ms. google

i just read a great article this morning on the ny times website ("Putting a Bolder Face on Google") about melissa mayer, google employee no. 20 and the company’s first female engineer AND i must mention that she's only 33 years old!! her role (vice president for search products and user experience) is to bascially stand guard over the look and feel of google's search engine.

you can read the full article on the ny times website. it's a three-page article. so if you don't have time or the interest to read all of it, i've extracted some parts and pasted below that i think apply to what we are learning this semester in visual aesthetics.

1. She [Melissa] ends up giving the same or similar guidelines to managers for various Google features and products in other presentations that day. The guidelines are devised, she said, from myriad internal experiments to gauge users’ preferences. Avoid first- and second-person pronouns. Always write “Google” instead of “we.” If you want to make the design on the page simpler, take away one of these: a type of font, a color or an image. Don’t switch tenses. And steer clear of italics because they are hard to read on a computer screen.

2. A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.

As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr. Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.

Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.