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:
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.
Complexity 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!
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.
The 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.
According 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.
There 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.
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:
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.
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.
Does 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.
yeah 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.
I think there will come a time when Yahoo and Google will merge
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.
I 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.
I think there will come a time when Yahoo and Google will merge
And it shall be called “Yoogle”.
Or “Yahoogle”.
Or “Goohoo”.
I 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.