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  • It's funny, because I'll tell people I work at Google.

  • And they'll go, what do you work on?

  • I design Search.

  • And they kind of pause for a second, and they're like,

  • what is there to design?

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • Design is a balance between a number

  • of things-- the utility, the usability, and the beauty.

  • I think that you kind of require those three ingredients.

  • One of the first things that I did

  • when I joined the Search team was

  • that I said that Search was too slow.

  • The response was, well, we probably

  • have to change the speed of light

  • in order to solve this problem, OK?

  • And I said, no, I think it could be faster.

  • The box in which you type, it was the default size

  • that input boxes are in the browser.

  • And so for like a decade, that's what it was.

  • This is the way in which people are talking to Google.

  • They're doing it through this tiny little box.

  • I said, well, why don't we make that bigger?

  • It was a very simple design change.

  • We just made the input box larger.

  • Commensurately, the font size got larger.

  • And the autocompletions gets larger.

  • And people started noticing them more.

  • By noticing them more, they actually started using it more.

  • They were actually able to get to the answer they wanted

  • faster, just by tweaking the size of this box.

  • There's lots of things that look very small that you might not

  • notice that we changed to make the experience better.

  • Over time, it actually really adds up.

  • I still think it's too slow.

  • That's why we're investing so heavily in the voice

  • experience, because it's actually much easier to ask

  • more complicated questions than if you had to type them in,

  • particularly if you have to type them in on a phone.

  • As you speak, the words are appearing,

  • and it feels so fluid and fast.

  • Once you start removing these speed bumps, even if they're

  • tiny speed bumps and just getting them out of the way,

  • that's pretty transformative.

  • Arthur C. Clarke has a famous quote.

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology

  • is indistinguishable from magic."

  • To make magic is to actually make the technology go away.

  • That's what I see my job is, is to craft experiences

  • that just work.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

It's funny, because I'll tell people I work at Google.

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