After SXSW I made a point to seek out new blogs. One is Micah Alpern, who writes about Marissa Mayer’s talk, “The How and Why of Google UI”:
"Marissa is involved in UI, Usability, and Project Management at Google so she's had a big effect on how Google.com has evolved. It was an insightful talk with great examples of how a user centered design processes can lead to successful products."
Also on the Google UI front today, 37signals enhances Google’s default design by exposing similar search terms and their hit counts:
"Our idea for 37BetterGoogle was to go beyond Google's standard search and offer alternatives based on the words you originally entered. By searching for different forms of the same words and comparing those results to your initial query, Google does the legwork for you, helping you see results you may never have discovered the first time around.
Interestingly, 37signals has placed the entire design into the public domain using a Creative Commons license, essentially giving the idea to Google free of charge. Good for them.
