(Read Building the Perfect User Interface, Part 1.)
In my first ramble about user interface, I used the toaster as an example of something that is erroneously thought to have a perfect user interface. Perhaps a more apropos example for most techies is the Internet search engine.
Think of any piece of information you’d like to know. Who was the king of France in 1425? What’s the address and occupation of your best friend from junior high school? How many barrels of oil does Venezuela produce every day? Chances are, that piece of information is sitting on one of the trillions of web pages cached in Google’s databases, and it’s accessible from your web browser right this instant.
You just have to figure out how to get to it — and Google’s job is to bring it to you in as few steps as possible. It’s all a question of interface, and that’s why user interface has been Google’s main preoccupation since day one.
It might seem the model of simplicity to click in a box, type for a search term, and click a button to get your results. But the Google model of searching is still an imperfect process at best. You may not realize it, but there are still a number of Rubegoldbergian obstacles between you and the information you’re trying to get to. For instance:
- You need to have an actual machine that can access the Internet, whether it’s a computer or a cell phone or a DVR.
- That machine has to be powered and correctly configured, and it relies on hundreds of other machines — routers, satellites, firewalls, network hubs — to be powered and correctly configured too.
- You need to know how to log in to one of these machines, fire up a piece of software like a web browser, and find the Google website.
- The object of your search has to be easily expressed in words. You can’t put an image or a color or a bar of music into the search box.
- Those words have to be in a language that Google currently recognizes and catalogs (and your machine has to be capable of rendering words in that language).
- You have to know how to spell those words with some degree of accuracy — which isn’t a problem when searching for “the king of France in 1425,” but can be a real problem if you’re looking for “Kweisi Mfume’s curriculum vitae.”
- You need to be able to type at a reasonable speed, which puts you at a disadvantage if you’re one-handed or using imperfect dictation software.
- Google has to be able to interpret what category of subject you’re looking for, in order to discern whether you’re trying to find apples, Apple computers, Apple Records, or Fiona Apple.
Some of these barriers between you and your information might seem laughable. But it all seems so easy for you because you’re probably reading this from the ideal environment for Google, i.e. sitting indoors at a desk staring at a computer that you’ve already spent hours and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to set up. If you’re running down the street trying to figure out which bus route to take, the barriers to using Google become much steeper. Or if you’re driving in your car, or if you’re a Chinese peasant without access to 3G wireless, or if you’re lounging in the pool, and so on.
Even in the best-case scenario, after you jump through all those hoops, you usually have to scan through at least a page of results from the Google search engine to find the one that contains the information you’re looking for. Google does no interpretation, summarization, or analysis on the data it throws back to you. Some search engines do some preliminary classification of results, or they try to anyway, but it’s generally quite rudimentary. Chances are you’ll need to spend at least a few seconds to a few minutes combing through pages to find one that’s suitable, and then you’ll need to search through that suitable page to find the information you want.
I don’t mean to minimize the achievement of the Google search engine. The fact that I can determine within minutes that a) the king of France in 1425 was Charles VII, b) my best friend from junior high school is currently heading the division of a high-definition audio company in Latin America, and c) in 2004, Venezuela produced 2.4 million barrels of oil a day — this is all pretty frickin’ amazing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note the search engine’s shortcomings. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that there are still a zillion ways to improve it. There’s still a huge mountain to climb before we can call Google an example of perfect user interface.
But don’t worry, because Google’s on the case.