Comment by adampunk
15 hours ago
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
have you considered, in the specific example of google being different from the rest, that all the other services were _wrong,_ or their goals were different than google's?
I’m not sure what you’re arguing with.
GOOGLE did not look like the rest of the search engine engines on purpose. We agree completely. It looked very different and it operated in a very different way.
If instead, we designed GOOGLE like we designed website websites now, with Jakob’s law front of mind, what would have been created would have just been another entry in a forgettable list.
The argument is that user research will tell you when your customers want a faster horse. It will not tell you all that much else. If you want customers who want a faster horse or if what you need is to be told to make a faster horse—which is most websites— it works great.
Google did, and we did. Google won the search engine war by having a far superior engine, not because they had cute art for the six letters of the company name (which came later).