2-Grant Pendrey

Google.com is a website that exemplifies aspects of obvious design.

The home page is cleanly and clearly designed to direct the users attention to the center of the page and provides an empty text bar and two buttons. As well the search bar has a microphone button on the far right side suggesting an audio option. This microphone icon also reveals a text box with words "search by voice" when hovering over the icon quickly telling the user its intended purpose.

The search bar for the search engine is a very important aspect of the obvious design. The majority, if not all websites use a search bar somewhere on their website to search for a specific user input on their website. This creates a very intuitive feature of the site as the uses is likely to have used this same feature multiple times before and can quickly use the site without feeling the need to learn something new to use the site. Another feature that is intuitive and helps to fit the mental model of what a user expects it to do is the algorithms running the search engine results. There are many different words that the algorithm understands to help provide a more accurate search result for the user. For example if the user typed in the search box "define the word obvious" the search returns mostly results relating the the definition of the word obvious. This is crucial as many people like to type out a query in a sentence like format that they might ask another person as this is similar to how they are thinking. This idea of users being able to articulate to the search engine in a similar way as their mental model of the search query allows the user to quickly get started with the use of the site as well.

Another clear example of the site being a product of intent is the categories above the search results. It easily lets you customize your result further for different types of search results depending on your interests for each individualized search. These categories allow you to quickly sift through different search categories and use the engine for all sorts of different results with ease. It is clear that the intent of the google.com website is to allow for an easy way to get you to the internet information you are looking for in a quick manor.

There are many more aspects of the google website that exemplify the principles of obvious design. Some of the aspects I discussed are major aspects of the website and others are smaller but each one works with the others to create what I identify to be a good example of obvious design.

Do you think that any aspects of the website take away from its intended purpose or hurt the user experience in some way? All things can be improved but why do you think the google site developers have designed that specific aspect in that way?