Offermann.us

Uh oh.

Marissa Mayer kicks off her speech by talking about artists and fashion designers creating custom background images to use on iGoogle home pages. This is what’s exciting at Google right now?

Minutes go by, and still more fluffy iGoogle talk. Now, I’m really worried…she’s going to crash and burn. I mean, she’s speaking at a conference for developers…and she’s talking about wallpaper?

Thankfully, once she really got going, her speech turned out to be quite entertaining and was filled with funny stories about the early days of Google.

Some tidbits:

• She once asked Sergey Brin to explain the spare design of the original Google home page:

  “We didn’t have a webmaster…and I don’t do HTML.”
  

• Early user testers would just stare at the Google home page…and not type anything into the search box.

  Why?

  They were waiting for the rest of the page to load.

  To solve this problem, Google had to add a footer, so people knew the home page was done loading.

  “Our copyright notice isn’t legally required.  It’s punctuation.”
  

• Every search query on Google hits between 700 to 1000 servers before serving the response. Think about that the next time your search results return in 0.09 seconds.

• “Design is becoming more of a science than an art.”

  They do tons of A/B Testing at Google, testing every tweak to the site on a small percentage of their users and then watching to see how it impacts their “Happiness Metrics”. Which means that they don’t have to guess which design or feature is better. They have numbers, hard evidence that one is better than another.

  Two examples:

  • Less white space around their logo made their users more satisfied.
  • Displaying more search results per query caused happiness to plummet, because adding even the tiniest fraction of a second to the page response time resulted in decreasing user satisfaction.