It's funny, because I'll tell people I work at Google.
And they'll go, what do you work on?
I design Search.
And they kind of pause for a second, and they're like,
what is there to design?
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Design is a balance between a number
of things-- the utility, the usability, and the beauty.
I think that you kind of require those three ingredients.
One of the first things that I did
when I joined the Search team was
that I said that Search was too slow.
The response was, well, we probably
have to change the speed of light
in order to solve this problem, OK?
And I said, no, I think it could be faster.
The box in which you type, it was the default size
that input boxes are in the browser.
And so for like a decade, that's what it was.
This is the way in which people are talking to Google.
They're doing it through this tiny little box.
I said, well, why don't we make that bigger?
It was a very simple design change.
We just made the input box larger.
Commensurately, the font size got larger.
And the autocompletions gets larger.
And people started noticing them more.
By noticing them more, they actually started using it more.
They were actually able to get to the answer they wanted
faster, just by tweaking the size of this box.
There's lots of things that look very small that you might not
notice that we changed to make the experience better.
Over time, it actually really adds up.
I still think it's too slow.
That's why we're investing so heavily in the voice
experience, because it's actually much easier to ask
more complicated questions than if you had to type them in,
particularly if you have to type them in on a phone.
As you speak, the words are appearing,
and it feels so fluid and fast.
Once you start removing these speed bumps, even if they're
tiny speed bumps and just getting them out of the way,
that's pretty transformative.
Arthur C. Clarke has a famous quote.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."
To make magic is to actually make the technology go away.
That's what I see my job is, is to craft experiences
that just work.
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