52 Words is Too Many on One Page.
Da Disambiguous Leisa who goes to the ballet and thinks about information architecture, uses a quote about how many words to have on a search engine home page, which I'd heard from Marissa Mayer at google previously, but is very relevant to me right now.
It's very easy in a beta period to start adding words / explanations / exceptions, as if to confirm that 1 + 8 = 9. This classic search/design discussion will also be impacted (in next 24 months) by the social media driven trend for users to "become member" - which (can in an opt-in way ala google co-op) then affect search results, filtering and the user tools to manage their data.
Josh Porter on Bokardo on "Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design" quoting Marissa (via Leisa) : "There’s this one user, a Google zealot - we don’t know who he is - who occasionally sends an e-mail to our “comments” address. Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.”
I'll have to go quantify how many words we have on the gnoos beta pages.
It's very easy in a beta period to start adding words / explanations / exceptions, as if to confirm that 1 + 8 = 9. This classic search/design discussion will also be impacted (in next 24 months) by the social media driven trend for users to "become member" - which (can in an opt-in way ala google co-op) then affect search results, filtering and the user tools to manage their data.
Josh Porter on Bokardo on "Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design" quoting Marissa (via Leisa) : "There’s this one user, a Google zealot - we don’t know who he is - who occasionally sends an e-mail to our “comments” address. Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.”
I'll have to go quantify how many words we have on the gnoos beta pages.
posted by redbarren at 7:52 PM
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