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programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
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John Maeda created quite a stir with his montage of the Yahoo and Google homepages from 1996 to 2006 in simple is about staying simple:
Although Philipp Lenssen has posted on this topic before (he calls it the portal plague), it's still striking. Altavista made the same mistake, and they didn't survive.
There's an interesting anecdote about Google's absolute focus on minimalism in Seth Godin's book Purple Cow:
It turns out that the folks at Google are obsessed with the email they get criticizing the service. They take it very seriously. One person writes in every once and a while and he never signs his name. According to Marissa Meyer at Google, "Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us a while to figure out what he was doing. He's counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, he gets irritated, and e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his emails are helpful, because they put an interesting discipline on the UI team not to introduce too many links. It's like a scale that tells you that you've gained two pounds."
And of course, 37signals is famous for their mantra of less as a competitive advantage:
Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have 4 features, you need 5. Or 15. Or 25. If they’re spending X, you need to spend XX. If they have 20, you need 30.While this strategy may still work for some, it’s expensive, resource intensive, difficult, defensive, and not very satisfying. And I don’t think it’s good for customers either. It’s a very Cold War mentality — always trying to one-up. When everyone tries to one-up, we all end up with too much. There’s already too much “more” — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.
What I’d like to suggest is a different approach. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. Do less than your competitors to beat them.
Usability guru Donald Norman thinks the comparison between Google and Yahoo is misleading, and offers the truth about Google's so-called "simplicity":
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren't many of these just linked together? Why isn't Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?
I think this is a completely wrongheaded analysis, because I don't want to do anything else. All I want is to find what I'm searching for. Like Damien Katz, I believe features don't matter:
These people don't care about your flexible, brilliant architecture. They don't wish to tweak settings. They don't want to spend more than 10 consecutive seconds confused. They just want simple, they want to get their task done and move on. They don't want to spend time learning anything because they know they'll probably just forget it long before they'll need to do it again anyway.
We should always be in pursuit of simplicity, in whatever form it takes.
Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions
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What's really cool is that if you go to the first version of Google: http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
And type in a search term and hit "Google Search", it still works.
Jeff, do you think *most* companies underestimate the benefit of simplicity and opt for the more traditional 'more features are better' approach?
My experience is that simplistic UI designs almost make up for program feature shortcomings ten-fold.
genghis on March 4, 2006 01:29 AMThe first observation to make is that this entire post is a glorified copy-and-paste job. Nice work concealing that.
You don't want to do anything else besides use the core search functionality? Putting that in bold doesn't make your argument any more convincing. You don't speak for all users or even most of them. I for one heavily use the news and to a lesser extent image search. I also use Gmail for my personal email which I check 1-5 times a day, so I use non-core (non-web search) features quite frequently. I get my Google usage done fairly efficiently, I think, but there are plenty of people using many different Google services frequently and there might be a good way for those users (which have to number at least in the millions) to get their stuff done by basically creating a user interace that is somehow more "integrated" as Don Norman said.
Google adds a little link in the corner to your gmail stuff if you keep a cookie to stay logged into it, and it also lets you clutter up the homepage if you want just like Yahoo but with actual stuff instead of crap about celebrities and other nonsense.
warren on March 4, 2006 02:00 AMAccording to Comscore, in January 2006, 32.2 million more people visited Yahoo! than Google. Also, Internet users spent 11 times as much time using Yahoo! compared to Google. Google = a search engine. Yahoo = an engaging destination.
Todd on March 4, 2006 02:37 AM> The first observation to make is that this entire post is a glorified copy-and-paste job. Nice work concealing that.
Absolutely. All I'm doing is tying together a number of memes from different places that are all related.
But how am I "concealing" that? With my sneaky use of quoted blocks and attribution links?
> Google = a search engine. Yahoo = an engaging destination.
Ask Yahoo, and they'll tell you they are also a search engine. As Damien said, I want to get my task done (finding stuff). I'm not looking for an engaging destination, I'm trying to get work done. The only "engaging destination" I'm looking for is the one at the end of a successful search.
See here for more:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html
>> The first observation to make is that this >>entire post is a glorified copy-and-paste job. >>Nice work concealing that.
>Absolutely. All I'm doing is tying together a >number of memes from different places that are >all related.
>But how am I "concealing" that? With my sneaky >use of quoted blocks and attribution links?
one of the reasons a lot of us love jeff's blog so much is that he does an amazing job of just this - pulling together the meat of an issue from a variety of sources and presenting it in a clear *attributed* condensed form. absolutely perfect reading from my standpoint, and always with some links you can visit to explore the issue more.
mouser on March 4, 2006 05:34 AMDoes anyone else find it odd that Don Norman backs up his discussion of GUI design with a book written in 1968?
