Consumers are now better conditioned and know how to use search engines and with greater efficiency. While Google is big, their notions and philosophies about doing business online are relatively simple and straightforward. Recently, the Google User Experience Team (UX) convened to publish the principles that ought to guide Google design teams worldwide. There are only ten guidelines, and they are indeed simple. A reputable design consultant told me in 1995 – “Never underestimate the power of whitespace.”. The Google homepage obviously embraces this philosophy, although iGoogle represents a slight shift away from the simplicity of this irresistible search solution. However, there are some that believe the Google user experience is a bit outdated, perhaps needing an AJAX face-lift. This is especially the sentiment for applications such as GMail. I think there’s a big difference between a search engine and a business application – GMail and other Google Apps need to address usability issues that are fundamentally different from user expectations involving search. Principle #1 - Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams. With this principle in mind, consider how you use search in your daily work. Are you a “ruthless” searcher? Do you use Google and other search tools to find and focus on exactly what you want? Typically, you start with Google (worldwide) and you find a domain (preferably a specific page) that provides the exact content you were looking for. Bypassing a home page and going directly to the page that meets your information quest is far more desirable than starting at a home page and browsing for answers. You aren’t alone – in 2008, about 75% of Internet users behave this way because they have learned how to find and access deep-links that provide answers. Part of the reason this percentage is so high is the advent of perma-links – these are page links that represent a specific idea or answer, or topic. Largely, blogs are responsible for creating perma-links but many content management systems are now using this approach to create more findable and sustainable content. Terry Heaton recently wrote about this in concert with new statistics from Jacob Neilsen. The data is clear and supports my past hunches about searchers that hop over short tail terms to access the long-tail of content. These newly recognized trends also support a hunch I had about the new definition of a home page - every page is the "home page". ;-) | 
