Aza Raskin on Google Search Results

November 6, 2007 at 8:55 pm · Filed under Aza Raskin, business, complexity, customer obsession, ethnography, featuritis, simplicity principle

In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized and son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related. Several readers responded with interesting questions for Aza. In today’s post, Aza Raskin responds to a reader’s question about Google Search Results page and how messy it is.

The Google search box is simple, clean, and intuitive. BUT, the search results, from what customers tell us is confusing and messy as hell. How do you suggest we clean up the natural search and the paid search results? Is there a more intuitive way of doing it? Thanks — A Googler

Ironically, one of the fundamental goal of interaction designers is to reduce interaction. When we do our jobs perfectly, few people ever notice (except when comparing your solution to other products).

In this light, I would make one suggestion: remove the pagination from the Google search results. At best, its somewhat annoying to click through the pages, and at worst its aggravating trying to remember which page had the result you are looking for. One of Google’s magics is the extremely fast loading times, and I understand that loading long pages takes a long time. The solution is a good implementation of an non-intrusive infinite scroll.

As a side note, playful touches make a great interface into home-run products (as long as playful doesn’t become annoying). I like the elongation of "Goooooooogle". That’s a great playful touch. That should be kept in some form.

Other articles in the "Ask Aza Raskin" Series: