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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It's often hard to look back and attribute success to the things that one did not do. I think this more than anything is Marissa Mayer's problem here on HN - it's tough to publicly point to anything she did, except play the totally critical role of saying no a million times over. Few people can do that, fewer still are right.

It seems that people who say no for a living—designers, directors, critics, even big-league VCs—all fare poorly on HN. I wonder why that is?

Because HN is filled with prospective entrepreneurs and innovative software engineers, and these people need to say "Yes" in order to do their job.

Startups would never get off the ground if their founders said "No" to everything. The next great idea would be killed long before it could be developed enough to prove its worth.

The critical piece is being able to say "Yes" to everything early on, and then critically look at everything you've said "Yes" to once they're on the table and say "No, no, and no" to the vast majority of them.

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).

Google design statistically, like evolution, except the variations being tested are not random (well, maybe some might be).

I would disagree with you that their products are not well designed. Of course they have many products, but the majority that I use are a step above their competitors.

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.

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.

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