
Google Instant Proves Google's Design Process is Broken - cornelln
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662273/google-equates-design-with-endless-testing-theyre-wrong
======
boyakasha
The central point of the article is that certain people (designers, for lack
of a precise term) can use their intuition to get better results than actually
testing alternatives; to quote the article:

"Testing can only tell you so much -- and it often only reveals that people
only like things that are similar to what they've had before. But brilliant
design solutions convert people over time, because they're both subtle and
ground breaking."

The article provides no evidence to support its claim. For all the anecdotes,
not a single one describes a situation where the intuitions of "designers"
outperformed a solution based on testing alternatives.

However, the pro-designer propaganda flies thick and fast, repeatedly implying
designers would have made a better solution, or seen the solution as obvious
without the need for testing:

\- "While that solution seems obvious and not particularly elegant"

\- "Is it just us who find our eyeballs spinning in their sockets...?"

\- "Obviously, none of these (prototypes) were going to work"

\- "A little design know-how would have made that obvious"

\- "(They eventually settled on a blue that is basically the average of all
the blues used in hyperlinks across the web. Duh.)"

\- "Google's 'solution' to providing instant results still seems so primitive
and ugly"

\- "But brilliant design solutions convert people over time, because they're
both subtle and ground breaking."

\- "testing artificially limits the worldview of the people"

\- "has your G-mail or Google Reader gotten any easier to use, or less
stressful on your eyes? Have either of them become a pleasure to look at or
play with? No."

The author isn't interested in making a coherent argument. The author's
interest lies in unashamedly gratifying the readers' sense of importance. It
is a website for designers, after all.

~~~
mattmanser
I felt that the central point the article was trying to make, and I thought
made it well, is that design is not about testing a set of obvious solutions
and then declaring X the winner because it was tested well.

Firstly that often results in horrid UX experiences, as Google Instant is. It
is also, weak for the following reasons:

1\. No innovation happens (which is why Apple came up with the smartphone
touch UI and Google just copies it)

2\. People don't like change, so will favour things close to what they had
before

You have fallen straight into the same odd thinking dominating Google, that UI
is incremental, testable and easily measurable.

You want precise and measurable. That's not design. Jonathan Ives is worth his
weight in gold for his design skills as much as Linus Torvalds is worth his
weight in gold as a programmer. And we as engineers have to accept that.

Google will never come up with a great design with the way it approaches the
problem. While I love their products, none of them have ever blown me away
because of their elegance or coherence. They only know how to do simplicity
and are beginning to forget how to do that too.

~~~
boyakasha
If Jonathan Ives submitted a design for Google Instant, and his design was
better than the "obvious solutions", then it would test well. If a better
solution tests badly then, by definition of the word "test", you're not
testing it properly. Whether or not the test candidates are "obvious
solutions" or created by designers has no impact on whether testing is good or
bad. Maybe someone can test whether testing tests better than not testing :)

I'm not saying that designers' intuition can be replaced by testing, I'm only
saying that testing can not be replaced by designers intuition as the article
implies. A designers' intuition, after all, hopefully comes from the
experiences of informally testing out designs in real life.

What really annoyed me about the article was the attitude of "We designers
come up with brilliantly ground-breaking yet subtle designs, and if testing
says there is a problem, then ignore the tests because we are always right.
Isn't that right, boys? YEAH! WE RULE!"

~~~
KuraFire
"If Jonathan Ives submitted a design for Google Instant, and his design was
better than the "obvious solutions", then it would test well. If a better
solution tests badly then, by definition of the word "test", you're not
testing it properly."

Innovative products rarely test well, overall. If you test it to a group of
visionaries who are comfortable thinking outside the box, then yes, it'll test
well. But if you test with a group of regular / casual computer users, non-
techies and the like, many innovative or important design decisions may not
test well.

Take, for example, USB. The technology came out and was sparsely added to new
computers, but always in addition to COM and Parallel ports. Apple saw that
USB was the future, so they made the iMac which—gasp!—only contained USB
ports. No COM, no Parallel, just USB.

You think that decision would have tested well with users?

"I can't use my existing printer?! That's stupid!"

Except… it was this very decision that made USB successful in the market,
because it forced all peripheral manufacturers to make USB devices if they
wanted to sell to Mac customers (a large enough market to be worthwhile for
virtually all of them).

And so, USB succeeded in the market. But it wouldn't have if Apple had used
Google's test-driven approach, because that decision would have tested quite
poorly.

