The User Experience at Google
Marissa Mayer

Rashmi Sinha Comments:

"Clearly Google … really value(s) UX issues … While I do think that Google has some lessons to offer UX practitioners, I doubt that many practitioners are going to model their work based on Google. Here is why…" Read

Bryan Pendleton offers an extensive outline of his notes from the talk.

Alan Williamson summarizes Marissa Mayer's presentation:

"Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked, 'Whats up?' to which they replied, 'We are waiting for the rest of it.' To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker…" Read

Original Announcement

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