Google’s so-called “simplicity”
Don Norman is sick of hearing people talk about how Google is so simple. The truth about Google’s so-called “simplicity” is that “anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing”. But behind the search page, it’s not so simple after all:
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.
Norman even dares to suggest that – gasp – Yahoo! and MSN are actually easier to use, because all the user’s options are immediately available and the user doesn’t have to go poking around through the site looking for them.
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?
Long live the iconoclasts! The “Google is so simple” meme is traveling the webdev world at lightning speed. It’s going to take some work to mount up a counter-meme (especially one that includes “MSN” and “good” in the same sentence).