Data-Driven Innovation - Google DNS
I came across a rare blog post yesterday evening. It's rare because it stitches together data from a couple of places to help solve a conundrum. In this case, it also illustrated some fantastic vignettes on usability testing, data-driven strategy and innovation. What was the conundrum? Yesterday, Google launched its DNS service but it hasn't been exactly clear why. Google's official response effectively states that "It's good if the Internet is fast because people can be more productive." Sounds altruistic, just like another recent comment from Google about not stealing all of the talent in the world, but Jason Kottke (@kottke) has a different thought on why Google would be interested in accelerating page load speed.
From his post:
Google VP Marissa Mayer told the audience at the Web 2.0 conference that slowing a user's search experience down even a fraction of a second results in fewer searches and less customer satisfaction. Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it? After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
Some lessons here:
- Users say one thing and mean another so you have to understand latent/unspoken needs
- Data is required to make strategic changes
- Usability testing is fundamental to product success
- Google's pretty smart (and so is Amazon, which is mentioned in the post as well)
There's a lot to like in such a short post. Full text can be found here.
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