How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design | Hacker News Reader

How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

articles.latimes.com

35 pointsAnon8437 comments

I can't believe Marissa Mayer is getting any hate here.

She talked at Stanford and her genius was evident.

She is intimidatingly smart and has business sense most people can only dream of.

The fact that she has been doing it for 11 years for virtually all of Google's products only further proves her prowess.

I'm personally in awe of what Marissa has been able to do at Google. We had a small billing error with Google once and she personally signed off on the check.

I'm not entirely sure how she is able to stay involved with as many different products and services as she does. It's a remarkable ability.

It's why when she switched over to managing the Local team, we all knew that Google was finally getting serious about this category.

I was just thinking today while wrestling with a Google presentation doc that the UI sucks, as does the UI of many Google products. Yesterday I was wrestling with the Picasa Uploader.

However the totality of the UX is ok, since I really need to share the information and that part works ok. In fact it is surprising how much suckiness I will tolerate in that tradeoff.

Sorry if this has nothing to do with Marissa Mayer. The only thing I know about her is that I keep hearing her name and seeing her picture, which is not unpleasant. Also, the original Google page was a miracle of minimalism in an era that gave us the Flash intro. If that was you Marissa, then thanks. Otherwise I owe another apology to someone.

Under her watch google made several design changes which were direct copies of bing, I would be embarrassed if i was her.

Like what?

I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits.

No?

Marissa did plenty of coding, enough that ten years later, we're still finding bugs in her code. ;-)

I think it was more that in a fledgling startup filled with smart, opinionated people, everyone wanted to do design, and Marissa actually proved to be good at it.

... Marissa actually proved to be good at it.

Except that, as far as I can tell from the vast majority of Google's products, Google (perhaps not Marissa?) has a design sense that ranges from "poor" to "incredibly poor". Chrome, perhaps, being a singularly notable exception.

They've been pretty key in advancing the state of the art^, so I don't know how you can say that. Maybe you don't have a sense of history.

^: I'm talking about search, mail, and maps specifically.

But Maps' UI is atrocious for anything beyond the most basic tasks.

These are technological advances, not design advances.

As for "not having a sense of history", that's a strange ad hominem, but I'll lend it a response:

- I was on the internet when there was only gopher (from terminals at the library).

- I was also on the internet when Netscape 1.0 was the shiny new thing (and the 56k frame relay I used to download it was considered quite fast).

- I used Mapquest, Altavista, and Yahoo, but before that, I used people's random collections of favorite links that you found on their home pages.

I don't lack perspective on history, but I don't equate Google's technological improvements in "advancing the state of the art" with overall quality UX design. The minimalist home page was brilliant in comparison to Yahoo at the time, but it's not an aesthetic they've been able to continue to apply successfully.

Google consistently produces fantastic technology, lackluster design, and then rarely, a design outliers that is actually good.

Every once in a while some company comes out with a really great solution to a problem. The most recent was with hipmunk and flights. When I used hipmunk for the first time, I had that feeling that after them, the whole landscape had changed.

I got the same feeling when I saw google maps - it was so far ahead of everyone, and not just technically but design-wise too. The same thing happened with mail. So on one hand you could say that their maps and mail are sort of standard, and that other companies have similar offerings.

But on the other hand, who set the standard in the first place?

Slippy maps are great. The UX was a great idea, but it was almost entirely dependent on having the technology and infrastructure to implement them, including asynchronous map tiling client side.

I don't think that is in conflict with my original statement, and the remainder of the Maps API is truly bad. I regularly make the mistake of using the scroll wheel, get stuck trying to figure out how to show (or hide) street view, etc.

Regarding GMail -- it's a poor approximation of an existing, very basic desktop experience. There's not a lot of design innovation there, if you look beyond webmail.

I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance?

Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while Google is openly proud of having advanced technology?

Actually, (and as a former Apple engineer) I'd say Apple is barely acceptable with most technology but absolutely fantastic leveraging that technology to produce amazing product designs.

What Apple technology in specific do you think is so advanced?

My impression (as someone not an Apple engineer) is that much of the iPhone hardware is pretty impressive, their visual skin layer is awesome and does some truly impressive computer graphics to get high performance on battery-constrained devices, and a lot of the MacOS underlying tech is pretty solid.

