical analysis of aggregated records of actual usage behaviors. • Tells us: What? When? How many? • When: After launch

  18. Statistical Log Analysis: Spell Check • Initial spell-checker was low quality • Build a better product – improve quality Stronger UI - big and red Logs show that people still misspell; don’t click on suggestion

  19. 1. Understanding our users • Customer Support • Tells us: What’s wrong? • When: After launch • How: Direct feedback from users highlights common issues and problems for launched products and services.

  20. Customer support feedback: Gmail

  21. 2. Localization and Internationalization

  22. “. . . the world’s information . . . universally accessible. . .” • ~65% of all Internet users speak a primary language other than English. • 79% of Internet usage is outside North America (InternetWorldStats.com) …

  23. “. . . and useful. . .” • People rely more on landmarks than addresses in Japan. Show more landmarks (e.g. stores and buildings) than in US or Europe.

  24. Watch for Cultural References • Ice cubes don’t mean “cool” in other languages. • Argentinians use “bananas.”

  25. But wait. . . there’s more! • Right-to-Left Text and UI • Arabic, Hebrew, Urduare bi-directional • Text input in Asia • Google preferences in Arabic

  26. 3. Consistency

  27. Consistency: Reinforce Google brand. A B C D

  28. Consistency: Reinforce Google brand

  29. Consistency: Reduce learning curve.

  30. 4. Integration 1 + 1 > 2

  31. Integration

  32. Search + Movie showtimes, Maps

  33. Universal search—trivia facts and news

  34. Talk + Gmail

  35. Smart Widgets in Gmail

  36. 5. Anywhere, Anytime “. . . make it universally accessible. . .”

  37. Going mobile. . .

  38. In conclusion. . . “Focus on the user, and all else will follow…”

  39. Thank you! • Questions?

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