After the launch

Originally posted on March 22, 2011

November 2010

As I write this, I still can’t get past the awe of designing a site that close to 2 million people have visited since it launched this morning.

Awe. I’ve don’t recall ever using the word, nor thinking that I would ever understand it, but here I am, dumbstruck in the relevance that one tiny group in Mountain View can make in the lives of others. Literally within seconds of pushing the site live, tweets started to pour in. Paragraphs appeared faster than I could imagine the human hands were able to type. It was as if people were hitting the refresh key on our URL in anticipation.

Why am I writing this? I would like to say that none of it is about pride, but I’d be doing a disservice to myself and my teammates who have worked relentlessly during the last couple of months to prove that great design can be done within Google. To show that, when relentlessly pursued and backed with the extra effort it takes to prove that design is powerful even when not exactly quantifiable, the investment in an engaging user experience can make a huge difference in both the cost and effectiveness of a successful website.