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How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

articles.latimes.com

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Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#11

Post by Detrus »

defen wrote: post #3

I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence, unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search results, before adwords and instant and live preview.

The "design" of the original Google search page was not so much in the aesthetics as the loading time. Every other search engine piled on decoration and most users had 56K connections. She was the one who convinced the founders not to imitate the other search engines, not to be portals, just let people search as quickly as possible.

That might have been more important than their search results in many cases. Design doesn't get better than that.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#12

Post by wvoq »

lovskogen wrote: post #2

I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits. No?

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption; do you believe that Google's success was independent of the way that users used their product?

And if the public face of the world's most powerful search company has your imprint, isn't that _ipso facto_ evidence of merit? If design was in fact irrelevant, how could _any_ number of successful designs ever constitute evidence for the skill of the designer?

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#13

Post by idoh »

moopark wrote: post #9
nostrademons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marissa did plenty of coding, enough that ten years later, we're still finding bugs in her code. ;-) I think it was more that in a fledgling startup filled with smart, opinionated people, everyone wanted to do design, and Marissa actually proved to be good at it.

... Marissa actually proved to be good at it. Except that, as far as I can tell from the vast majority of Google's products, Google (perhaps not Marissa?) has a design sense that ranges from "poor" to "incredibly poor". Chrome, perhaps, being a singularly notable exception.

They've been pretty key in advancing the state of the art^, so I don't know how you can say that. Maybe you don't have a sense of history.

^: I'm talking about search, mail, and maps specifically.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#14

Post by haploid »

wvoq wrote: post #12
lovskogen wrote: post #2

I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits. No?

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption;…

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence.

Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor.

Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista with a better search engine, not with a better interface.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#15

Post by qq66 »

defen wrote: post #5
amackera wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?

More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).

The products were designed to achieve financial objectives. They have been of mixed successes in this regard. Nobody was designing them so that commenters on the Web would say their "user experience" was good.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#17

Post by ajg1977 »

haploid wrote: post #14
wvoq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption;…

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence. Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor. Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista wit…

His comment is written in a quite snide and belittling way. It's hard to avoid feeling that he either has a low opinion of Marissa Mayer personally, or female engineers in general.

Also, I would argue that while Google was indeed a better search engine, its clean minimalist design and fast loading times also did a lot to differentiate it from Altavista and Yahoo.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#18

Post by leoc »

idoh wrote: post #13
moopark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Marissa actually proved to be good at it. Except that, as far as I can tell from the vast majority of Google's products, Google (perhaps not Marissa?) has a design sense that ranges from "poor" to "incredibly poor". Chrome, perhaps, being a singularly notable exception.

They've been pretty key in advancing the state of the art^, so I don't know how you can say that. Maybe you don't have a sense of history. ^: I'm talking about search, mail, and maps specifically.

But Maps' UI is atrocious for anything beyond the most basic tasks.

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#19

Post by dhs »

haploid wrote: post #14
wvoq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption;…

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence. Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor. Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista wit…

Wait, what? I used to shave - twice! - while waiting for AltaVista to load its homepage full of crappy colorful ads. Then I switched to a plain white Google page that took like a second to come up. And you're telling me that I wasn't using a better interface?

Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

#20

Post by wvoq »

haploid wrote: post #14
wvoq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption;…

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence. Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor. Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista wit…

There was just a presumption of incompetence and an insinuation that Mayer's accomplishments are not _really_ accomplishments, without any given reason. The OP didn't state "Mayer must be incompetent because she's a woman", but that's not how sexism works--people perpetuate sexism by allowing sexist attitudes to color their judgments about the merits of individiuals, often subconsciously. Why do I think it is reasonable to ascribe sexist attitudes to the OP? Because the OP is willing to presume incompetence of an engineer a) without evidence ("I can picture it now...") and b) in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary (the alarming success of GOOG), when the only atypical characteristic of said engineer is that she's a woman.
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