Some background about the presenters

Presented by Molly Stevens from the New York office and Jens Riegelsberger who works in London. Jens works on Google Maps. Before working for Google he worked on Microsoft’s Xbox 360. He got into usability ten years ago. Molly is a user experience researcher who’s been with Google for three years working on products for advertisers. She has a Masters from Georgia Tech University.

What is user experience at Google?

Some can’t understand what research and design goes into Google products. What do you really need to do to a search box? The point is, the box has stayed the same for all these years. The focus for Google is on simplicity and the core task. The User Experience department is a small part of Google, the number of people employed in it is in the low three digits. For comparison, Product Management is larger – in the low four digits and Engineering larger still – in the low five digits.

Google’s approach

The most important thing is be agile for your users. A lot of what they do is data analysis. For example, with Google Analytics they conduct a lot of A-B testing, just like the functionality in Google Website Optimiser. They invite people into user testing labs to observe and test. They also do in-the-field observations. For example at Victoria Station in London, they did ad-hock observations of how people navigate. They also look at how people navigate shops etc.

Adwords (case study)

Molly displays a picture of an advert-laden door in a street in Cairo. This is the original Adwords. Targeting users to give the most relevant content possible is important for Google. They go into offices to see what kind of data people need as they use their products. They notice the equipment people use, computers, notebooks etc. Context is important.

Users don’t often appreciate their own behaviour. A lot of people ask ‘who really clicks on ads’ in Google products? People do, they just don’t know it. Some background: The system is designed for realtime; it’s a pay per click model of advertising; with Adsense, bloggers and publishers can make money on their websites with ad blocks; ads are made relevant to the content of the page.

In 2007 they started a project to update Adwords, it hadn’t been updated since it was built. Since 2003 they’d added more tools like Ad Scheduling. Additional reports and tools were coming into the interface but the framework wasn’t there to support it. User experience was asked to understand what the experience is now, plus it needed to be as usable as possible around the world. They focussed on three things:

• Lab studies
• Field visits (to understand context)
• Task analysis

They travelled the world to get to diverse markets. Visited large advertisers and small businesses and other users of their service. One example – they went to a small Canadian business that GeoTargets Ads to Canada (picture shown of small mom-and-pop business), the owner finds it works.

The researchers came up with some key tasks. They focused on the task that advertisers spend the most time on. In the new Adwords interface, things that came out of this:

• ROI – needed to be clear to the users, so they could tell what they were getting from it
• Efficiency – with the task and analysing ROI
• Clarity – how clear can we make it about exact costs

Design principles in addition:

• Speed
• Guidance – important to be given at the right time
• Consistency – so users are thinking about the activity not navigating the interface

The redesign took two years from 2007. In 2009 they visited Google advertising agencies and search marketers in Mexico City and used them as a test model. They looked at two things:

• User experience now
• What’s happening in the field

They found Mexico was similar to other markets but some of the pain-points were exaggerated. E.g. If you’re in Mexico city the traffic is really bad, also it’s also difficult for advertisers to target people in their local vicinity based on the technology available. However even new people with little marketing experience were happy with Adwords. Google expected more unhappiness, but couldn’t find it.

Some things they saw:

• One of the larger advertisers set their language to English(US) which meant the date format defaulted to US format in the interface. So there were some things they were able to fix on the product
• In Mexico there were less people educated in the web, there’s a much less robust tech infrastructure and level of knowledge about how to do things effectively. Google identified a need to find a way to get this knowledge into the population.

Changes to Adwords from this work – they set up a navigation panel and gave deeper links. They also added a help widget that gives relevant content for the topic of the page.

Google Maps for mobile (case study)

Jens presented this case study starting with explaining a field trial from two years ago. The UK and Germany had poor uptake of mobile maps. They went to Hamberg, Munich, Manchester and London. They had  six people in each location using the maps software on their normal phones. They had install parties. Where phones don’t come with it pre-installed, getting maps onto the phone is the biggest hurdle (depending on the phone, of course some have app markets).

In the study they asked to record the participants’ searches and sometimes even called them to get the context of the searches. Through this they got detailed information on the goal, plus what did and didn’t work so well.

