When you are as big as Google, there must be times when you think you are completely untouchable. As a user of the service, I have to admit that I thought the same. However the furore over the recent changes to their background should serve as a wakeup call to us all.
If you were living under a rock today, the backlash against the search giant was nothing short of spectacular. When I woke up, and logged on – already Twitter was awash with complaints, petitions and solutions – in fact, no sooner had it launched, than I noticed hackers racing to create grease monkey scripts to remove it. The users spoke – some with their feet, others through angry comments on Google’s own webmaster forums. As one user described it
‘It’s like returning to your house and finding it painted a different color.’
The single biggest complaint from users today was the fact that there was ‘no opt out’ . Not only did we all wake up to something different, but they were forcing into downloading the background images by default. There’s a lesson in there for all of us. If you are implementing drastic changes, let the user choose between old and new – at least until you get a feel for its success.
Traditionally, they have always kept things clean, and put their users first. The single most important webpage in the entire company’s operation, has always been advert free, with minimal noise. It’s also been the fastest loading search engine, with code compressed to the smallest possible amount, both to save money, and to aid the user experience. Even in the age of broadband, they’ve insisted on maintaining those standards.
It’s the primary reason I fell in love with the search engine – they cared when I was on a shitty 56k modem connection, they got me where I wanted, and let me get on with the task at hand. When every other search engine was focused on building massive portals of information that attracted advertising dollars, and shoved it under my nose. Google on the other hand were playing the sneaky tiger, giving me crystal meth search in the form of speed. They provided the minimum interface to complete the task of search and their entire brand ethos has always been focused on users.
Today however, for a split second, somehow, they took their eye off the ball, and suffered the consequences.
User interface design on the world’s most visited web page, should be a cautious, well thought out process with scenarios created for every eventuality. Today’s ‘experiment’ was severly lacking in all of those, and we got to see that even the world’s biggest brands are not infallible. I can’t help but feel that the fundamental ideals of great interface design are being cast aside at the ‘plex, in favour of being seen to ‘innovate’ or ‘compete’. In my opinion, more often than not, innovating is getting rid of features to make the journey smoother.
This article underpins everything that would have prevent today’s brand disaster.
Web users are, at the crux of it, an extremely fickle bunch. One minute you are the king of the world, and the next – your reputation lies in tatters. Social media has cranked the volume to 10, and we all experienced the fallout in one form or another.
Bing versus Google today made for a very interesting picture, maybe it was a bold two fingered ‘anything you can do, we can do better’ – but if you are market leader, you don’t gain respect by following the guy in second place – you only stand to lose it. Google came off bruised today, and left the room with its tail between its legs – ending the experiment early.
From Marrisa Mayer
‘We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early.‘
This sounds like horseshit to me. A company of Google’s size don’t get an interation out the door without rigorous cross browser testing, and it troubles me greatly to hear such from someone in a senior position. Such a statement only further undermines. Hold your hands up, be honest and tell the world you screwed up.
They are lucky – whilst they are showboating with one of the web’s most highly traffic’d sites, they also receive instantaneous feedback from millions of people letting them know when they’ve gone the wrong direction. What process have you in place to listen for even the smallest grumble?
In focusing solely on the competition – Google clearly forgot about their users, with even Microsoft having a laugh at their expense. Add to that the privacy problems detected in Germany and Australia and other little chinks in Google’s armour, show a vunerability that many of us didn’t even think existed.
The Google background experiment is a sound reminder that no one is too big to suffer the wrath of users.
linky
posted:June 10, 2010 9:37 pm
You’re absolutely correct. My guess is that there were any number of people at the plex shouting that this was going to be a bad thing. I’d further posit that it was probably the very developers asked to push the feature through. Why weren’t they listened to?
Jim R. Wilson
linky
posted:June 17, 2010 9:16 pm
Why all this hoopla about this little thing? It is not correct that there was no opt-out. I tried an image and then immediately removed it. By default, they showed an image to get the word out but switching back to classic Google was a cinch. If you read the official Google blog when this was released, you will know that there was always an opt-out.
webster
linky
posted:June 17, 2010 9:27 pm
this post?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/freeze-frame.html
or this post?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-of-homepage.html
Can’t see any opt out information here anywhere webster…Pretty sure there was no way to do it at the time of writing. Hence the multiple posts from major blogs around the world “how to remove Google background”
http://bit.ly/dqOAMI
Paul Anthony