I'm really quite curious as to where you put the dividing line - my impression (as a Google engineer who works frequently in UI) is that there're a lot of really subtle design decisions in both Search and Maps that are nothing more than HTML/CSS, but really improve the usability of the product.

Or perhaps her skills and sense of design were what was needed at the time and things went well. If she was useless apart from one good decision there's very little chance they'd give her anything meaningful to do. She's been working on the products that seem most important there so I sorta doubt your theory.

I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"), subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption; do you believe that Google's success was independent of the way that users used their product?

And if the public face of the world's most powerful search company has your imprint, isn't that _ipso facto_ evidence of merit? If design was in fact irrelevant, how could _any_ number of successful designs ever constitute evidence for the skill of the designer?

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of automatic female incompetence.

Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance of results far more than any other factor.

Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista with a better search engine, not with a better interface.

His comment is written in a quite snide and belittling way. It's hard to avoid feeling that he either has a low opinion of Marissa Mayer personally, or female engineers in general.

Also, I would argue that while Google was indeed a better search engine, its clean minimalist design and fast loading times also did a lot to differentiate it from Altavista and Yahoo.

Wait, what? I used to shave - twice! - while waiting for AltaVista to load its homepage full of crappy colorful ads. Then I switched to a plain white Google page that took like a second to come up. And you're telling me that I wasn't using a better interface?

There was just a presumption of incompetence and an insinuation that Mayer's accomplishments are not _really_ accomplishments, without any given reason. The OP didn't state "Mayer must be incompetent because she's a woman", but that's not how sexism works--people perpetuate sexism by allowing sexist attitudes to color their judgments about the merits of individiuals, often subconsciously. Why do I think it is reasonable to ascribe sexist attitudes to the OP? Because the OP is willing to presume incompetence of an engineer a) without evidence ("I can picture it now...") and b) in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary (the alarming success of GOOG), when the only atypical characteristic of said engineer is that she's a woman.

All I'm saying is whoever would do the Google page would now be a famous designer.

She has engineering background. I met her recently and asked her a question about the using the search API. In the same conversation she mentioned that UX is just as important in startups, but often overlooked.

I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence, unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search results, before adwords and instant and live preview.

I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?

More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).

Google design statistically, like evolution, except the variations being tested are not random (well, maybe some might be).

I would disagree with you that their products are not well designed. Of course they have many products, but the majority that I use are a step above their competitors.

It's a mixed bag. For example, I thought Chrome was very well designed.

Good point - for some reason I was only thinking of their web products. Chrome is excellent.

The products were designed to achieve financial objectives. They have been of mixed successes in this regard. Nobody was designing them so that commenters on the Web would say their "user experience" was good.

I'm saying they may have had more success if they'd focused on those things explicitly. Great design and financial objectives are not mutually exclusive - see Apple iAnything. Of course it's an unanswerable question whether more focus on design would have helped some of their failed products, but unanswerable questions are the most fun to argue.

As an example, in my opinion a big reason that Wave failed was that it had an awful user experience - people simply had no idea how to operate the interface. I think there was also a marketing failure in that people didn't even know why they were supposed to use it, but that's a separate issue. When I have multiple tech-savvy friends tell me they have no idea how to even use a product from a major corporation like Google, I worry a little bit.

The "design" of the original Google search page was not so much in the aesthetics as the loading time. Every other search engine piled on decoration and most users had 56K connections. She was the one who convinced the founders not to imitate the other search engines, not to be portals, just let people search as quickly as possible.

That might have been more important than their search results in many cases. Design doesn't get better than that.

It's often hard to look back and attribute success to the things that one did not do. I think this more than anything is Marissa Mayer's problem here on HN - it's tough to publicly point to anything she did, except play the totally critical role of saying no a million times over. Few people can do that, fewer still are right.

It seems that people who say no for a living—designers, directors, critics, even big-league VCs—all fare poorly on HN. I wonder why that is?

Because HN is filled with prospective entrepreneurs and innovative software engineers, and these people need to say "Yes" in order to do their job.

Startups would never get off the ground if their founders said "No" to everything. The next great idea would be killed long before it could be developed enough to prove its worth.

The critical piece is being able to say "Yes" to everything early on, and then critically look at everything you've said "Yes" to once they're on the table and say "No, no, and no" to the vast majority of them.

Who is this Marissa Mayer person? I've never heard of her before...

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