One of the lesser appreciated aspects of Google's success is its commitment to being the best, not just in technology but the User Experience as well. Even when the company was barely a year old, its engineers obsessed with response time, simplicity and purity which then reinforced the favorable brand image of Google. While its competitors were throwing tons of money on advertising (CMGI announced a $ 100 million advertising blitz for Altavista on October 1999 [!]), Google was focusing on other aspects like keeping response time below one second (mentioned again by Marissa Mayer during the recent Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco), innovating with the world's coolest spell-checker, besides improving core search technology. It was all based on cold, hard data: 25% of Google's users frequently misspelled their queries, while the usage dropped noticeably when the response time crossed over one second. This might not be ground-breaking news, yet early stage companies could learn quite a lot from it.
We all love great technology but it's the User Experience in my opinion that really turns great ideas into more pervasive success stories - iPod being the classic example. Judging from Apple's Leopard or Microsoft's Aero in Windows Vista, User Experience keeps gaining on importance as evidenced in some of the biggest tech products.
I would like to highlight two recent User Experience examples I personally liked, though both of these sites are pretty early stage and their success by no means guaranteed:
- iScrybe (check out their demo on YouTube linked from their homepage)
- Pluggd (great coverage of their Audio Search UI in VentureBeat)
- MyBlogLog (their Rockin' Widgets are all over the blogosphere)
While UI alone won't make a site successful, great technology coupled with equally appealing UI, makes that technology more useful, more accessible, and more compelling.
