Usability 2.0
- Published April 12th, 2007 in /dev/random, Google
Directly from the Google campus, here’s the coverage of the Usability 2.0 tech talk.
It started quite well - japanese food served over a Google’s surfboard (ie, a surfboard with Google’s name printed on it!) along with a glass of red wine. There are people from everywhere, including Adobe, Paypal, eBay, CNET and, of course, Google, Yahoo and Netflix (and a bunch of people from SAP).
Sean Kane
Sean Kane, from Netflix, was the first to talk. He gave a bunch of interesting stats about Netflix like over 1 billion DVDs delivered. He thoroughly presented the Netflix interface (according to the hands that were raised when he asked who has a Netflix subscription — everyone should know that pretty well by now, but thanks anyway :-). People were quite amazed when he said that Netflix will implement drag & drop on the queue (like, finally?).
Apart from this, he didn’t actually talk about anything that could resemble to be related to Usability 2.0 or Usability at all, except pointing Netflix solutions for the user experience. Quite poor this presentation.
Jon Wiley
Jon Wiley followed. Wiley is a User Experience Designer on the Google Apps team. He publicized a little bit about what he does. But before actually doing that, he tried plugging his MacBook Pro but the cable was VGA and not DVI. Yahoo’s speaker, Luke Wroblewski, that also had a MacBook Pro came to rescue. Funny this cooperation between Yahoo! and Google!
Wiley raised an interesting point and it was the first big motto of the day: DON’T MAKE ME THINK.
He then showed up a cool cartoon. Since I don’t know where he got it I’ll just put the transcripts here.
1: Make me a sandwhich?
2: What? Make it yourself!
1: sudo make me a sandwhich
2: Ok!
It’s definitely off-topic but rather funny, at least for tracking down who’s from the *nix world.
He also said that they have a kind of partnership with some schools in Rwanda to provide free Google Apps subscriptions. So, they try targeting a UI that it’s as usable by tech-savvy people for 1st world countries as it is by people in 3rd world countries like Rwanda.
Usability as marketing!
Google got video coverage of their easy sign-up process. Someone made a video of signing up for Google Apps in 60 seconds. Usability is always a Good Thing and can sometimes be used to promote your company.
Luke Wroblewski
Luke Wroblewski ended the speaking session. Luke was definitely the most insightful and funny speaker of all the panelists. Unfortunately, by this time I was already tired of having my laptop over my lap so I simply turned it off. Whenever I remember all he said I’ll put it here. I’ll leave you with a question he asked.
How can the usability contribute to the user experience?
Extended Questions
There were a lot of questions. The presentations were so quick that I though that they had a second presentation with the real stuff. They didn’t.
Fortunately that some questions helped getting them to speak a little bit about the real stuff. One interesting topic is assessing usability. Some use quantitative metrics others use qualitative metrics, but everyone agrees on running those tests to try assessing the level of usability. The Yahoo! speaker told (and someone confirmed) that the UI Usability tests at Apple were pretty much non existent — meaning they trusted immediately what came out of the UI team.
This brought Apple up to discussion. It was kind of mutual agreement that Apple sets the standards in desktop applications’ usability and are definitely a great example of excellency in User Experience. Somehow, it seemed that I was actually in Cupertino listening to Steve talking…
Finally, someone tackled the MySpace issue. And I complement it. How come a site completely lacking usability could provide a good User Experience to the user considering they are one of the most viewed websites in the world. I leave this as an exercise for the astute reader.
My take
I was expecting a little bit more. But it was great for networking with people from other companies (I met someone from a company that does social software for health care systems! — more on this later) and, of course, for getting to know Google’s campus. And it’s jaw-dropping. It’s HUGE (I mean it) and it’s like you read. A must see!
The moment of the evening was when I went to the rest room. Here are the pictures of what is right in front of your when you’re, well, taking a pee. A design pattern for testing in C++! How geek can it go?
Hi Mario,
I guess you have so much to do and see that you don’t have time to rotate the pictures. ;-)
I’m having problems posting a comment to
http://mywheel.net/blog/index.php/2007/04/11/bloggers-code-of-conduct/#respond
It simply doesn’t open… :-/
The comic you are talking about is
http://xkcd.com/c149.html
About “I met someone from a company that does social software for health care systems! — more on this later”, please do share. I’m really interested in this topic.
Thanks!
here: http://cu.nniling.us/c149.html
Well Pedro, I did rotate them while uploading to Flickr but for some reason they got back to their original state and I hate wasting time doing the same thing twice! :-)
Pedro P., that should be fixed now.
Joao S. and Vitor, thanks for the link. I’ll try talking a little bit more of that topic within a few days.
Thanks for the detailed summary. Seems like even if it didn’t live up to your expectations, it was a pretty good event. I was surprised by learning about Apple and its lack of usability testing… Indeed it proves that their UI team is top notch.
Other thing, about MySpace. IMO it wasn’t a matter of usable vs non-usable. At the time, when they launched, you already had Livejournal, Xanga and communities of the sort… but all of them had limitations as to what extent you were able to customize your page. You couldn’t insert videos, couldn’t use javascript, couldn’t change all that much about the page… just basic layout. Then MySpace came along and suddenly they were able to put all the videos and mp3s we wanted… customize the content, multimedia-wise. Even if, in the end, they had the most sickening page on their hands, with humongous loading times… at least it had their videos. It’s all about identity.
Then the social effect kicked in… “hey check out my page”, “cool! i want to have videos of (insert emo band here) on mine!”. And the rest is history.
The lesson learned here is that you have to understand the needs/desires of your target audience. At least, this is how I see the whole MySpace phenomenon.
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Oh, that seems like a perfect place for a design pattern. haha
As for the GCampus… I hope I get to see it in person soon. :D