~~~
tyen
Hang on, Apple also did the same with firewire and it died even though it was
a technically better solution. Its error was it was expensive to manufacture a
firewire device as it needed a hardware layer on the device side. USB didn't,
so USB devices were cheaper and they won the war once USB 2 came out and the
speed difference was negligible.

So not all Apple decisions work, like PC's over Macs. Apple lost that war as
the open standard won.

And then sometimes it is the better design, like iPods and iPhones over their
competition that wins.

My point is I'm not sure your argument holds in general, sometimes its this,
sometimes its the other thing that works.

------
acdha
A great example of begging the question. The basic assumption is that Google's
UIs are unpopular without any evidence that this is true; given the wide
popularity among the people I know (even the designers) I think it'd be more
accurate to say that Google is successfully producing clean, functional
designs and not even attempting web design contest entries.

UI is more than looking pretty - gmail is popular because it stays out of the
way and lets you focus on content, which it handles quite well; in contrast,
iTunes increasingly feels like a train-wreck because they swap icons without
fixing any of the quirky behaviours and non-standard interface conventions
which users must memorize. It was also a confusing comparison because a UI for
managing a tightly-curated, highly-structured list containing on average a few
thousand items pre-selected by the user isn't obviously relevant to
arbitrarily searching across billions of unknown items.

~~~
cliffkuang
Hi there---Thanks for reading. Actually wasn't begging the question at all, or
even contesting the results of the testing. Obviously UI is about more than
looking pretty, but I was arguing the the Google Instant experience is a good
example of testing producing a result that's far from optimal (and which could
be a lot better).

As for iTunes, obviously, if you read the piece, I wasn't comparing it to
Google. I was comparing the _process_ that produced it -- and how Apple has
always gotten better in UI, with each generation, while adding complexity. I
don't think Google can really say that for themselves, as the profusion of
Google products shows.

~~~
eds
I just read the article. In it, you assume the product could be better, as you
just repeated here ("could be a lot better"). Please explain how that's not
begging the question.

~~~
cliffkuang
That was a premise of the article, that the Instant experience was a failure.
Obvs, you can disagree, but that's a starting point, for an article that's
mostly concerned with answering "Why"

------
hopeless

      "has your G-mail or Google Reader gotten any easier to use, or less stressful on your eyes? ... No. Just look at the music listings in new, redesigned iTunes."
    

Actually, yes I do find gmail and reader easier to use - actually quote
preferable. In contrast, iTunes is one of the most confusing pieces of
software I have to use on a daily basis - second only to Lotus Notes. All that
is Apple is not great.

~~~
derefr
I've wanted to expel this rant for a while: when you pick it apart, iTunes is
basically as great as it _can_ be while still running on Windows as well as
OSX (not to say that it's great in any absolute sense.) It has to be
monolithic to be multi-platform, and it has to be multi-platform to serve as a
life-support system for all the iConsumerElectronics on Windows.

If iTunes was OSX-only, it could spray itself all around OSX as a bunch of
cute one-screen utilities with clever integration hooks:

1\. The App Store would become part of Software Update (which would thus
become a general Mac App Store and App Update manager—hopefully buying out
AppFresh and giving MacPorts a GUI);

2\. Contacts, Bookmarks, Notes, etc., and the transfer of media to the
iConsumerElectronics in a friendly, GUIful manner, would all be a part of the
iSync utility (yes, that exists—it's the ghetto for synching phones that
aren't made by Apple);

3\. Podcasts would just be a client program that relies on the same
background-downloading daemon that System Updates do, with a modification to
read arbitrary feeds, and extract enclosed media files (or torrents!); once
downloaded, iSync would just see them and sync them;

4\. iTMS would just be a website, which would expose special content types
that Safari would know what to do with (audio/x-apple-ringtone = save to the
Music/Ringtones folder, etc.);

5\. and iTunes would be left to be a music library, consisting in its entirety
of Playlists, Genius, and perhaps the Radio (and hooks to send events to Ping,
if it likes.)

If iTunes was OSX-only, it wouldn't need to know how to burn CDs; it could
just allow you to export a playlist as a folder of MP3s, and then integrate
audio-CD burning as an option in the OSX Burn Folder menu.

