Crastinate

The Googley Design Principles have gone up on the Official Google Blog.

Last month, I gave a talk about the principles at the WritersUA Conference in Portland. Luke Wroblewski, who also spoke at the conference, blogged the principles. That generated some discussion, but what I found really fascinating was that people then took the principles and translated them into half a dozen languages (we’ll be doing that as well, soon).

The design principles were created by Susanne Brokaw, Sue Factor, Kevin Fox, Kerah Pelczarski, and myself. Initiative and guidance came from Irene Au, Director of User Experience. Susanne, Kevin, and Kerah had been working at Google for many years, designing the form of products that so many of us use each day and laying the foundation of the principles we had gathered to define. Sue, a fantastic writer, refined our collection of intents, anecdotes, and aspirations into clear and articulate prose.

I learned a lot from my colleagues while collaborating on this project and I’m proud of our work. While the principles are primarily intended to guide our design activities at Google, I hope they will inspire others to think about their own design philosophy and how they can create great products for their customers, too.

From Boing Boing:

The Mars Society Desert Research Station is a facility near Hanksville, Utah where researchers pretend they’re living on Mars. When researchers leave the facility to collect samples, they wear spacesuits. Email communication is on a 20 minute delay to simulate the distance the radio signals would have to travel between Earth and the Red Planet. The idea is to identify the challenges, from logistical to mechanical to psychological issues, that a team visiting Mars might face.

I think it’s great when the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) gets covered, because it is such a can-do project. And it gives me an excuse to write down my MDRS experiences, which I’ve put off for too long.

I was a member of the MDRS site selection committee back in 2000 (I think it was 2000… my memory is a little fuzzy). We had a broad set of criteria for selecting a Martian analogue in the United States. It was clear from the beginning that we needed something in the Desert Southwest, since Mars doesn’t have too many plants. But we also had to account for geological diversity, land ownership, security, and the logistics of transport and construction.

The lack of plant cover was a surprisingly difficult criteria to satisfy. Deserts are far more lush than you might think. Google Earth would have been immensely valuable to our endeavor, but it didn’t exist at the time. Instead, we used a variety of Landsat, aerial, and USGS imagery, plus GIS data provided by state and local governments.

We identified several candidates. Our first promising candidate was the American Girl Mine in the Cargo Muchacho Mountains of southern California. The mine was no longer operational. A site visit showed it to be unsuitable. Another candidate was a crater in Nevada. I can’t remember if it was a volcanic or meteor crater. One of our committee members was a pilot and they did some aerial photography. Even though the vegetation was sparse, it was still too much. Another one was in northern Arizona, and a site visit showed it, too, to be unsuitable.

James Cameron (yeah, that one) suggested to Dr. Robert Zubrin that we have a look in and around the badlands of southern Utah. I recruited my good friend Dr. Patrick Young to join me on a photo reconnaissance to Utah. We did a lot of initial work reviewing land ownership maps, topo maps, aerial photos, and satellite imagery. James Cameron had suggested we poke around Hanksville, Utah.

At first we thought we should be looking at public lands, such as those managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). BLM land is woven together with state land in an odd checkerboard pattern in the area of concern. My guess is that it was some land trade deal in the past - some kind of 80/20 split. So we stopped in at the BLM office to chat about it. People give you funny looks when you ask to build a simulated Martian habitat on their (our) land. The response we received was disinterest coupled with bewilderment.

Patrick and I went on to visit the area where the MDRS would eventually be located. We took copious photos, evaluated the soil, and did a lot of exploring. We even found a coal seam. We wrote up our experiences and submitted our photos for consideration and the site was selected. I think it was situated on a piece of state land, Utah being more amenable than Uncle Sam. I later designed the logo for the MDRS and the original website. I’m proud of my (small) contribution to the advancement of knowledge and exploration. I learned a lot from my experience on the site selection committee.

I have never seen the Mars Desert Research Station in person.

I will be speaking at SXSW Interactive on Monday, March 10th. My presentation is titled Client-Side Code and Internationalization. It is going to be exactly that - one hour of XHTML, CSS, UTF-8, RTL, and tips for prepping and testing your designs even if you don’t speak the language. I was frustrated last year when doing some localization work and I thought I’d share what I’d learned about the subject.

