Thursday, March 26 The Uninspiring Google Books
There have been some interesting discussions around the web following the departure of one of its key designers, citing an over-reliance on quantitative assessment of every design decision. Bruce Temkin of Forrester asks, does “Google’s design need to have more soul?” Helen Walters at Business Week interviewed Google’s Irene Au about their design challenges.
I have been using Google Books quite a lot in the course of researching my own book, mostly to check out previews to see if a particular book is worth getting out of the UC Berkeley library. (Actually I mostly access it through Sente, a rather good bibliography database program, which is able to surf Google Books and Google Scholar along with many other sites, and suck bibliographic information off them.) It illustrates some of Google’s challenges.
Here is what a typical front page looks like:
;)
Click to enlarge
Considering that this is supposed to be the portal into the world’s printed knowledge, can you imagine a less inspiring presentation? There is no excitement, anticipation, sense of wonderment. As Google encompasses more knowledge, I sense a problem: it flattens everything to the same level. Google lacks nuance. (Its acquired properties stand out differently — YouTube, Picassa, Earth, Blogger.)
Now obviously Google is focused on simplicity and speed, and that stripped-down philosophy goes for its approach to aesthetics too. The Google front page is famously unadorned. But with Books they’ve made an attempt to give some starting points for exploration by showing a selection of publications. But they are a motley mix that bears no relation to my past browsing history or anything else that Google might glean from me. (I suppose there is someone out there who is interested in a combination of Jet, Lesbian Chic, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory, The Nazi Doctors, and Waste Management.) So why bother putting them there? The chance of something being on that grid that is on the topic I’m looking for is one in a million.
Right now they are straddling a middle ground between Google front page and Amazon, and it’s not working. Pick a side - go rich or go minimal.
customer experience, douglas bowman, google, irene au, user experience | IN CATEGORIES... Brand, Design, Software 
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Reader Comments (3)
Given the amount of data google has on each of us, surely they should be able to do a scarily accurate selection of books, perhaps even more perceptive than amazon (years of searching and browsing history, bookmarks, and emails must be a more accurate - or at least, an alternative - depiction of each of our interests than which books we've bought over the years?). Is the issue with what they are doing behind the scenes - which data they use, how the choose the titles - or with the design - how they present that data? How might it work differently to amazon, when the aim isn't necessarily to invite a purchase or shift stock? Perhaps a sprinkling of more unexpected (older? out-of-print? rarer?) titles, or unanticipated connections between topics - back to the experience of browsing a library shelf, and coming across something unknown and wonderful, perhaps?
(Interestingly, I used to find which books I wanted to get out of the library on Amazon, and then go and browse the shelves which they library computers identified as the home of my target book - not the other way round.)
I would have thought they'd be pretty accurate too, but then I think about how terrible Amazon's recommendations are, and by rights they should be able to nail it every time what with all the stuff I've bought there...
Google is all about maximizing information throughput.
Any unnecessary graphics will only make your search slower and make you lose focus.
You enter the site with a purpose in mind and you leave it with that same purpose in mind.
Bing, for example, distracts you with unrelated images. Which is bad, but sells.