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The truth about Google's so-called "simplicity" - 8 March 2006


by Don Norman

Read this article in Chinese
Translated by Liang Zhang, proof read by Christina Li.

The truth about Google? It isn’t simple.

Look, I like Google. It’s a great search engine. But I am sick and tired of hearing people praise its clean, elegant look. Hell, all search engines have that clean elegant part to them: type your search terms into the box and hit “Enter”.

“Oh,” people rush to object, “the Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff.”

True, but that’s because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks – if you can remember how to get to them.

Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use. Not because they are complex, but because they simplify the life of their users by letting them see their choices on the home page: news, alternative searches, other items of interest. Yahoo! even has an excellent personalization page, so you can choose what you wish to see on that first page.

Take another careful look at Google’s front page. Want a map? You have to click once to be offered the choice, then a second additional time to get to the map page. Want to use Google Scholar to check references? Um, well, is that “Advanced Search” or “more.” What about their newly announced blog search? Why is Google maps separate from Google Earth? (Oh, those were purchased from different companies. Yes, but why should I, the user, care about the history of Google’s acquisitions?)

All of these things require you to click on “more” which gets you to the options page where there are 29 alternatives, plus links to “About Google,” “Help Center” (if Google is really so simple, why does one need help?), “Downloads” and then a special section on “web search features,” which has another 24 links of web features, a book search toolbar, and then another 23 sections of text — not links, text descriptions and an entire meta-language you can learn to improve the searches.

Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

A long time ago, 1968 to be precise, a wise person named Conway wrote: “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” So true: I can see this in products from many a company. Except with Google, there appears to be no organizational structure of the product. Hmm.

Reference
Conway, M. E. (1968). How do committees invent? Datamation, 14 (April), 28-31.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, and author, his latest book being “Emotional Design.” He lives at www.jnd.org.

Buy books by this author from amazon.co.uk

Comments made

  1. Alessandro

    Oh that’s unbelievable! Finally a person who has my same opinions on Google! :-D

    I completely agree with you! :-)

    Hurrah for MSN Search and it expanding advanced search menu! (the one that they name “Search Builder”).

    A negative aspect of MSN Search? Its URL: “google.com” its better than “search.msn.com”!
    9 March 2006, 13:55

  2. Ange

    Perhaps the people who praise Google (myself being one of them) are simply using the search engine to do just that—search. When landing on the Yahoo! page, the numerous options are distracting, almost to the point that I forget why I came there in the frist place.
    9 March 2006, 14:50

  3. mazedesigner

    Google’s design is conducive to focused work. It may require more clicks to find the tool you want, but when you get there you can be more productive.
    9 March 2006, 18:14

  4. Kurtis

    I definitely agree with Ange: like everything else, it depends on how (and why) you use it:

    I usually don’t bother to visit Google’s homepage: I construct my query right in the address field.

    On the other hand, my mother likes Google’s “clean appearance” ... but spends most of her time on Yahoo, because she’s comfortable with it … and she has a Yahoo email address.

    Am I a “good user”, and my mother a “bad user”? No, just different kinds of user. Google works well for me, and not well for my mother. Should Google disappear? I hope not (even though I don’t own Google stock).

    People can choose what they want … and whatever is most usable for them.
    9 March 2006, 18:47

  5. greeneggs

    “first you have to figure out how to find it” – ummm SEARCH!

    Google is the best search engine in the world. People come to Google to search. If they want something and type in a phrase that matches what they want, chances are they will see the page/site they want in the top couple of results.

    Why wouldn’t you just use google to search for what you want to find on the Google website?

    You can’t be all things to all people, so Google have decided to build a great search engine and make it blindingly obvious on the homepage that that is the core of what they want you to do.

    If everyone else’s model is so good then why aren’t they number 1.

    In Australia, we call it the tall poppy syndrome. Build them up and then tear them down.
    9 March 2006, 23:26

  6. greeneggs

    Oh, by the way, this text box that I am typing into doesn’t scroll, so I can’t see what I am typing once I have reached the bottom of the box. TERRIBLE Usability Mr Norman!!!! I would expect much better from you!

    Firefox 1.5.0.1. Windows 2003 Server.
    9 March 2006, 23:30

  7. Christina Li

    Hi Greeneggs,

    Thanks for your comments about the text box. I do appologize for the terrible experence you’ve had.

