On Google’s Simple Design
Greg Norman from The Nielson Norman Group comments on Google’s so-called “simplicity of design”. (Full article here.)
Look, I like Google. It’s a great search engine. But I am sick and tired of hearing people praise its clean, elegant look. Hell, all search engines have that clean elegant part to them: type your search terms into the box and hit “Enter.”
“Oh,” people rush to object, “the Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff.”
True, but that’s because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks — if you can remember how to get to them.
And then farther down, he writes:
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 would argue that Norman is wrong, and that Google is a unified application.
How? Google is all about being the Command Line of the internet. Need a map of Boston? Type Map Boston and you get a prompt for the Google map of Boston. Quick, easy access to a Google application.
So… Does Norman, an expert on user experience, really think (or expect) that users would first browse to “Google Maps” before executing a search? Sure, there’s the eternal battle of search vs. browse for most sites, but Google doesn’t really give you a choice. You have to search.
It’s almost as if the “free-standing services” Norman speaks about are subordinates to search. They are not on equal footing as search, and shouldn’t necessarily appear as part of the search application.
Google isn’t deceptive, either. They just put lots of thought into the backend search algorithm, and limit the amount of “extra stuff” on their homepage because it isn’t necessary.
I would even argue that Google could improve by showing even less on their home page. Google has so many services they have to dedicate a whole page to listing them. It’s too much to expect users to scroll through a list that long.
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