Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for design principles

A Brief History of the Complete Redesign of Google at #SXSW2012

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Sunday, March 11 at South by Southwest Interactive Conference, Austin, TX
Google Panel Consisting of Evelyn Kim (Visual Designer for Maps), Jon Wiley (Lead Designer for Google Search), Michael Leggett (Design Lead, Google Apps & Gmail), Nicholas Jitkoff (User Experience Designer for Chrome), Chris Wiggins (Google Creative Lab)

The Evolution of Google Design

Google Kennedy Redesign of 2011

“So did Google just hire a bunch of designers recently, or were they all being kept in a cage all this time?” @tylerball

The process of this redesign is told in two stories. There is the story that you know about that happened in 2011, but most people don’t know the story of the redesign in 2007. 6 designers set out to express the Google brand that was consistent across all properties. It was called Kanna (Icelandic for “to explore, to examine”). Trying to find the balance between form and function, but mainly design and engineering. Looked at over 100 brand attributes that were narrowed down to 4 clusters.

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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

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Bill Scott – Designing for Mice and Men

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Bill Scott from Netflix – Designing for Mice and Men
Bill Scott, Netflix – Designing for Mice and Men

Bill has been in the industry for a long time, at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix.

Challenge is designing across devices: web, mobile, tablets & TV. Iteration changes based on devices. In Canada, they don’t even have a queue.

People like to make lists.

Chaos – 400 SKUs (devices) can run Netflix. Different manufacturers can create different NetFlix experiences. Using HTML5 for all platforms. Using Webkit (QT Webkit, Skia Webkit, iOS Webkit) Takes advantage of the same engineering team to create for most devices.

Server-driven dynamic UI

Webstyle release vs CE firmware updates

Support A/B Testing

Controlled Variances

Managing Across Platforms

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  • portability layer (html5)
  • vary the experience across platforms
  • design for user posture, input capabilities, navigation styles and display capabilities