They went back after two weeks. They found that some small issues get larger by rubbing people up the wrong way over time. One such feature was that the map reverts to default view every time you start it. This upset people on their mobiles since they may want to start the map where they left off.

They set competitions to test the speed of the app vs. the real world equivalent – for example, go to a petrol station and ask someone directions. From this they realised minimising app startup time was important.

Zoom function. The engineers assumed people would learn the maps interface (‘They’ll find the zoom button the second time they use the app’). Using these real world tests they could show people had difficulty finding the button on repeat use. The interface had to be changed.

Jens’ favourite bug story was of a Manchester participant who tried to pull up Manchester Airport, however in maps she found herself teleported to Manchester Airport in New Hampshire (US). App  teleporting, or ‘warping’ users over to the US has been improved but it’s still not perfect. Importantly they combined real usage with detailed logging to find these problems.

Driving directions in India (case study)

The question, what’s the best way to use Google Driving Directions to show which way to go? Even with complete data a list of turns would not be good. The initial research on this happened in India and the US, they spent a long time looking at human way-finding. From this research they came up with a proposal that was literally test driven in India through the busy traffic using landmarks. The final product was launched in November 2009. They decided to includ confirmation landmarks in directions (as well as turnings), but these weren’t necessarily places where you change direction.

Google Maps India uses a Wikipedia model, maps and landmarks are contributed by users. Google chose to give colloquial directions to people to make it clear in the same way you’d give directions to a friend, this took a lot of engineering.

Five things they’ve learned

1. 20% products are important to Google. Molly and Jens work on the usability of other people’s 20% products. For example, an engineer worked on search insights looking at the top five things in rising search trends. They turned this turned into flu trends, they found this correlated with actual cases. Countries are now using this to track diseases. In fact it was used in Mexico during the swine flu outbreak.
2. Prototyping. Important to do. Sometimes using a paper prototype is good or engineers hack something together.
3. Launch early and listen.
4. Observe in the field. A recent study in Tokyo showed that a large number of users take pictures of PR codes (not sure what this is?). Instead of using maps on their phone, they bring up Google Maps on a computer and take a picture of the screen with their mobile.
5. Everyone at google is a gatherer. The usability guys collate. Being a user researcher is often like being a doctor, you diagnose.

Q and A

Q. With the 20% projects, what’s your process of selection?
There isn’t one.

Q. Where do designers fit in this?
(Jens and Molly only mentioned designers once in the presentation). They work so closely with the designers they forgot to mention them. They are a part of the same team as the Interaction Designers etc. Jens and Molly only emphasised engineers because they wanted to stress their importance. Besides, everyone on the Product team came from an industrial design background.

Q. Road names change, some have two, some don’t have any – how does Google Maps handle that?
This happens in India quite often, it also apparently happens in Greece. Every road can have multiple names in Google Maps. Google also like to emphases other aspects like landmarks.

Q. Questioner likes the idea of 20% projects, are they peer reviewed?
There are project fairs (where employees can pitch for help with their project) but no review board. 20% projects are bottom up, if it has a good technology it might grow naturally.

Q. Do 20% projects get shoved to the bottom of the pile? Do employees end up spending 2% of time on them? What happens when things get busy?
It varies from person to person. You can bank up time so the deadline for your main project is passed you can sometimes spend weeks on your 20% project.

Q. Does Google prefer usability stats over qualitative insights?
The most effective is a combination of the two. For example, the teleporting maps problem in Manchester. This was taken back and found to have happened more often than they would have liked so things were changed.

Q. Do you ever take a lead in the research strategy? Meaning, is it always lead by engineers?
The Google Maps India landmarks research was a good example of a significant project (over two years) that was driven by the Product team.

Q. Field studies. You mentioned one big one, but do you think you spend enough time in the field?
Field studies happen in parallel and in multiple locations. Jens actually feels he spends too much time away.

Q. How do you keep up with all the products that Google produces?
We don’t. The Product team are a limited group.

With its Symbian OS, I’ve always recommended it with the warning that it’s a bit of a geeks phone. Downloading applications from the net, they don’t go through the same vetting that takes place with the Apple App Store. Some can be a little less stable than others and in some instances they conflict. Feature-wise it’s a solid phone if you’re prepared to perform the odd restart and fault find.