He also seems to be ignoring the fact that you have to *scroll down* before you can access many of the features on Yahoo's home page, including the web directory.
Phil on March 4, 2006 06:19 AMyeah this is awesome i have google set as my homepage because all i do is search. i never read news, get stock quotes, chat, shop etc all i do is search for stuff. it got boring after a while, in fact i had to search for stuff to search for, but hey, this is what google says i should do, they must be right.
who uses EITHER of these homepages? yes yahoo's is useless, but executing a google search is far better tone by the url bar search window or even better, a shortcut.
> According to Comscore, in January 2006, 32.2 million more people visited Yahoo! than Google.
I believe this is misleading because many people search from a toolbar or from the search field in Firefox which defaults to Google, thus drastically reducing the number of "visits" to the Google home page.
thakadu on March 4, 2006 11:59 AMComplexity should be up front and on the main page! The advanced search features of Google are incredibly useful! If I had to count the times when the front page wasn't sufficient, when I had to dig deeper into all that hidden complexity for a customized, advanced search, I'd have to put the total number at 4 or even 5 in the past several years!
So... there! Take that!
marshall on March 4, 2006 01:25 PMThere is no need for a complicated interface with Google. Put in an address and it will offer up a link to a map. Enter "3 ms * speed of light in miles" and you will find that light travels 558 miles in 3 milliseconds. Type in "dog pictures" and it will give you a link to dogs in Google Images. Want some news about Iraq? Type in "Iraq news". There is no need to hunt for the right link on the home page. Just tell Google what you want.
> > According to Comscore, in January 2006, 32.2 million more people visited Yahoo! than Google.
> I believe this is misleading because many people search from a toolbar or from the search field in Firefox which defaults to Google, thus drastically reducing the number of "visits" to the Google home page.
This is not misleading. Google's traffic counts visits to Google search results from toolbars. Comscore measures all traffic to the sites, not just the homepages.
Todd on March 4, 2006 04:47 PMPerhaps a better comparison is between google.com and search.yahoo.com. Try it!
Paul on March 4, 2006 09:12 PMI think there will come a time when Yahoo and Google will merge
Nigeria movies inc on March 4, 2006 11:56 PMI wish that cell phone manufacturers/providers would adopt this simplicity idea.
I just wish I could find a cell phone that offered no more than a typical home telephone other than the fact that you can take it anywhere.
Joe Blow on March 5, 2006 03:43 AM>I think there will come a time when Yahoo and Google will merge
And it shall be called "Yoogle".
trollface on March 5, 2006 04:38 AMOr "Yahoogle".
trollface on March 5, 2006 04:38 AMOr "Goohoo".
apeboy on March 5, 2006 05:54 AMJoe Blow - Kyocera A101K Simple Phone
[ICR] on March 5, 2006 08:08 AMThe Main reason I use Google, is because I'm lazy. I do have broadband internet, and a pretty quick PC, but like most PC users when I want my browser window to come up, I want it to come up "now." I guess waiting for the 2 or 3 extra milliseconds it takes to load yahoo just turns me off to it ;)
So as google for a homepage I click, boom its there I just type in what I want and it's always in the first 2 to 5 results.
I'm quite happy being lazy when it comes to the Internet. Thank you google, for helping me keep up with my lifestyle.
Treyvan on March 5, 2006 11:42 AMI can't even stand waiting for a homepage to load - I have a blank homepage. When I open a browser window, I know where I want to go, and I want to start going there.
omg ninjrars on March 5, 2006 07:47 PM> This is not misleading. Google's traffic counts visits to Google search results from toolbars. Comscore measures all traffic to the sites, not just the homepages.
It is misleading. If I got to yahoo.com and execute a search, that is two page views. If I search google from a from a toolbar (ie Firefox or new Explorer beta) then that is one page view.
Rick on March 5, 2006 08:28 PMYahoo WAS great until a year or two ago when the first 10 links were always cleverly disguised links to OTHER search engines that came up with spy ware and assorted spam. Got me to switch to Google pretty quickly.
Angella on March 6, 2006 01:11 AMOne of the better things that google has going for it is that it doesn't have any partnerships with adware companies. Yahoo's deal with GAIN has done little more than piss a WHOLE lot of people off.
Matt on March 6, 2006 05:29 AMYahoo teamed up with GAIN, Google being sued over PPC Fraud and Page Rank fraud. I prefer to search with the address bar and it defaults to google wah wah wah..
You realize that you can set what search engine you get from the search bar. At home I choose Yahoo and work Google. Why google at work? Because the industry I am in relies heavily on Google, but their results are far less relevant than Yahoo. Yahoo has more on their homepage true, but the search isn't hard to find. In fact it's right up there on top, not buried underneath tons of stuff.
