The great This Week in Google podcast just had a very enlightening conversation about the new Google Sidewiki. This feature, just rolled out last week, allows anyone who has the Google Toolbar to open a sidebar on any site to add comments. The reaction of many on the panel was critical, in that it takes the editing power and content management ability of the site owner away (Google owns the content). Jeff Jarvis (author of the great book What Would Google Do?) said that in the end it was “a failure of empathy” – Google did a very “un-Google” like think in that they did not put themselves in the place of site owners and wonder what they would think about this new feature.
Now in the end this may be a very small tempest in a teapot (Google may end up dropping the feature or users may never adopt it in sufficient numbers) but the topic reminded me of an earlier article I wrote on empathy – more specifically, it made me wonder if Google may be losing some of it’s focus on user experience. Example #2 – also discussed on this program was the new Chrome Framewww that users of Internet Explorer has to install, as a plug-in, if they want to use some of Google’s new technology such as Google Wave.
Instead of doing the additional coding necessary to make Wave work in IE they gave up and now make users install this app to run Chrome “inside” IE. While I have not personally tried this out, having users take an extra step to do something because your developers can’t figure it out doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
The lesson I’m taking away from all this is simple: Google is the 800 lb. gorilla of the Internet, and therefore they should be even more careful and diligent when it comes to implementing new features. Millions of users rely on their products every day, and any drastic changes can be incredibly disruptive. This is not to say they should be paralyzed with fear – just that they need to ramp up their user experience efforts and follow the (paraphrased) Hippocratic Oath – “first, do no harm.”
I also can’t help but think “physician, heal thyself” in that I, too, am designing new features in systems that impact millions – which is why we do the due diligence of ethnographic research, usability testing, and user acceptance tests. In the end, we have to keep moving forward, and the challenge is always balancing out time-to-market versus quality. If you’re in a similar situation as a designer, it never hurts to be a little late but produce a better offering for your users.