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Intelligence
Great User Experience = Great Organization

Intelligence

Great User Experience = Great Organization

Mar 21, 2007By Michael Stoner

What I found fascinating is this quote from an interview he did with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of user experience:

There’s this one user, a Google zealot – we don’t know who he is – who occasionally sends an e‑mail to our “comments” address. Every time he writes, the e‑mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e‑mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e‑mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.

The full interview is here.

The point, Hurst reminds us, is not to say that every home page should only have a small number of words, but:

Notice how the discipline of counting words on the home page translates into a discipline of customer-centered development. This isn’t to say that a home page should only have a few words, necessarily. The point is that any team’s commitment to building a great customer experience shows – especially online.

Reminds me of a post I wrote a couple of years ago that people still mention to me, and I consider a valid challenge: look at your home page and imagine what Google would do to redesign it. It wouldn’t have 150 links, nor would every department of the university be represented there. More  ” title=”here”>here.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?