Google = Good Experience
Friday, March 19, 2004
by Mark Hurst
Get Good Experience by e-mail: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
Consider this:
1. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are new inductees into
Forbes' list of the richest people alive. (See http://tinyurl.com/2xjuf)
2. Google takes in an estimated $1B annually, and growing.
3. Google's IPO, likely later this year, promises to be the biggest
public offering in several years.
These are impressive results. Revenue, profit margins, IPO
multiples, and the founders' personal net worth: any MBA will tell
you that these are good measures of a business's success. By any
traditional business metric, Google has succeeded wildly.
Yet the reason for Google's success is anything but traditional.
Google's approach to business is simple, a single rule that - if
applied consistently across all channels, interfaces, and products -
will yield tremendous results:
Create a good customer experience.
I've written about Google before, but a recent spate of articles
about the company inspired me to remind everyone again. I'm also
inspired to write because I'm continually reminded that many
businesses - even a few practitioners of what we call "user
experience" - simply don't understand the simple reality that drives
business results.
Create a good customer experience.
Which is to say, many companies base their user experience on the
wrong things: office politics, "me-too" reactions to competitors,
the "rules" of information architecture tactics, inertia ("we've
always done it this way"), the ego of the graphic designer (who just
wants to work at a print magazine), serving advertiser interests at
the expense of the user, and a dozen other excuses for why they
just can't afford to pay attention to the customer.
I yield the floor to David Kirkpatrick, Fortune columnist, who
quoted Tim Armstrong, VP of Ad Sales at Google, in a recent
interview:
From the beginning we had the approach that the user's success
drives the success of the ads, and that could not have been a
more foreign concept to the advertising community.
(Fast Forward, 3/17/04)
Now let's hear from the New York Times:
With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the
most popular Internet search engine, 'has a near-religious quality
in the minds of many users'."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/fashion/14GOOG.html
And finally, let's hear from the users. In almost every listening
lab we run at Creative Good, in which users are open to go wherever
they want online during their session, they go to Google. Two years
ago, we didn't see this: the average user hadn't even heard of
Google. Today, people rave about Google in our listening labs. I've
seen a day of listening labs where, unprompted to go there,
unprompted even to search at all, 7 of 8 users go to Google at some
point during their 45-minute session.
The enthusiasm and loyalty of these users is Google's greatest asset,
the reason for all those traditional measures I listed above. And how
did Google do it?
By focusing exclusively on creating a good customer experience.
It's true that Google still has challenges to overcome. Yes, Google
will soon face competition from other clever search companies. And
yes, Google might some day fall victim to Wall Street's constant
demands for short-term revenue increases, bloating its site for the
benefit of advertisers and partners.
But for today, let's see the success for what it is: Google = good experience.
- - -
Gel conference (coming up on Friday, April 30 in New York!):
Get Good Experience by e-mail: update@goodexperience.com
- - -
Come to the conference! Good Experience Live, Friday, April 30, 2004 in New York City.
Back to Good Experience
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Get e-mail updates of goodexperience.com: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
Copyright 1999-2003, Good Experience, Inc.
