home



__**MALT Design Project # 1**__

__**Team Project:**__ Form teams of 3-5 people around your interest in a specific technological invention (i.e. iPad, wii console, WOW, iPhone, etc.). Spend the next 3 weeks researching every aspect of the design process. Capture your findings collectively with a tool such as Voicethreads, blog, podcast or video and post your work or a link in the forums before September 1. Your audience is the cadre so make it accessible, informative and entertaining. Be prepared to discuss what you learned at our last session.

__**Team Members:**__
 * **Lucy**
 * **Mie**
 * **Lili**
 * **Matt L.**
 * **Matt W.**
 * **Kevin**

__**Group Meeting:**__
 * August 25 at 9:00 P.M. Pacific Time on Google+ to decide jobs
 * August 31 (Wed.) at 7:00 P.M. Pacific Time on Google+ to wrap up the project #1. (Mie-Pls. revise if it's not correct)

[]
 * __(Cadre Member) Topic:__** **The designer/s (who they are, backgrounds, and why they were selected)**
 * When searching about Google history and its creators I came accross the following web-site that has some good information (Lucy). Not sure if we have to just post the link or summarize.
 * (ML) Beginning in 1996, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine called “BackRub” that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages. By 1998 they had formalized their work, creating the company we know today as Google. Google’s mission is to "Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful", which they accomplish by building web applications, or “apps”, to make it simpler for people to share information and get things done together.


 * __(Cadre Member)__** **__Topic:__ The design parameters (timeline, pressure, financial, specifications)**


 * (ML) They make about $5 billion a year in profits.
 * (ML) Their profit margins are very high. And they are noted for pouring back resources into investment
 * (ML) So far, however, they've not figured out how to make money on more than Google search, so they're desperately searching for those other engines of growth.


 * __(Cadre Member)__** **__Topic:__ The design inspiration (why, motivation, customer expectations)**


 * Design Inspirations (Lucy)**


 * Google designs with people's lives and needs and even dreams in mind. Google's products are helping people solve actual problems and improve their lives.
 * Google values people's time. Speed of loading and easy access to important clicks puts Google ahead of its competitors. Unnessesary actions are elliminated.
 * Google keeps is simple, but powerful. It focuses on features that help to get the job done.
 * Google designs to engage beginners and to attract experts. Help is there when you need it and advanced features invite to learn more.
 * Google want to change the game. Innovation is the key.
 * Google designs for everyone and everywhere. People use Google on their mobile devices, using different browseres on different platforms with different speeds.
 * Google designs to bring businesses and users together. Profitable desing should please the users first.
 * Google designs to attract the eyes but not to overhelm the mind. Appearance is always in ballance with functionality.
 * Google designs to earn people's trust. Everything is done to avoid unhappy surprises for users.
 * Google designs have personalities. Users can interract with Google like with their neighbors.


 * At Google, innovation and creativity keeps their projects changing and improving. Their consistency comes from Googlers - smart, amazing people who foster an environment of collaboration and fun.,

> > **The Google culture:** > > Google built around the ideas that… > > Great just isn’t good enough. >
 * __(MATT L) Topic:__** **So What Motivation Lies Behind the Design of Google? **
 * (ML) **Ultimately, Google’s constant dissatisfaction with “the way things are“ becomes the driving force behind everything they do**
 * When Google went public in 2004 they announced to the public in the letter from the founders that they will invest in things that may not pay off, in fact that may lose many hundreds of millions of dollars or more. But, they're playing for the long term, and if you don't want to invest in their company, don't do it. But this is what they're going to do with shareholder money.
 * Work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.
 * Great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn‘t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls.
 * maintain a small company feel.
 * Corporate headquarters, fondly nicknamed the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California.
 * Here‘s a look at life at the Googleplex in Mountain View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFeLKXbnxxg
 * Emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success.
 * invested in several programs which, while not directly related to our core business, are designed to encourage innovation in areas we care about.
 * green initiatives
 * google ventures
 * google.org
 * Their commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas and opinions
 * Each Googler is an equally important part of their success
 * Give employees freedom to do what they do best – built on trust
 * Put great stock in employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life.
 * They are aggressively inclusive in hiring, and favor ability over experience
 * Create an atmosphere that is casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
 * They incubate entrepreneurship into the company:
 * For example - They start with an attitude that engineers can figure out more efficient ways of doing things and better ways of doing things.
 * Every engineer - and 50 percent of the 20,000 employees are engineers at Google - gets a day a week, or 20 percent of their time, to work on any project of their choice. And many of the innovations that Google has done and created come out of that 20 percent time.
 * Being great at something is a starting point, not an endpoint.
 * They set goals they know they can’t reach yet, because they know that by stretching to meet them they can get further than they expected.
 * Through innovation and iteration, they aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways.
 * Focus on the end user
 * Even if users don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is their problem, not yours.
 * They try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by their global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards.

