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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

#31

Post by moopark »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
moopark wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are technological advances, not design advances. As for "not having a sense of history", that's a strange ad hominem, but I'll lend it a response: - I was on the internet when there was only gopher (from terminals at the library). - I was also on the internet when Netscape 1.0 was the shiny new thing (and the 56k frame relay I used to download it was considered quite fast). - I used Mapquest, Altavista, and Yah…

I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance? Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while…

Actually, (and as a former Apple engineer) I'd say Apple is barely acceptable with most technology but absolutely fantastic leveraging that technology to produce amazing product designs.

What Apple technology in specific do you think is so advanced?

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

#32

Post by T_S_ »

I was just thinking today while wrestling with a Google presentation doc that the UI sucks, as does the UI of many Google products. Yesterday I was wrestling with the Picasa Uploader.

However the totality of the UX is ok, since I really need to share the information and that part works ok. In fact it is surprising how much suckiness I will tolerate in that tradeoff.

Sorry if this has nothing to do with Marissa Mayer. The only thing I know about her is that I keep hearing her name and seeing her picture, which is not unpleasant. Also, the original Google page was a miracle of minimalism in an era that gave us the Flash intro. If that was you Marissa, then thanks. Otherwise I owe another apology to someone.

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

#33

Post by nostrademons »

moopark wrote: post #31
nostrademons wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance? Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while…

Actually, (and as a former Apple engineer) I'd say Apple is barely acceptable with most technology but absolutely fantastic leveraging that technology to produce amazing product designs. What Apple technology in specific do you think is so advanced?

My impression (as someone not an Apple engineer) is that much of the iPhone hardware is pretty impressive, their visual skin layer is awesome and does some truly impressive computer graphics to get high performance on battery-constrained devices, and a lot of the MacOS underlying tech is pretty solid.

I'm really quite curious as to where you put the dividing line - my impression (as a Google engineer who works frequently in UI) is that there're a lot of really subtle design decisions in both Search and Maps that are nothing more than HTML/CSS, but really improve the usability of the product.

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

#34

Post by neurotech1 »

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?

She has engineering background. I met her recently and asked her a question about the using the search API. In the same conversation she mentioned that UX is just as important in startups, but often overlooked.

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

#35

Post by defen »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #8
defen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's a mixed bag. For example, I thought Chrome was very well designed.

Good point - for some reason I was only thinking of their web products. Chrome is excellent.

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

#36

Post by defen »

qq66 wrote: post #15
defen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm saying they may have had more success if they'd focused on those things explicitly. Great design and financial objectives are not mutually exclusive - see Apple iAnything. Of course it's an unanswerable question whether more focus on design would have helped some of their failed products, but unanswerable questions are the most fun to argue.

As an example, in my opinion a big reason that Wave failed was that it had an awful user experience - people simply had no idea how to operate the interface. I think there was also a marketing failure in that people didn't even know why they were supposed to use it, but that's a separate issue. When I have multiple tech-savvy friends tell me they have no idea how to even use a product from a major corporation like Google, I worry a little bit.

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

#38

Post by lovskogen »

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;…

All I'm saying is whoever would do the Google page would now be a famous designer.
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