Gmail, agile development and user experience design

Brian Dillard, Monday, February 18, 2008 @ 3:34 pm

Ionut Alex Chitu of Google Operating System posted yesterday about Gmail's evolution from internal beta to public beta to today's constantly-evolving-but-still-beta version. Gmail's Humble Beginning never uses the phrases "agile software development" or "user experience design." (Nor, for that matter, does the original post, by Gmailer-turned-FriendFeeder Paul Buchheit, from which Chitu liberally quotes.) Regardless, the evolution of Gmail provides a case study in the combination of agility and UxD.

Sample quote from Chitu's post:

Gmail got a delete button after many months of requests from users, even if Gmail's philosophy was "archive, don't delete". Gmail will also add some functionality from folders to its labels, most likely drag and drop.

The key step is to build a product that's interesting enough to a attract an audience and learn from people who use the product. "The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them," explains Paul.

It's fascinating to get a glimpse into the development process behind the webapp I use to run my entire life - especially when that process proves to be the same one we strive for at Pathfinder. Frequent iterations, constant user testing and a willingness to revise or totally scrap outdated requirements - these are all hallmarks of agile development.

As with many positive software-engineering examples, though, this one brought a related negative example to mind - namely, the default behavior of Google Calendar's search box.

A couple of years ago, gCal launched a feature that allows you to search public events from within the calendar interface. Unfortunately, they decided to re-use the main search interface - the one you use to search your own calendar - and then made public calendars the default search behavior. Ever since then, every time I have ever tried to search my own calendars - say, to look up a friend's birthday - I've encountered the same problem. I type a search term in the box and hit "return," producing a meaningless set of search results from various public calendars. Then I have to navigate back to my own calendar, re-enter my search term and use my mouse to click the secondary "Search My Calendars" button.

I can't imagine that I'm the only person to find this behavior more of a bug than a feature. Perhaps some old-fashioned user testing - the kind that resulted in Gmail's "Delete" button - would rectify this situation in Google Calendar.

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   [...] been complaining for months about a usability problem with Google Calendar’s default search behavior, so I figure I should [...]

   Pingback by Pathfinder Development » Google Calendar: Finally, a search box that makes sense, Monday, July 28, 2008 @ 4:31 pm

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