. > When open-domain search engines (i.e., web search engines) went mainstream in the late 1990s, they did so by glossing over the problem of query elaboration and focusing almost entirely on information retrieval. More precisely, they addressed the query elaboration problem by requiring users to provide reasonable queries and search engines to infer information needs from those queries. In recent years, there has been more explicit support for query elaboration–most notably in the form of type-ahead query suggestions (e.g., __ [|Google Instant] __). There have also been a variety of efforts to offer related queries as refinements. > But even with such support, query elaboration typically yields an informal, free-text string. All__ [|vocabularies] __ have their flaws, but search engines compound the inherent imprecision of language by not even trying to guide users to a common standard. At best, query suggestion nudges users towards more popular–and hopefully more effective–queries. > In contrast, consider closed-domain search engines that operate on curated collections, e.g., the catalog search for an ecommerce site. These search engines often provide users with the opportunity to express precise queries, e.g., __ [|black digital cameras for under $250] __. Moreover, well-designed sites offer users __ [|faceted search] __ interfaces that support progressive query elaboration through guided refinements. > Many (though not all) closed-domain search engines have an advantage over their open-domain counterparts: they can rely on manually curated metadata. The scale and heterogeneity of the open web defies human curation. Perhaps we’ll reach a point when automatic information extraction offers quality competitive with curation, but we’re not there yet. Indeed, the lack of good, automatically generated metadata has been cited as the top __ [|challenge] __ facing those who would implement faceted search for the open web. > What can we do in the mean time? Here is a simple idea: use a closed-domain search engine do guide users to precise queries, and then apply the resulting queries to the open web. In other words mash up the closed and open collections. > Of course, this is easier said that done. It is not at all clear if or how we can apply a query like “black digital cameras for under $250″ to a collection that is not annotated with the necessary metadata. But we can certainly try. And our ability to perform information retrieval from structured queries will improve over time–in fact, it may even improve more quickly if we can start to assume that users are being guided to precise, unambiguous queries. > Even though result quality would be variable, such an approach would at least eliminate a source of uncertainty in the information seeking process: the user would be certain of having a query that accurately represented his or her information need. That is no small victory! > I fear, however, that users might not respond positively to such an interface. Given the certainty that a query accurately represents his or her information need, a user is likely to have higher expectations of result quality than without that certainty. Retrieval errors are harder to forgive when the query elaboration process eliminates almost any chance of misunderstanding. Even if the results were more accurate, they might not be accurate enough to satisfy user expectations. > As an __ [|HCIR] __ evangelist, I am saddened by this prospect. Reducing uncertainty in any part of the information seeking process seems like it should always be a good thing for the user."
 * __(Cadre Member) Topic:__** **What Does the Google User Get Out of the Deal? What are their Expectations? **
 * (Matt) User expectations developed from customer feedback. "Ideally, a search engine would read the user’s mind. Shy of that, a search engine should provide the user with an efficient process for expressing an information need and then provide the user with results relevant to the that need.From an information scientist’s perspective, these are two distinct problems to solve in the information seeking process: establishing the user’s information need (query elaboration) and retrieving relevant information (information retrieval).


 * Sources: **


 * =The Google Business Model: [|http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=130518412]=
 * []
 * []


 * Any extra miscellaneous information worth sharing:**


 * (ML) When it comes to greening their office buildings, they apply the same focus that they use for any of their products: put the user first. Google wants to create the healthiest work environments possible where Googlers can thrive and innovate.
 * 15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid. Read more: [|http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2010-11#how-much-should-you-charge-to-wash-all-the-windows-in-seattle-2#ixzz1Vuuw8cG1]