If iTunes was OSX-only, it wouldn't need to have sections for TV Shows,
Movies, Books, Ringtones; those would just be folders on your hard drive,
which iTMS (through Safari) would write to, and iSync would read from.

There's a thousand other ways it could be better and slimmer—but, if you'll
notice, none of these things could work given the restriction that they have
to work on Windows as well.

~~~
acdha
Even when iTunes was OS X only it felt awkward and unlike most other OS X
programs. The problem is that they bought an OS 9 MP3 player (SoundJam) and
have been hacking at it for years without doing the rewrite needed to get
things like platform-standard UI, non-blocking I/O, etc. Any time you see a
modal dialog, remember it started out on an OS which barely multitasked. Cross
platform isn't an issue - Windows has equivalents for every single thing on
your list, whether native or something they already ship like Apple Software
Update.

As far as package management goes, the problem here is that Apple simply does
not care. The Mac sysadmin community has been asking for better solutions for
years but it's just not a priority for Apple - even App Store updates, which
theoretically are more important, have been broken[1] for something like the
last 4 major iTunes releases but since it's merely clumsy and doesn't prevent
sales it obviously hasn't been as important as a new version of some non-
standard window controls.

[1] The process is now: click on Apps. Click on "Get Updates". Click on "Get
All Updates". Wait. Dismiss erroneous "The information on this page is
outdated and must be refreshed" dialog. Click on Apps. Click on "Get Updates".
Click on "Get All Updates". This from a UI powerhouse? The phone almost gets
it right except for the gratuitous password nag.

~~~
derefr
Indeed, it did start out as a part of OS9. However, I think the Principle of
Charity applies here—Apple _generally_ employs good engineers, and they got
everything _else_ native-ized, standardized, POSIXized, etc. for 10.0. There
must have been a particular reason for iTunes being the one thing that got
left out of HIG-ification in 10.0 _and every update since_ , and I propose
that that particular reason is Windows support.

Yes, Windows does have hooks to add functionality—but hooks aren't enough. The
reason Apple could remove components from iTunes was that it could, itself,
integrate them into all shipping copies of OSX. Apple doesn't decide what
drivers and plug-ins get shipped with Windows, so anything they'd install
would be third-party and after-the-fact (which is what already happens: e.g.
the CD burner driver bundled into the Windows iTunes installer.) You can't
slim down Windows iTunes because you have to ship all the programs that make
up the functionality of iTunes, whether modularly or monolithically. However,
you _can_ slim down OSX iTunes if you just start saying "this will be an OS
feature, not an iTunes feature."

Also, on a completely unrelated note:

> The phone almost gets it right except for the gratuitous password nag.

I've always taken that to be a sudo escalation prompt. You don't want your
kids picking up your phone and buying things on it.

------
melvinram
"A second might matter tremendously to an engineer... that's kind of a silly
way of thinking about it."

I remember a study done by Google that showed that by shaving off something
like 1 second from their load times, they were able to increase the number
searches people did substantially, which for Google = millions of dollars in
extra revenue from ad clicks. Seconds still matter.

~~~
txxxxd
Totally agree, this author is missing a critical point: shaving a second of a
search doesn't just mean that Google feels faster - it also means that
_everything else suddenly feels slower_ in comparison.

~~~
mbreese
I'm less interested in how fast Google can return a result. (That should be as
fast as possible...)

What really matters to me is how quickly can I find what I'm looking for and
go on my way. This is the only metric that really matters.

Total time = search result + visual scanning/deciding

Right now, for me, the total time has increased because the time it takes for
me to scan the page and figure out if I want to click a link has increased.
Also, because you're being bombarded with extra links as you type, I'm more
apprehensive about clicking a link, because I'm wondering if there was a
better choice using a different variation of the query.

