Secret To Success: Clean Design

So Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. I'm not saying it's a has-been buying an also-ran, but... I don't see Google shaking in its boots.

I haven't seen anyone talk about this, but I will tell you the secret to Google's triumph over its competitors in on-line advertisement. Google understands the value of restraint. In particular, it understands the value of restraint in design. When you go to its home page, you get a clean, mostly white screen with a pleasant design right in the middle, and a box that invites you to type in anything you want. There's minimal text, but sometimes there's a charming drawing.

By contrast, the home pages of the other behemoths are painful. The search boxes are buried in the top of pages cluttered with stories I don't want to read, pictures I don't want to see. The pages are all noise and distraction, with nothing inviting about them.

Consider email, too. When you look at your home screen in gmail, there are no advertisements at all. Only when you open an email do ads appear, but they are off to the right and low down on the screen, never interfering with where your eye wants to go to get the information you actually want. The last time I checked my Yahoo account it was nowhere near so clean. Then too, Google restricts all the ads to the same size, typeface, and color--a peaceful blue--and thus minimizes their intrusiveness.

It is all about the design. Any half-way decent graphic artist could have strengthened Microsoft or Yahoo's market share, but only if those companies learned the value of self-restraint. By grabbing for the money on their home pages, they're losing the race for the jackpot. Stepping over pounds to pick up pennies, as the Brits say.

That said, TypePad has it all over Blogger on the design front. Sorry, all you darling Blogger-ites, but I hate it more every day. That's where Google's pushing too hard to force everyone into its mold. Back off, and let me maintain separate identities for my personal correspondence and my blogging, please! Sorry, that's mixing two issues together--design and privacy (of which Google knows not)--but they both bug me on Blogger.

But anyway, kudos to Google for understanding that service comes first. Good design is good service.

Comments

[ckm]

Excellent analysis. My sentiments,exactly.

[Pat]

So true. I'm a good design junkie too. Yahoo has redesigned my email page so many times I barely recognize it. I find my self scrolling left, right, up, or down constantly just to avoid being distracted by the moving ads. I think you should sell your ideas to Yahoo and Microsoft. They could certainly use them.