I’ve always thought it’s the utilitarian answer to the iPhone. Where Apple customers are until now unable to copy and paste, you can with an N95, but the button is somewhat hidden. Patches, fixes and apps exist for the Nokia where the system is not as locked down. What’s great about the N95 is that, where the need arises, someone’s usually solved a functionality problem in advance. The answer is hardly ever ‘we don’t support that’.

So before I get swept away in Apple and Palm hype, I thought I’d log my favourite apps. Here goes:

• Fring. One of my favourite apps for functionality. It links with Skype and you can have what looks like a normal phone call through WiFi (free if you’re calling someone on their computer). I regularly talk to people in Australia on this and after a few hitches (generally with the net speed at the other end) it now works perfectly. It also works with other social networking sites.
• Gmail. An amazingly fully featured app from Google. It keeps a local copy of your email but syncs with their server. You’ll never lose a message and it has better functionality than the iPhone app. I’m able to search, a feature iPhone users have only had through their web version up until now.
• YouTube. Another Google usability triumph. Although it doesn’t always seem to be as up-to-date as the web version and clicking on browser web links don’t open the app automatically, it does have one killer feature: it’s the only app I have that (without hacking) streams video over the 3G network. Really useful.
• Google Maps. Simply amazing. This app takes advantage of the inbuilt GPS receiver in the phone. With this I’m never lost, I can always find directions to a destination from my location to within a few metres. Coupled with Google Latitude, it’s a great tool for keeping up with people across London. I can also access Google Street View from my phone, I can’t count the number of times this has been really useful.
• WirelessIRC. Despite the name red-herring, I actually use this to access Twitter. Unlike most other Twitter apps, it runs happily in the background. Whenever I want to update myself on other’s activities I can immediately view, rather than take the time to launch an app > connect to the network > download tweets etc etc. I can easily copy and paste text to re-tweet (RT) and using Nokia’s inbuilt functionality, I can copy and paste posted URLs to my web browser. (NOTE: On the N95, the copy and paste functions are found under the key that looks like a pencil on the bottom left below the screen).
• BBC iPlayer (1.5). Although newer versions exist, they seem to have been blocked from working on the N95. Don’t despair, you can still download the app from sources across the web. BBC iPlayer is a fantastic boost to the multimedia capabilities of this phone. As long as you’re not worried about the jump between the listings app and the in-built RealPlayer to stream programmes, you’re never going to miss a programme again. Shame it only works on WiFi (unless hacked) and doesn’t support downloads.
• Opera Mini. A web browsing experience comparable with a PC. I use this mainly to access Google Reader. The Mini browser comes with the ability to create ‘bookmarklets’, something that when mixed with a little Javascript, allows me to post interesting links to Delicious. All of this functionality is a life-saver on long train rides (or even the cramped commute to work).
• Web development apps such as SIC! FTP and s60HTMLed. This combination means I can effectively edit web pages from anywhere. s60HTMLed is a great application but takes some setting up. You need to download Python for S60, the ‘appuifw2′ extension and in my case I had to Symbian Sign the web editor.
• Shozu. A multipurpose photo up-loader that allows me to tag and describe pictures that I upload to Flickr.
• Snaptweet. A service that scans my Flickr account and adds pictures with the ‘snaptweet’ tag to my Twitter stream.
• GooSync. Synchronise your inbuilt calendar with Google Calendar. Simple and effective.
• Last but not least, the other inbuilt features like the WebKit browser (yes, the iPhone isn’t the only one that comes with this); 5Mpixel camera; and accelerometer for quick transition between landscape and portrait display. (NOTE: to set the display, go to Menu > Tools > Setting > General > Personalisation > Display > Rotate screen ‘Automatic’).

My advice for N95 users is to every-so-often, backup everything and look for system updates. I think an amount of this functionality will not work, or would be more buggy with older software. Where lots of phone manufacturers forget about updates only months after release, Nokia have been consistent in their support so you may as well take advantage of this goodwill. The phone isn’t perfect and there’s lots of other software I haven’t mentioned, but I thought I should acknowledge this phone’s 15 months service to me before I upgrade.