SXSW takes place in my hometown of Austin, Texas. I miss Austin and I’m thankful to SXSW and everyone who voted for my talk for giving me the opportunity to visit and drink one of these.

The next week, I’ll also be presenting at the WritersUA Conference in Portland, Oregon. It is a conference aimed at user assistance professionals, who spend a great deal of time thinking about users and helping them solve problems. It’s a great place to give my other talk, Guiding Principles of Googley Design. I’ve never been to Portland before, but I hear it is a fantastic town and I’m looking forward to it.

Update: My SXSW 2008 slides [2MB PDF] are now available.

In December, my friends Leon and Andy, who were featured in last year’s Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, cast me in a little video project they were doing. It was directed by Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show), and also starred Jerry Minor (SNL) and Brandon Johnson (Arrested Development).

Here is the first video…

On YouTube, it has been viewed well over 1.3 million times. It has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times across many other sites and blogs. It was the number one featured video on CollegeHumor.com and was featured at the end of Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN and was also seen on Attack of the Show and Talk Soup.

I don’t think any of us expected the magnitude of the response. Many people thought it was hilarious. Others said it was clearly fake. A few said it was fake, but thought it was funny anyway (my favorites). Those shouting fake often pointed to the extraneous boom mic, the redundant guy with the soda, the lack of an affiliate logo, bad lighting, the non-existence of Canadian brown finches (a species we made up on the spot), and my “obvious bad acting.”

Well, now the truth can be told. It was indeed a marketing stunt to promote Frumondah Soda, made by Nigerian Sunshine International.

Yes, that’s right, we made a fake viral video to promote a fake soda and we made a fake documentary about it. With a musical number at the end.

I would like to thank the Academy…

The whole experience was a fun ride. I knew that theatre degree would come in handy one of these days.

I was in Sydney, Australia for two weeks last month working out of the Google Australia office and attending Web Directions South. I had a great time. Sydney is a wonderful city - I really enjoyed walking through the neighborhoods, the CBD, and around the harbor.

I was also able to take a train out to Katoomba and hike into Blue Mountains National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was beautiful! I hiked down into the valley and back up the Grand Staircase - 900 switchbacking steps straight up a rock cliff. There was a sign that marked the halfway point and I couldn’t decide if they were being helpful or cruel. Despite the name, the area is really a bunch of sedimentary mesas. If it weren’t for the thick covering of eucalyptus, I imagine it’d look a bit like parts of northern Arizona or Utah.

I flew to Sydney on United. I’ve expressed disdain for United in the past, and my sentiments remain unchanged. Fourteen hours on a cramped, aging 747 with crappy projection screens and even crappier CRT monitors spaced every 30 feet or so. The movie selection was awful, the sound system broke on both of my flights, and the videos had the squiggly lines that come from having played a VHS tape too many times. And don’t even get me started on the food. Next time I head Down Under it is Air New Zealand or nothing.

Upon arrival in Sydney, I waited in a customs line for about 60 seconds and then was greeted with a pleasant “G’day.” We had a brief conversation about my visit and then I was on my way. Upon arrival in LAX, we were greeted by a man shouting at everyone to “FACE THE WALL!!!” Americans and foreign visitors alike froze in confusion. There were no signs, just maze after maze of ribbon barriers. The man shouted for us to turn and face the wall several more times.

He was apparently trying to get a very large crowd of slightly dazed people to spontaneously form a line that zig-zagged across the room because a single file line would have been impossibly long. No one had thought to deploy more ribbon barriers, despite the fact that knowledge of the plane’s impending arrival was known at least 14 hours in advance. Eventually we all figured out where we were supposed to be and then endured, in my case, a twenty minute wait.

I had plenty of time to think about the awful customer experience for people arriving in the United States. How a country handles visitors says a lot. The lack of resources was evident. There were more arrivals than could be accommodated by the allocated officers, baggage carousels, customs inspectors, and space. There was a lack of signage, of attention to the details, and of any effort to actually make people feel welcome. Lacking. Where do all of the resources go in the richest superpower in the world?