I loved the older method of as you type updating the query box, but this is
information overload.

~~~
Kadrith
I just open the links in a new tab, then once I have several open I check to
see if they are what I want. If they are not I close them and go back to the
search tab to refine what I am looking for.

Slightly different topic, but I like Wonder Wheel for searching as well. I
start with something intentionally vague if I don't know the exact phrase I
want for describing something. Then I select the best choice from the Wonder
Wheel.

------
randallsquared
While Google Instant is somewhat annoying to me, and therefore turned off, on
my Mac (because of the interaction between it and Safari), I think that the
process of throwing any old idea against the wall and seeing if it sticks is a
sound one in the usual case. The argument the article is making seems to be
that theory is better than experiment; I think this would only be true in the
case where experiment has shown over and over to be in line with theory, but
UI design is such a young field that I'm strongly skeptical of that claim.
Surely there have been enough recent accidental or surprising improvements
that experiment with unusual ideas is still worthwhile?

------
awongh
I guess I'm in the minority, but I totally agree w/ the OP. I think instant
works for me about half the time, the other half it's just confusing and
messy.

I'm hoping that future iterations of instant can bring some polish to the UX,
because right now it seems messy and unnecessary. If I was to continue to work
as rapidly as it does now I want some more context to the results it's
spitting out, like in the 1st design iteration they show....

I feel like they could have hit it out of the park with some real magic, but
instead they (b)punted and put out the ugly untested beta.

This is the search design for the people who use google to get to their
facebook login, and not for those who are truly searching for information.

~~~
panacea
"This is the search design for the people who use google to get to their
facebook login"

Do you personally even encounter 'Google Instant'?

If I'm not using my browser's search bar, I've got my personalized iGoogle
page open.

They've made changes to the vanilla Google homepage which is most likely,
predominantly visited by the sort of people who use Google to get to their
facebook login anyway.

~~~
awongh
I do this sometimes too, which is usually when google instant works for me,
like when I've visited a page a bunch of times, but I can't be bothered to
bookmark it or save the search in some other way, and I know it will come up
easily in the first page of results- I just want to get to a page super fast,
and it's not a url per se, but something specific I searched for and need
again.

I'd say most times I search through my chrome bar, but sometimes I do end up
on the google page for whatever reason.

------
cliffkuang
Hey all---I'm the original author of the post, and I wanted to thank you for
starting a feisty debate. Really thrilled to see both supporters and critics
of my view. One thing I do want to point out tho: The post was really meant to
show one, alternative way of thinking. I actually believe that the best
results come from some kind of blend of the two approaches. That is what I
think Apple is really good at -- and not just making pretty boxes for circuit
boards.

Also, in the comments I made about a second mattering, it was exactly my point
that while seconds are important to engineers, they may or may not be to
_users_. And a focus on actual user stresses is the essence of design.

Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting!

~~~
vessenes
Cliff,

I totally disagree with your premise. If I put it in the nicest possible way,
you are suggesting that engineers can hit some sort of local maxima for their
design decisions with testing, but that 'professional' designers can get them
out of that with bold, intuitive changes.

It's nice to think so. It's certainly a possible difficulty in design: many
designers have made their names reworking a tired design into something iconic
and revolutionary. (This article about Tag Heuer's digital stopwatch is a
great example: <http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?p=3748>).

In this case though, I think you're missing it. If you believe design's God is
usability, that is that design is about providing function to actual users of
the design, then you're on the wrong side of this conversation: the side with
only your opinion, arguing against the side with billions of datapoints.

Since search is the only way Google makes money, let me ask you a rhetorical
question: how long do you think Google Instant will stay turned on if it
worsens the user experience? By worsens, I mean that empirically users
demonstrate less advertising engagement, or show that they are getting worse
search results?

So on the seconds conversation: seconds matter to USERS. Seconds only matter
to google's ass-kicking advertising engineering team because they matter to
users. Google is accidentally leaking some proprietary search information to
you in those videos -- they're telling you: ultra-ultra-fast search makes
Google more money because users like it better.

Where good design is less easy to statistically evaluate, say with Google Buzz
or News, this approach falters, but I think picking on Google Instant/Homepage
search is choosing exactly the wrong section of the company to complain about:
these guys are the absolute best in the business in the search results /
advertising world, it's their bread and butter, and they test the hell out of
stuff like this before it launches.

As to the matter of personal speed preferences, a counterpoint: speed matters
to me a lot, and I want to use a search engine like it's an extension of my
brain. Case in point: one of the computers on my desktop uses duckduckgo for
its search bar. It's noticeably slower than google for searches. Maybe .2 or
.3 seconds vs .05 seconds. That's annoying. I notice it every time I search
with DDG; it takes me out of the flow of whatever I'm doing that required some
searchable information. I would guess that I'm not alone.

