Agree wholeheartedly with this post. Thing is; I have never come across a so-called user experience expert that had a single particularly insightful thing to say about a user interface.
Indeed, my experience has been that I get more insight from "lay" people than these guys.
I can't even be bothered to count the number of different items on the Google menu. Actually I just have... it's 17 items (for me), plus an "even more" item. I'd love to see the analytics for that one!
Now, you might forgive them because, well, if you have lots of products then you need a way to navigate to them... EXCEPT the millions they spend every year on making menu-based navigation completely redundant by their world-beating search.
If I want Google Maps, I will either type "maps" into Chrome's address bar, which auto-completes it, OR (as most non technies will do, I hazard a guess) I will type something (e.g "maps") directly into Google.
The unfortunate thing is that this is not just Google. It 99.9% of websites I have ever visited. OK, so most small companies do not have the resources for a dedicated UX person, but the only big-company website I can think of with a sane UX is Apple. Is it really all that hard? Actually I suspect it is - it's Conway's Law in full effect.
Indeed, my experience has been that I get more insight from "lay" people than these guys.
I can't even be bothered to count the number of different items on the Google menu. Actually I just have... it's 17 items (for me), plus an "even more" item. I'd love to see the analytics for that one!
Now, you might forgive them because, well, if you have lots of products then you need a way to navigate to them... EXCEPT the millions they spend every year on making menu-based navigation completely redundant by their world-beating search.
If I want Google Maps, I will either type "maps" into Chrome's address bar, which auto-completes it, OR (as most non technies will do, I hazard a guess) I will type something (e.g "maps") directly into Google.
The unfortunate thing is that this is not just Google. It 99.9% of websites I have ever visited. OK, so most small companies do not have the resources for a dedicated UX person, but the only big-company website I can think of with a sane UX is Apple. Is it really all that hard? Actually I suspect it is - it's Conway's Law in full effect.