    The blog system uiGarden uses is textpattern. The comment system is part of it. This textbox works fine on some browsers but not all of them. I’m trying to fix this bug and will be very grateful if any people can give us a hand since none of our team members have a good knowledge of php.

    Sorry about this to everybody!
    10 March 2006, 11:16

  8. Jonathan Snook

    The problem isn’t PHP, it’s CSS. And it’s this offending line:

    /Don’t show textarea scrollbar on IE/
    textarea{
    overflow: hidden;
    }
    Try changing hidden to auto. Also, the tabindex is really off. And the background image is extremely distracting. There’s so many things wrong with this comment box it hurts.
    10 March 2006, 14:53

  9. Garth

    Thanks for your insightful comments on this! That’s so true about Google’s UI, but it’s not a fault, just a choice. In seminars I’ve taught on UI design, I’ve talked about “clicks vs. clutter”, i.e. you can have a clean homepage that minimizes clutter, but you might have to clickthrough several levels to get the content you want; or you can have a busy page where all the links are visible out front, but then the information gets obscured by all the clutter. In Google’s case, I think they chose the simple interface because that’s what appealed to Web searchers who were getting sick of all the search portals that (when Google went live) were loading up their homepages with ads, irrelevant content and all kinds of junk. Still, people who make generalizations about Google’s UI being superior because it’s “spare, clean, elegant” forget that this kind of UI design, which is fine for search engines (some search engines), does not necessarily work for other site categories.
    10 March 2006, 19:40

  10. Michael Zuschlag

    There’s much to be said for favoring breadth over depth as you suggest, and maybe Google would benefit from more depth. Or maybe not, because there’s also something to be said for proportionality: making common things easier to use by keeping uncommon things out of the way. If you model it mathematically, where performance on a feature is degraded by moving it deeper in the hierarchy, but also where performance on a feature is degraded by the clutter of other features around it, I think you’ll see that optimal distribution of your features on the home page versus the deeper page depends on the frequency each feature is used as well as the performance cost for putting a feature deeper. For a given cost, the more the frequency of use is concentrated in a few features, the fewer features should be on the home page. In the case of Google, I suspect the overwhelming use is for general web search, so other features perhaps do belong a page deeper. Of course, by sticking other features deeper in the hierarchy, the high frequency of using Google for general search only tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but maybe that’s a business decision that Google took consciously. Or maybe they figured that if a user really uses something like Google Scholar, they’ll have a direct favorite to it, pushing the decision to yet another level higher in the hierarchy. What’s the Favorites bar but a personalized home page?
    10 March 2006, 20:44

  11. 0h4crying0utloud

    Do you also go grocery shopping at gas stations?

    I think the people at google realized what makes places like yahoo suck. Sure there’s a lot there but the quality is lower and many people prefer to visit two different areas when they are so loosely connected like gas and groceries.

    You see, while it makes sense to place the dips right next to the chips in the snack isle, it’s not such a good idea to have a link to “yellow pages” surrounded by links to TV schedules and Financial Information. The result is a blue cloudy mess that keeps changing with every redesign effort to make sense of the chaos. But it will never work.

    Maps.google.com is a great mapping tool and now I’ll never go to yahoo maps again. I don’t navigate there from www.google.com though, that’s an unnecessary extra step. Google seems to be making services that are so useful and well designed that they can stand alone and worth linking to their browser to or typing in, just as www.cnn.com or www.uigarden.net.

    So I’m afraid you going to continue to hear about google’s clean and simple interface because I am very certain it contributes substantially to their total domination in the search engine market. You know yahoo once was powered by google and that didn’t really help so the question is: As a search engine, what makes google so great if not the clean and simple UI?
    10 March 2006, 23:22

  12. Sergio

    You´re absolutely right…and wrong at the same time. They´d have a poorer interface if the wanted it to be a portal. They do not. As said previously, they launch web services initiatives and wait to see which ones stand up on their on. If they do, people will bookmark it. If I want to use google maps I do not, concurrently, want to search, so I just type the web address. Actually, many times I simply googgle it. It´s neither wrong nor right, it´s just a differente paradigm.
    11 March 2006, 23:35

  13. 0h4crying0utloud

    There seems to be a concensus here. Looks like you’ll have to write another article about how so many of us had “difficulty” with your posting . You’re so mistunderstood!
    13 March 2006, 23:15

  14. Paul

    I personally disagree, as I find the lonely unimposing Google Search box to be the interface. If I need a map, I type in the address and boom links to maps from Yahoo, Google, and Mapquest, and this is before going through the hell of search boxes and windows that Yahoo and MapQuest impose on you. I can search in plain text for “124 address, fictional, california” in plain English (or Mandarin, I’m wagering).

