Day 2: An Event Apart - Part 4
(FOURTH INSTALLMENT) Day two of the San Francisco based "An Event Apart" started off with Doug Bowman from Google doing a great lecture on "Design to Scale" --- or how do you address the needs of all of your users as your web presence grows.
It was a great presentation and it was wonderful to get in the head of at least one Google employee for a brief 45 minutes. Some of the highpoints of his talk were as follows (my comments in the parens):
It was a great presentation and it was wonderful to get in the head of at least one Google employee for a brief 45 minutes. Some of the highpoints of his talk were as follows (my comments in the parens):
- All data grows exponentially so be ready for the onslaught
- Managing data scale is imperative
- Visual data is key
- (Check out the Google Reader interface)
- When thinking about design you must plan ahead for flexibility
- Think about Amazon's "tabbing navigation system" if it had continued to grow unchecked --- they had to change (much to my regret; and even though Apple's tabbing has changed they didn't have to and I honestly don't think they should have --- old system is easier to use)
- Speed matters with scale (he demonstrated how much memory you'd save over masses of users by just cutting your design down by 5 kb --- amazing --- google "downtime in nines")
- He says to strive for "simplicity in layers" a great quote that went with that was: " Simplicity is not the goal, it is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." Paul Rand
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