Google was a great search engine when it was the search engine of the geeks and they hadn't started on subtle advertising such as paid mentions in television shows. I mean did anyone really know about google before it was casually mentioned on ER back in 1999? I doubt it. Google went to hell as soon as it sold out, and it's getting worse. Their main focus is shifting to paid advertising only. Give it a year and the next "Google" will be out, it will be some amazing little known search engine that only geeks use because it's results are relevant and non commercialized.
At least with Yahoo they are honest with being commercialized.
Ron on March 6, 2006 02:33 PMJeff Atwood, if you want to just search, then use just a search engine. End of story.
The whole point of the Comscore stats are that seemingly more people want to be able to multitask from a single, still relatively simple(compared to many other websites) interface.
As for toolbars/built-in searches, even if it doesn't count toolbars, Firefox has a very small share of the browser market. Geeks are a very minor minority(redundant?) in the grand scheme of things. And Yahoo has a toolbar just like Google, so that would make it a moot point.
David on March 6, 2006 03:33 PMAh, that is what I like about Google.
Notice too, that whoever took the screenshots uses a parsimonious browser window. I hate that MS Explorer defaults to using 15 to 20% of your screen on buttons and menu choices.
anon on March 6, 2006 08:01 PMI'm still wondering how some people make such good arguments over two things that I see as completely different objects. Yahoo is a website that tries to guess what you want. Google is a website that lets you tell it what you want. Google is like an internet slave, and the internet was created for lazy people. It also covers the three basic needs for most internet users: 1.Finding Information 2. Finding Entertainment 3. Finding Pornography. If you want a website that will try to run your life, go to Yahoo. If you want a website that will try to make your life easier, go to Google. It's that simple.
The other Phil on March 6, 2006 10:10 PMI don't think this is necessarily about Google being "better" than Yahoo. It's about having a single focus and sticking to it.
I still think Norman's comparison is specious. Google has all those other services, true, but nobody cares. The most important one is probably Gmail, and you get there by typing in gmail.com, not by navigating via a link on google.com.
Yahoo's portal style of service federation is meaningless. I want news from the site that's best at news-- which probably has its own URL. I want email from the site that's best at email-- which probably has its own URL. If I want auctions I am going to www.ebay.com, because Yahoo's auctions are a joke.
I think you can see where this is going.
The future of the internet is a bunch of disparate URLs. Yahoo will never link to anything other than blah.yahoo.com, so it's an evolutionary dead-end, no matter how many zillions of links and images they plaster all over their home page.
Jeff Atwood on March 7, 2006 02:34 PMHere's a great post that riffs on the same themes
http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000576.php
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The tech industry is full of people who really, really like technology.
It should be so obvious, by definition, right? Birds of a feather: Aren't Star Trek conventions full of people who really love Star Trek? What's the big deal?
What struck me in San Diego was that technology doesn't need to actually help users, or improve their lives in some way, in order to look really, really cool. Something that looks cool and exciting to me (as MIT-trained geek) can also be largely irrelevant to me (as user advocate).
The love of technology isn't, by itself, for or against helping people - it's a different interest altogether. Now for the most part I do think that technologists tend to have an interest in helping people - but technology itself doesn't have a bias... and what you choose to love defines your outlook.
It's important to draw that distinction, I think. What some techies call great, cool, exciting, slick, compatible, open - all those have nothing to do with whether the technology is useful, productive, simple, valuable, meaningful, indispensable.
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Try my usable google homepage "Simply Google" at goo-home.com
Chris Mcevoy on April 9, 2006 11:59 AMSo the "simple" version of google has 25+ input boxes? I hope that's some kind of parody..
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000548.html
Jeff Atwood on April 9, 2006 11:17 PMThere's a reason "to google" is a verb. I've never heard anyone say "I'm gonna Yahoo! that!"
e.marie on June 18, 2006 07:06 PMHello all swingers. More information for your life.
So it seems like DITA is doing something quite useful. But despite what Norm admits about DocBook’s old-style paper-documentation feel, I’d have to argue that it does contain an example of this kind of modularity: the refentry structure. (Though I have long thought that we didn’t quite hit a sweet spot with this structure; it was too man-page-specific on the one hand, but trying to be too generic on the other — why not call it manpage and then also invent something with fewer structural assumptions? It looks like DITA has done the latter, and I guess what Norm has also just succeeded in doing.)
Put simply...
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
| Content (c) 2008 Jeff Atwood. Logo image used with permission of the author. (c) 1993 Steven C. McConnell. All Rights Reserved. |
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