In early March of this year, Colm and I spent some time in Google’s London offices being trained up for the Google Enterprise Professional programme as part of iQ Content’s partnership with Google. We had four days of nerdy fun installing and configuring the Google Search Appliance (GSA). I also learned something about Google’s attitude to user experience design, which seems as big a part of their success as any secret sauce their search engine runs on.

Sitting in the reception area of Google on the first morning, I felt like Charlie Bucket standing outside Wonka’s chocolate factory clutching a golden ticket. At any point in time there are one or two companies that are recognised as the coolest places to work. These companies become magnets for the cream of the alpha geek crop and tend to turn out the sexiest and most innovative work. Google is undoubtedly one of those companies, so it was interesting to spend a few days inside their organisation to see what the fuss was all about.

The Google offices are certainly well equipped with geek chic. In reception there’s a wall-sized display of Google Earth, programmed to hop from point-to-point on the surface of the globe and zoom into famous landmarks. There’s also a continuously scrolling display of the search terms being typed into Google.com projected on the wall behind reception. This is absolutely hypnotic. There’s something voyeuristic about peeking on the search terms other people are using. Britney Spears featured heavily.

Other highlights for me where the massaging armchair, the giant Connect 4 game in the canteen and of course the excellent snacks and Innocent smoothies on tap all day and free of charge. Happy workers are more productive workers. The GSA itself is a sight to see. Any rack-mounted server engineered to look like a swiss cheese is bound to impress. Cool as these things are, though, the biggest impression I came away with was Google’s focus on User Experience.

It became clear to me throughout the training that providing a good user experience was a major factor in the design of the GSA. For example, I asked the instructor at one point how the GSA handles multiple sign-on systems on a network. The answer was:

“We don’t. You need to change your network to handle single sign-on because asking people to login multiple times to access search is a really bad user experience.”

Now that’s a surprising answer for anyone who’s worked for long in the software industry. Usually, the first request for support for multiple login would have the sales team frantically pressuring the development team to add the feature, in case they lose a customer. In fact, that’s how most software is designed, through random additions to a feature list generated by customers and the sales team.

But that approach is lazy and doomed to fail in the long run as the accumulation of features over time destroys the conceptual integrity of the product. So it was heartening to see that Google have the guts to say no, to stay focused on the user experience and to stay true to the vision of what their product is and how it should work. This focus on user experience is what too many companies miss, yet it is at least as important to the success of Google search as the fabled page rank algorithm.