• If it didn’t make sense the title is a reference to a quote from Harold Wilson, it seemed fitting given Opera’s move against Microsoft. Something that’s provoked a passionate reaction from the likes of Eric Meyer and Andy Clarke, both very aware of the ramifications this is already having on the politics of the web community. Update 17 December 2007: Yesterday Andy posted a follow-up to his suggestion to reform the CSS Working Group, I think due to the incisive response he received. Molly Holzschlag comments and I think she’s in a good position to do so.
• Speaking of politics, this week the BBC Internet Blog posted an article by Jonathan Drori about the difficulties attached to implementing CMS technology across the corporation. He even mentions “fiefdoms” which I think many web managers across the public sector will identify with.
• Totally unrelated and on a happier note, Phil pointed out that the Beta version of Google Maps Mobile can now locate a mobile phone “with or without GPS”. Shame it’s (strangely) not supported on my phone.
• And finally, back in October I watched a presentation over at Mac Learning about the new accessibility features in Mac Leopard. With the recently released answers to questions posted during the session, I was pleased to find my question was included. I asked whether element navigation (what’s this?) is available in browsers other than Safari 3. Unfortunately (and I suppose unsurprisingly) the answer is no. However, I guess the fact that Safari 3 now implements long overdue features such as tabs may be some consolation for this.

What is element navigation? It may not be clear what feature I’m talking about so read on for a brief description. In Leopard using Apple VoiceOver and Safari 3, the user can jump through the page to elements of the same type e.g. all the Headings by type (H1, H2 etc), or links (both picture and text links). I suppose this is useful, I’ve been aware that this has been implemented in other screen readers for some time. Note: Apparently VoiceOver is not a screen reader in that it does not read the screen, it responds to direct programme output. Very clever, *smiles*.

This week I’ve found myself reading Read/WriteWeb more and more. If you’ve not seen it, they produce thought provoking articles on all sorts including some that analyse the past and offer an academic look at the possible future of the web. In the last few days I’ve been contemplating their posts on “Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three Approaches” and “Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee’s Graph is The Next Level“. These posts led me to Tim Berners-Lee’s “Giant Global Graph” and Google’s ‘light-hearted’ “Social Design Best Practices“. I found these good for getting to grips with possibilities for the web’s future direction. What’s interesting is that it all seems to tie together the thought as Tim quotes:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important

Anecdotally, blue flavor alluded to this last week after recapping on FOWD with the statement ‘content is still king.’. Well actually Tim abstracts this even further by stating it’s what the content is about that’s important, but both follow similar lines by stating the importance of ‘situation-appropriate’ web access (another quote from Tim’s post).

So after digesting all of that freely available info, who needs to go to conferences like @mediaAjax? We’ll actually I do and I was quite sociable at the after conference gathering, although I didn’t have the moola to attend the event.

This is the first time I’ve seen an introduction to the platform and I must say I think it has acres of potential. Yes it might be later then the rest (Apple’s iPhone has been shipping since the summer, Android isn’t ready for consumers until late 2008), but the same happened with the Wii and, due to it’s unique features, it surprisingly dominates the games console industry. Apple, probably Google’s biggest ‘competitor’ (according to AppleInsider, Google chief Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s Board of Directors), has redefined the mobile experience but their environment is not open (apps development is only available through Safari) which is why unless they release their grip they’ll never win at fighting the tide.

Conversely, if Google’s open platform can keep what looks like an iPhone inspired interface whilst also fostering innovation, it’ll soak up the demand for next generation handsets that Apple kick-started.

Update, 16 November 07: Google’s Dave Burke gave a presentation on Android at the recent Future of Mobile event held in London on 14 November. Mike Butcher blogged his talk. Although apparently he didn’t say anything new, it’s interesting to note that Android is Linux based with Java running on top. During the presentation Dave created a programme in under 8 minutes, it seems Google is trying to emphasise the ease with which programmes can be created.

Wow, think what that could do when combined with something like Photosynth & Seadragon (mentioned in a previous post).