"The How and Why of Google UI"

Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products, Google

Date: Wednesday, Jun 18, 2003
Time: 6:30pm Refreshments; 7:00pm Speaker
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions below)
Pruneridge and Wolfe,
Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.

Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.


ABSTRACT
Google has centered the design of its interface around user needs and demands. This talk will focus on our internal approach to user-centered design as well as the results that we have achieved. Google's product development process is fairly unstructured and flexible. All employees take part in the product definition and great ideas flow. We work to foster flexibility and creativity. I'll analyze the strengths and weaknesses of our approach and provide examples of how this process has contributed to Google's products and, specifically, our user interface.

BIOGRAPHY
Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products, Google Marissa Mayer has been with Google since June 1999 and is currently Director of Consumer Web Products and Product Manager for Google.com. Formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team, she has spearheaded almost every user-interface change to Google's website in the past four 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.

Here is a map to HP.


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