What Would Google Do?

Back in the 1970s, I was working in my first advancement job. I’d been assigned to write an op-ed for a history faculty member. I had six pages of notes from conversations we’d had, as well as about a dozen papers related to the thesis of the op-ed. I was struggling to write a lucid, elegant exposition of his fairly complicated ideas. My boss, a crackerjack editor, advised, “Writing an op-ed is easy. Here’s my mantra: You write 2500 words and edit them down to 700!”

I often think about that experience when I’m talking with clients about a redesign of their website. It all starts with the home page—and there are many similarities between designing a great home page and writing a great op-ed. Organization is paramount. Prudent, constant editing is essential.

Nobody does this better than Google. So I’m starting to think that we should all be thinking about how we can simplify home pages, not make them more complicated. Let our new mantra for home page design be “What would Google do?”

There’s no more simple-seeming website that I know of. Yet the simplicity of Google’s home page masks a wealth of incredible offerings. Have you ever clicked on the “more »” link in the upper right of the search box? Well, try it. Look at the array of services that Google offers and be astounded. Google Maps alone is amazing—I can even find my house, located in the hills of Vermont, on that map (though I can’t get a close satellite overlay—yet).

Google keeps its home page clean by making sure that only the services that gain the greatest number of page views are promoted on the home page. According to Fast Company, which featured a fascinating article in its November 2005 issue called “The Beauty of Simplicity”, here’s how Google does it:

“To make it to the home page, a new service needs to be so compelling that it will garner millions of page views per day. Contenders audition on the advanced-search page; if they prove their mettle—as image search did, growing from 700,000 page views daily to 2 million in two weeks—they may earn a permanent link. Few make the cut, and that’s fine. Google’s research shows that users remember just seven to ten services on rival sites. So Google offers a miserly six services on its home page. By contrast, MSN promotes more than 50, and Yahoo, over 60. And both sell advertising off their home pages; Google’s is a commercial-free zone.”

So what does this mean when a complex institution (like, say, a university) is redesigning its website, starting, of course, with the home page? What would Google do in redesigning a university site?

Let’s see: Reduce the complexity. Chuck the dozens of links. Get rid of a lot of the extraneous words and images. Keep it clean. Make it scannable. If the School of Engineering achieves a large number of page views consistently, then link them from the home page. But not the School of Business if they have a tenth as many.

I’m not saying that this would be easy—or even that the sites we design for clients approach the Google ideal. But the question really is whether they should come as close as possible. Because here’s yet another lesson from Google: Visitors actually reward simplicity if they can easily find what they want!