------
rxin
This is just very different mentality between thinking as a designer vs
thinking as an engineer.

Google in particular is a data driven company. Most decisions are made by
results from experiments. Google is able to do this because the economies of
scale. They have tons of data. As a matter of fact, the "experimental traffic"
is higher than 100%, indicating multiple levels of experiments are conducted
in every search (on average). I remember the quote from a session "A/B testing
is for marketers. Engineers run multivariate experiments."

In terms of traditional designers: their process is more of an art than
science. They think, and trust their instincts. They traditionally operate in
a setting that can't afford this kind of experiments.

The reality is people are weird and unpredictable. It's statistics and hard
science when it's backed by data.

The challenge, of course, is that it is easy to iterate incrementally using
measurement data. But for disruptive changes, although you could measure it,
the change itself (the alternatives) is often not obvious.

~~~
msy
You cannot measure everything. You cannot A/B test frustration, or confusion,
or discomfort. You cannot measure slight changes in the way your brand or site
is perceived. You can vaguely measure of proxies but they're just that,
proxies. The danger of a culture built around worshiping data to the point of
ignoring everything else is that you forget that you cannot measure
everything, including many of the things that matter most.

~~~
sokoloff
Partially true. While you can't directly test for frustration or confusion,
what you can test for is the important (to your business) _effects_ of that
frustration or confusion.

Higher bounce rates, lower conversion, changes in dominant navigation path,
lower average order value, etc. can be determined from A/B or multi-variate
testing, and a lot of companies are much less interested in whether a user is
confused than they are in whether any potential confusion is causing a
reduction in CR% or AOV.

If the article's rant had argued "A/B or MV testing is a hill-climb and
incremental changes backed only by test data virtually assures you'll find a
local maxima, but only a daring design decision is capable of moving you to a
different, higher, hill," I'd be more inclined to agree.

As it stands, it reads to me like a designer who is frustrated by not being
able to scratch his own personal itches, without regard to the underlying
business results: <http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/140/>

~~~
msy
But if you're measuring via proxies you lose causation. Have those gradual
changes that immediately increased conversion or upsell by 2% over the last 3
months cheapened the brand and site, causing long-term damage to its
perception in the market place? Has the move to weekly newsletters, that
brought that burst of business started to make people think of you as
irritating and spammy? A/B testing isn't going to tell you that but those
blessed metrics are going to start going south down the road and you aren't
going to be able to A/B test your way out of it. Perceptions last, brands are
ephemeral and empirical, careful testing indicated New Coke should have been a
massive hit.

------
thomas11
I found the article a good read and would have found it somewhat convincing,
if it wasn't on a page loaded with everything from a giant photograph to
different horizontal bars to all rainbow colors at the bottom, directly under
a pink bar.

------
bpodgursky
The Google News changes introduced earlier this year proved this to me. You'd
be challenged to find a single person on the internet who prefers the new
Google News format. It took months for the design team to grant even the
slightest hint of a concession, letting people switch back to an (albeit
uglier and less efficient) two-column format.

~~~
uuilly
I also think their new image search is a disaster. I like the infinite scroll
bar (which bing did before them) but I hate how the images pop in and out. The
whole experience is jarring.

~~~
elai
I love the new image search, and find the image popout quite useful when I
want to see a image in more detail without the jarring experience of actually
going to the page, and not having to click next again to see more images. I
don't hover around images unless i want to see detail, i press down on my
keyboard to see more.

------
zaidf
Your entire post seems to be a rant on google testing designs that would be
"obvious" for most designers. I am a designer I don't think I agree that some
of the things you say are obvious are that obvious. I also believe that line
of attack completely ignores all the gold google runs into in the form of non-
obvious optimal solutions. So while a majority of tests might return the
obvious solution as the optimal one, a minority may return non-obvious optimal
solutions. You completely ignore that possibility.

With that said, I agree, I hate google Instant. It's a shiny object that may
have limited shelf-life.

------
beej71
Fortunately Google Instant has Google Classic built in. You just have to type
in a search term and then hit RETURN. I use it this way most of the time out
of habit.

Personally I think Google Instant is great, and this guy's design suggestions
for making it more readable pretty much gut it.

But hey, I'm an engineer, so I like efficiency.

