Research and Design: User Experience at Google. July 11, 2006

Jennifer Gove, User Experience Researcher, Google.

What are users trying to do when they search the web? How can the experience be improved, particularly when innovations in technologies generate new user behaviors and tasks? This talk will describe Google's focus on user experience, and our efforts to understand the intent of our users in the ever changing face of the tools and resources available to them. I'll discuss some of the techniques we use to capture and analyze behaviour, the methods employed to help ensure that our interpretations are valid, and the integration of research with design. We'll look at the problem of combining data in the small (field studies, usability studies) with data in the large (log analysis data of millions of interactions), illustrating how we can improve our understanding of users by combining the best insights from both ends of the spectrum.

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