The How and Why of Google UI

Marissa Mayer, Google
marissa@google.com

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University January 17, 2003

Google has centered the design of its interface around user needs and demands. This talk will focus on our internal approach to user-centered design as well as the results that we have achieved. Google's product development process is fairly unstructured and flexible. All employees take part in the product definition and great ideas flow. We work to foster flexibility and creativity. I'll analyze the strengths and weaknesses of our approach and provide examples of how this process has contributed to Google's products and, specifically, our user interface.

Marissa Mayer has been with Google since June, 1999. Currently product manager for Google.com and formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team, she has spearheaded almost every user-interface change to Google's website in the past three years. While at Google, she has worked on search classification, the Google web directory, image search, Google News. She has also internationalized Google's interface, and has lead much of the UI design and development effort including establishing user testing. Several patents have been filed on her work.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford to over 3,000 students and has received both the Centennial teaching award and the Forsythe award for outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.

Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and SRI International in Menlo Park, California.
Marissa holds a B.S. with honors in Symbolic Systems from Stanford as well as an M.S. in Computer Science also from Stanford.

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