~~~
mbreese
It would be Google Classic if the bottom half of the screen would stop
changing as I'm typing. Right now, I hate using Google proper... it hurts my
eyes. Then again, I pretty much just use the location bar in Chrome to do
Google searches, so I'm not affected much, but Instant is a big difference
over Classic.

I'm all for efficiency, but I prefer clarity.

------
moultano
It seems like his complaint is really that Google Instant isn't incremental
enough for him. It "tests poorly" with him in exactly the way that a really
innovative design should: it requires him to adjust how he uses it.

------
uuoc
Google instant is the reason why my NoScript whitelist no longer contains an
allow javascript rule for google. No javascript, no instant. No instant, no
distractions while I'm typing in my search string.

The single most important factor Google should be concentrating upon is the
quality of the search. If the search returns exactly what I'm looking for at
the top of the first page, then I'm happy. I don't care if it took Google 3
seconds longer to produce that quality result. In fact, if by taking 3 seconds
longer, the search result quality were to jump by 2x or 3x, that would be much
better than trying to flash results in front of me as I type.

~~~
hyperbovine
This approach does not massage one's nerd G-spot as effectively, but you can
disable it like a normal person by clicking the link to the right of the
search bar.

~~~
uuoc
Except that I also don't allow google to set cookies either.

------
some1else
"Before Google Instant, probably the most infamous example of Google's design-
by-testing approach was the "41 Blues" --- Google's engineers apparently
couldn't decide on two shades of blue for showing search results, so they
tested 41 of them to see which attracted the most clicks. (They eventually
settled on a blue that is basically the average of all the blues used in
hyperlinks across the web. Duh.)"

I don't see why this would be subject of cricism. User testing is the one and
only validator for good design decisions. Every designer knows this,
especially when the decisions closely pertain to User Experience.

------
statictype
It's broken only in the sense that they approach design as an engineering
problem instead of 'hire a designer and do whatever he says'.

~~~
michael_dorfman
That's a nice looking strawman you've got there.

A better approach would be "hire a professional designer, and generate some
significant ideas, and then take an engineering approach to testing those
ideas."

In other words: who should come up with the B's for those A/B tests--
engineers, or designers? (Or both?)

------
albertzeyer
Funny that the website where this is published has such a crappy design.

* Vertical scrollbar at width of 800.

* The dotted gray border right to the text is annoying (it flickers on my TFT).

* At lot of vertical space wasted on the left.

* I don't find it very pretty at a whole. (But that is of course subjective.)

------
points
What a boring rant. Almost every single point I look at, he's wrong on.

------
aneth
If Apple tested a version of the iPhone that had four buttons on the front, it
probably would have tested better because one button was unfamiliar to users
and would have seemed inadequate. The point here is that sometimes good design
requires challenging and educating users - doing the right thing instead of
the easy thing. Apple's delight of their users is often when the user realizes
he didnt actually need something he thought he did. Of course, I am describing
a process involving risk, which can be mitigated through some testing, but
will always be somewhat correlated with reward.

~~~
slowpoison
I'm going to wager that the choice of a single button on the iPhone is bad
design, esp having experienced both single button and multi-button designs
(Android phones).

I've designed apps for iPhone and Android and what ends up happening on iPhone
apps is that you have to put additional buttons in your app to compensate for
the lack of buttons on the iPhone.

Take the virtually omnipresent back button in iPhone apps. Most applications
need a back button. Hence on the iPhone, they draw this button on the top left
corner. I much prefer the Android phones' hard back button, not only because
it makes single-handed operation possible, but also because sometimes soft
back buttons don't cut it - what do you do when you want to switch to the last
app or what if your app lost focus to another app because of some unsolicited
event and you want to go back? Same for search button.

Now I'm not saying Android got all things right. In fact Android UI, UX is
nowhere as pleasant as iPhone's. But, I don't agree that a single button on
iPhone was a good decision. I'd like to know if there have been any real-life
studies or empirical data on this.

~~~
aneth
Not every application needs a back button. Virtual interfaces allow the
interface to tailor to the need of the application, instead of the other way
around.

I agree sometimes a back button seems like it would help, but after using iOS
products for a long time (this is on an iPad, I don't miss hardware buttons
much.

