Google Fail

There's been a lot of uproar over Google's recent attempts to "wow" users with gimmickry: a playable pac-man game on the site's home page that distracted and annoyed users, and their attempt at leveling the playing field against Microsoft's "Bing" search engine by replacing the stark, white background of their home page with an image.

Users objected to both of these changes in droves, and the general reaction seems to be dismissal of the user's complaints as resistance to change. So long as that attitude persists, it can be anticipated that Google will trot out additional "improvements" until it either drives users away, or get rid of whatever executive thinks that this kind of nonsense is a good idea.

But more to the point ... it's an interesting case study in user experience. Google quickly overtook rival search engines by providing a clean interface, uncluttered by useless distractions, and by doing so, it gave users the ability to find information quickly. And now, confident that it "owns" its users and can't possibly be overtaken as the king of search (which is exactly what the companies it toppled would have said), it seems to be making exploratory steps down the very same path to ruin.

Aside of a tasty morsel of schadenfreude, there are a few lessons to be taken:

First, a "good" user experience isn't about gimmickry. It's about giving the user exactly what they need to accomplish their goals, and nothing more. Google's original site took the Web by storm because it was simple: a field to enter text, and a button to click. Aside of their logo (a necessary evil), that was it. And users loved it.

But then, things took a turn. Google added the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button and started replacing its logo with special holiday and event graphics. I can't believe that users asked for either of these things, or wanted them, or found that they made the site a better experience for them. Most users ignored them, or tolerated them, and maybe a few found them to be "cool" for at least a little while.

And that's where the problem begins. It starts with a perfectly good site that does exactly what people want, then the operator starts adding on novelties that will attract or entertain a small number, while the rest won't object too much. So long as it's low-key and not too bad, and so long as they don't cross the line, to the point where the gimmicks overwhelm the core value, why not?

The reason is fairly simple: over time, the little things add up. AltaVista and Yahoo didn't begin as "noisy" sites with a clutter of distractions - they added them incrementally, and eventually buried the core functionality of their sites in a trash heap. I don't recall that either made any major blunders, but it may have been better for them if they had - it's easier to roll back a single big mistake rather than a slough of small ones - though in either case, one big blunder or two dozen small ones both serve to do the same thing: to distract and overwhelm, and make the core functionality (the real value that attracts the users) harder to find.

In effect, Google failed to ask the critical question: when a user comes to our site, what do they want to do? There's typically only one thing - or if there are more, one is the most important. And if any "feature" or "improvement" doesn't enable the user to do that one thing better than they did before, it's simply not worth adding.

And when you consider the user's perspective, the answers become simple: when a user goes to a search engine, they are trying to find information. Does a novelty like a video game or background image help them to do that better than a site without one?

The answer is fairly obvious, and it should have been obvious to Google.