    Movie times? Type the movie name in. Google News? Type in the news report you’re curious about. The Google UI can be confusing because it’s transparent beneath the hood of the search engine, but it’s there, and easy to work with.

    Personally I prefer this approach to the information overload of Yahoo or MSN. I don’t have to think about whether I’m looking for X, Y or Z; I just search.
    14 March 2006, 21:35

  15. Murli

    I have immense respect for Don Norman but have to disagree with him (at least somewhat) on this issue. Before I got to this post, I coincidentally wrote a piece around the same issue:

    http://tinyurl.com/g5qkl

    My basic argument is this: the tradeoff is between Usable Simplicity and Functionally seful complexity. Arguments about whether or not Google is better are going to mirror the great (and unresolved) Mac v. Windows debate. Each side will have a cult-like following, with those on the Usable Simplicity side typically claiming the moral high ground (myself being one).

    There are going to about as many people who love Google’s usable simplicity as there are those who prefer complex functionality. There is a market for Google, and then there is a market for its exact opposite.
    17 March 2006, 07:45

  16. tristan

    Google’s popularity is undoubtly due, to a great extent, to its simplicity of use for searching the web : its interface is cognitivly restful, and we “web addicts” often need some rest !
    But it doesn’t exclude the fact that when you venture beyond the home page it’s true that you face some usability flaws.
    Norman said : “Want to use Google Scholar to check references? Um, well, is that “Advanced Search” or “more.””
    I agree : I faced the same problem when I was looking for Google directory.
    Having said, I don’t really understand why Norman is so “mean” to Google. Did I miss something ?
    17 March 2006, 23:22

  17. Tinus Guichelaar

    I can’t take this article seriously when the UI to post comments is as bad as this one.

    Fix this before you decide to take a pick on Google!
    22 March 2006, 08:03

  18. Tinus Guichelaar

    And when I click on one of the “latest comments”, nothing happens..
    22 March 2006, 08:49

  19. Christina

    Dear all,

    Thanks for pointing out problems with the comment box on this site. As stated above, I am both aware of it and trying to solve it (Thanks to Jonathan Snook, I have corrected the CSS). But probably there are still other problems I can’t solve at the moment have made your experience on this site painful. I do apologise for this and am still trying to resolve. I would be extremely grateful if anybody is willing to offer some help.

    Also, please note that Dr. Norman has nothing to do with this site. He just gave us the permission to reprint his article, and that’s it. So please use the contact form provided to comment problems of this site and keep your comment related to the content of this article.
    23 March 2006, 00:26

  20. fredhead

    i think there is a happy medium somewhere between simple access to services and a clean search homepage. Yahoo and Google are at 2 opposite ends of the scale – one shows everything & the other shows nothing so opinions and preferences will be strong. There are other folks trying to solve this, the redesign that ask.com just did is a case in point, it seems to be balancing the 2 things well with a clean search page and a toolbox thing for access to services, its worth a look.
    4 April 2006, 23:24

  21. Gil

    Very interesting angle. I hate this whole “praise the google” phenomenon (that I call googlbation) in my blog – would love to hear your comments http://www.degardener.com/2006/04/25/is-google-losing-design-edge
    AND
    http://www.degardener.com/2006/03/11/googlebation/
    AND
    http://www.degardener.com/2006/03/09/a-question-for-google-is-wap-just-a-simplified-version-of-the-web-for-you/
    11 May 2006, 12:41

  22. crownquarz

    yes, the same idea with u! when we only use the search function, it is so simple for me. but when do others e.g. groups.google.com, gmail.com and so on. it is so discommodious for I have to search in google.com for many steps or type this in URL. Most of all, I like it more than Yahoo & Msn.
    14 May 2006, 11:44

  23. charlie

    Isn’t this getting back to the age-old argument about clicking? I can click through 10 pages rapidly if signposting is clear and I know where I’m going and I get where I want. I don’t care if it’s one function or service in one place as long as I can find it and I know what to expect. Google is simple for that reason – and all it’s services work.


    11 July 2006, 12:27

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