Interesting presentation (albeit from 2006) about Google’s user experience by engineering director Jen Fitzpatrick.
Some sample points:
- “Google is like a swiss army penknife”. The homepage has hardly changed since 1997.
- In early testing, people didn’t use the ‘I feel lucky button’ – they had no idea what it would do. But they liked it anyway, because it was quirky. It made them feel like there were real humans behind the website.
- Customers generally won’t write to you when they’re happy.
The somewhat obvious but most important thing about user experience is… to make sure that your product fulfils a genuine user need. Without that, user experience is more or less irrelevant. So obvious, so easy to forget.
