Why does Google put a copyright line at the bottom of their main page?
Pop quiz: why does Google put a copyright notice at the bottom of their homepage? No, it’s got nothing to do with legalese. In fact, when they first put it up, their lawyers told them that copyright was implied and they didn’t strictly need it, so they didn’t have to put it up if they didn’t want to.
Give up?
It’s a placeholder. If you didn’t know, Google is obsessive about user tests; in fact, they pioneered the modern web A/B testing model. But back before they had a hundred million consistent daily users to test on, they had to do it almost all manually. And by “manually”, we really mean “manually” — they invited people over for pizza, and then put them in the computer lab.
A lot of their early stuff apparently revolved around their UI, as well as the user experience in general. Not that it’s not a concern these days, but now, it’s a downright scientific study, with whole teams of people dedicated to the matter. “Tests” used to mean “a bunch researchers simply watching user reactions”. Where they couldn’t afford experiments, they used existing research. If you don’t have the budget like Google’s, this might be something to keep in mind.
But anyway, this familiarity that we now enjoy is actually very misleading. Most of us see the Google homepage so many times a day, it’s hard to think there was another time for the web, one when minimalism wasn’t in vogue. Actually, I imagine that some of us, maybe even most of us, might expect that the Google homepage was was alwaysa comfortable experience. But in fact, this is actually not the case. Much to the proto-Googlers’ astonishment, first time searchers would, often simply stare at the for long periods of time. Sometimes as much as several minutes.
Even though the test administrators were not supposed to interact with the subjects, they were eventually forced to. Trying to affect the results as little as possible, they asked if there was something they could help with.
The most common response: something to the effect of, “Oh, I’m just waiting for it to load.”
It turns out that Google’s trademark minimalism confused people! Their homepage was reportedly so out of the ordinary that one lady was convinced beyond all doubt that Google was all an elaborate experiment from Stanford’s psych department. These were the days, remember, when sites like Yahoo were jammed with links, and people tended to “browse” rather than search.
Thus, the response to all of this was that Google eventually decided to add the copyright statement at the bottom of their page. It’s their way of saying, “Yes, we’re done loading. Search now.”
Not to belabor the point, but there is a whole set of seemingly trivial problems that turned out to have drastic consequences for usability. In another, seperate case, they found that the difference of a few pixels in the spacing between the search bar and the results caused a significant dropoff in the number of returning searches for the day. In yet another case, they found that the speed at which the search page renders accountsfor as much as a quarter of the returning daily traffic.
Everything matters. And everything matters because quality is fractal. In other words, you can look at any one component of a really well-designed site (or anything else) and the quality of that component is directly reflective of the quality as a whole. Yes, it’s true that the whole picture matters a lot, in some cases more than specific details, but most of the time, attention to detail is downright critical.
Think about it another way: how many valuable services never panned out because of seemingly benign problems literally confused their audiences to death and were simply never rectified out of ignorance? I shudder to think of all the exciting and innovative products that I am missing out on because someone didn’t know to test extremely thoroughly. Consider that, in these cases, the problems are such that that you might never even have thought of them.
When you found a company, there are a lot of things that seem more important than testing. Few things actually are. There’s a quote my academic advisor used to give me to illustrate that some battles are simply not worth it: let’s not choose this hill to die on. The lesson here is that you might not think you need to test your product, but trust me, you really do. Test it on your friends, your family, even strangers. One of the founders of either Meebo or Reddit (or maybe it was something else, I can’t remember) was notorious for approaching complete strangers at a coffee shop and asking them for feedback, and if this site was something they could use. It would behoove you to remember this well.
